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EVALUATION OF RELATIVE SENSITIVITY OF THREATENED AND ENDANGERED SPECIES TO CONTAMINANTS
Citation:
Brix, K. V., F. J. Dwyer, W. J. Adams, C. G. Ingersoll, D. K. DeForest, L. C. Sappington, AND F L. Mayer Jr. EVALUATION OF RELATIVE SENSITIVITY OF THREATENED AND ENDANGERED SPECIES TO CONTAMINANTS. Presented at SETAC 20th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, November 14-18, 1999.
Description:
Water quality criteria have been developed by U.S. EPA for the protection of aquatic life. An implicit goal of water quality criteria (WQC) that has been reinforced by the Endangered Species Act, is that WQC are protective of threatened and endangered species. This assumption has not been rigorously evaluated because listed species have not been extensively tested for their sensitivity to contaminants due to their limited numbers. To test this assumption, we evaluated results from standard acute toxicity tests on fourteen listed fish species using five toxicants: copper, carbaryl, permethrin, pentachlorophenol and 4-nonylphenol with different modes of toxic action. We then compared the sensitivities of listed versus non-listed species. The distribution of species sensitivity for each contaminant for data sets consisting of listed, non-listed and all species were determined. We also evaluated the differential sensitivity of various species groups such as invertebrates versus fish and warmwater versus coldwater fish, and determined whether these relationships applied to both listed and non-listed species.