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PCB concentrations in riparian spiders (Tetragnathidae) consistently reflect concentrations in water and aquatic macroinvertebrates, but not sediment: Analysis of a seven-year field study
Citation:
Otter, R., Marc A. Mills, Ken M. Fritz, James M. Lazorchak, Dalon P. White, Gale B. Beaubien, AND D. Walters. PCB concentrations in riparian spiders (Tetragnathidae) consistently reflect concentrations in water and aquatic macroinvertebrates, but not sediment: Analysis of a seven-year field study. SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT. Elsevier BV, AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, 912:169230, (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169230
Impact/Purpose:
This product evaluates monitoring approaches for contaminated sediments sites. to characterize the bioavailability and the effectiveness of a remediation. This product will describe to GLNPO, the Regions, and the Program Office the usefulness of new and existing tools to measure the performance of the applied remedy at a contaminated site. Methods and tools to evaluate remedy effectiveness are needed for federal and state managers of contaminated sites. Superfund, RCRA and Great Lakes Areas of Concern site managers and decision makers need quantitative and qualitative assessment metrics and endpoints to measure the environmental response to remediation decisions. This research will focus on developing new tools and evaluating existing tools and metrics for their use on evaluating the short-term and immediate response to the remedy as well as the long-term performance. These methods and approaches will be organized along biological, chemical, and physical lines of evidence to allow a weight of evidence assessment of the remedy. These remedy effectiveness approaches and metrics will integrated into the larger Remediation to Restoration to Revitalization paradigm being accomplished in Research Area 9. Lessons learned will be provided through technical briefs to synthesize best practices and communication of new methods and tools.
Description:
Tetragnathid spiders have been used as sentinels to study the biotransport of contaminants between aquatic and terrestrial environments because a significant proportion of their diet consists of adult aquatic insects. A key knowledge gap in assessing tetragnathid spiders as sentinels is understanding the consistency of the year-to-year relationship between contaminant concentrations in spiders and sediment, water, and macroinvertebrates. We collected five years of data over a seven-year investigation at a PCB contaminated-sediment site to investigate if concentrations in spiders were consistently correlated with concentrations in sediment, water, and aquatic macroinvertebrates. Despite significant year-to-year variability in spider PCB concentrations, they were not correlated with sediment concentrations (p = 0.186). However, spider PCB concentrations were significantly, positively correlated with PCB concentrations in water (p < 0.0001, annual r2 = 0.35-0.84) and macroinvertebrates (p < 0.0001; annual r2 = 0.59-0.71). Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) showed that spider PCB concentrations varied consistently with water (β = 0.63) and macroinvertebrate PCB concentrations (β = 1.023) among years. Overall, this study filled a critical knowledge gap in the utilization of tetragnathid spiders as sentinels of aquatic pollution by showing that despite year-to-year changes in PCB concentrations across environmental compartments, consistent relationships existed between spiders and water and aquatic macroinvertebrates.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: PCB concentrations in riparian spiders (Tetragnathidae) consistently reflect concentrations in water and aquatic macroinvertebrates, but not sediment: Analysis of a seven-year field study