Alteration of macroinvertebrate community in tropical aquatic systems in relation to sediment redox potential and overlaying water quality

INTRODUCTION Fresh water is an important driving force, cycling minerals and nutrients around the terrestrial environment and has been defined as those systems comprising human communities, socioeconomic interactions, and biophysical processes co-occurring in space and time. Evaluation of the biological community of a water body provides a sensitive and cost effective means of assessing stream condition. Aquatic ecosystems both lentic and lotic are characterized by great variability and complexibility which is getting compounded by increasing anthropogenic activity. Yet as a habitat fresh water is of great biological interest because the habitats concern are highly variable encompassing a great range of types and chemical variability more so than any other type of habitat, so that no two fresh water bodies are ever quite the same (Willmer, 2000). It have been compared two kinds of aquatic habitats (one lentic and one lotic). All the two sites investigated are situated near the trophic of cancer (situated at longitude 88° 33/ E, latitude 23° 24/N, of West Bengal, an eastern province of India). The lentic aquatic system is heavily affected by anthropogenic activity and the lotic system was not so heavily affected. The various Physico-chemical properties of water, sediment and different macroin vertebrate communities of those systems has been studied . Macroinvertebrate communities tend to have greater diversity than fish or other biotic communities ABSTRACT: Limnological studies in two tropical Indian aquatic habitats showed that macroinvertebrate communities have greater diversity than other biotic communities present there. Sediment redox potential is found to be an important factor for alteration of macroinvertebrate communities in aquatic bodies. Anthropogenic activities have influenced the changing of sediment redox potential values of the studied sites and there by affected the macroinvertebrate communities.