Develop, calibrate and test a model for freshwater copepods for Chemical Risk Assessment
Devdutt Kulkarni, PhD project, RWTH Aachen, Germany
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Copepods are important species in aquatic systems, quick to colonize and dominant in aquatic ecosystems. Copepods are master predators and feed on algae, rotifers, daphnids and other soft-bodied plankton are also important fish food. Like other zooplankton they are an important part of the aquatic food chain. However copepods employ complex life-cycle strategies and have longer generation times as compared to cladocerans and ostracods. These characteristics will have implications for population vulnerability on exposure to toxicants. Copepods are mostly under-represented and not studied as well as cladocerans with respect to ecotoxicology. The little work that has been done on copepods in ecotoxicology focussed mainly on marine species. For pesticide risk assessment, cyclopoid copepods are important organisms owing to their planktonic occurence at the surfaces of water bodies making them susceptible to pesticide exposure by way of spray drift or run-off.
We are developing an individual-based model for a representative species of freshwater cyclopoid copepods in Europe. Our work consists of a combination of laboratory experiments for the calculation of ecophysiological parameters (e.g. growth, reproduction, survival, etc.), toxicity experiments and computational modelling to simulate population dynamics under toxic exposure. We aim to:
- predict effects of pesticide toxicants on cyclopoid copepod populations and to estimate the time to recovery of cyclopoid copepod populations from individual level data (physiological ecological parameters and eco-toxicology) obtained from experiments and literature.
- To test whether copepods, due to their long life-cycle, are more sensitive to the impact of toxicants than daphnids (the representative for crustaceans in ecotoxicology).
- To extrapolate the effects of the toxicant from a species with a short life cycle (short life cycle in some copepod species makes them relatively easy to study for whole life cycle tests. However the duration of this short life cycle is still more than that in daphnids) to that with a long life cycle, within the same family by calibration of data in accordance with literature.
The IDamP approach developed by Preuss et al (2008) to predict the population dynamics of Daphnia magna at laboratory conditions from individual life-history traits observed in experiments with different feeding conditions will work as a start up. We will employ an iterative approach of literature review, laboratory experiments and computational modelling.
Supervisor: Thomas G. Preuß (RWTH Aachen)
Co-Supervisor: Udo Hommen (IME)
Associated partners: gaiac; Bayer; BASF; UBA
