Familiar vertebrate wildlife comprise less than five per cent of the animal kingdom. A major proportion of the other thousands of non-insect species are aquatic and will be increasingly exposed to a wide variety of manmade and natural chemicals. Effective management of this toxicant—wildlife complex demands general and simple means for the prediction and estimation of effects and hazards. Direc...

Water, soil sediment and seafood [crab (Sudananautes africanus africanus), lobster (Palaemon paucidens), African catfish (Clarias gariepinus) and African catfish (Synodontis schall)] samples collected from River Benue (Nigeria) were analysed for sodium (Na), potassium (K), copper (Cu), magnesium (Mg), iron (Fe), calcium (Ca), zinc (Zn), lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), arsenic (As), selenium (Se), chro...

Lanthanide emissions to the environment increase as a result of the growing industrial applications of these elements. However, robust data to evaluate the environmental fate of lanthanides are scarce. This article describes the accumulation and elimination of lanthanum (La) by common duckweed (Lemna minor L.). Speciation modeling was performed to assure that solubility products were not exceed...

Cadmium (Cd) is a highly toxic heavy metal for both plants and animals. The presence of Cd in agricultural soils is of great concern regarding its transfer in the soil-plant system. This study investigated the transfer of Cd (exogenous salts) from a wide range of Chinese soils to corn grain (Zhengdan 958). Through multiple stepwise regressions, prediction models were developed, with the combina...

The transfer of POPs in food animal origin has been studied by a meta-analysis 28 peer-reviewed articles using rate (TR) for milk and eggs bioconcentration factors (BCF) eligible tissues after establishing an adapted methodology. TRs the most toxic PCDD/Fs into were generally elevated even higher eggs. BCFs excreting adult animals varied widely between studies complicating to hierarchize or con...

We investigated the influence of the acanthocephalan parasite Polymorphus minutus on the mortality of its intermediate host, Gammarus roeseli, exposed to cadmium, by the measure of LC(50-96h) values as well as the bioaccumulation of cadmium both in the host and in its parasite. LC(50) results revealed that infected G. roeseli males died less under cadmium stress than uninfected ones; while the ...

Modern chemical legislation requires measuring the bioconcentration factor (BCF) of large numbers of chemicals in fish. The BCF must be corrected for growth dilution, because fish growth rates vary between laboratories. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) that BCFs of multiple chemicals can be measured simultaneously in one experiment, and (2) that internal benchmarking using a conservative test su...

PCBs are mixtures of chlorinated biphenyls with different degrees of chlorination, are hydrophobic chemicals, very persistent and bioaccumulative in aquatic organisms, especially in fishes that are at the end of the food chain and are the final receptors of toxicants. PCBs can be classified as narcotics: they produce no change in the biophase and elicit anesthetic reversible effects. Bioaccumul...