Acute sediment toxicity tests do not test key life stage events such as moulting and reproduction and therefore do not reveal the longer-term effects of contaminant exposure. A laboratory method is described for determining the chronic toxicity of contaminants associated with whole sediments. The test is conducted using neonates of the estuarine amphipod Corophium volutator at 15 degrees C, salinity 25 psu and a 12 h light:12 h dark photoperiod. The endpoints are survival and growth after 28 days and survival, growth and reproduction of amphipods upon termination of test i.e. reproduction within all control vessels (ca 75 days). The sediment chronic toxicity test was used to investigate the effects of sediments spiked with environmentally relevant preparations of slightly weathered Alaskan North Slope crude oil, including a water-accommodated-fraction (WAF) and a chemically-dispersed (Corexit 9527) WAF. Sediment oil concentrations were quantified using ultra-violet fluorescence. The amphipods exposed to chemically dispersed oil had higher mortality and lower growth rates than control-, Corexit 9527- and WAF-exposed organisms, resulting in reduced reproduction. The described method supplements the standard acute sediment test and would be particularly useful when long-term ecological effects are suspected but acute tests reveal no significant mortality. The sediment chronic test reported herein has shown that sediment that was not evidently toxic during 10-day acute tests could have population-level effects on sediment-dwelling amphipods.
The acute toxicity of the oil dispersant Corexit 9527 reported in the literature is highly variable. No peer-reviewed data exist for Superdispersant-25 (SD-25). This study compares the toxicity of the two dispersants to a range of marine species representing different phyla occupying a wide range of niches: The marine sediment-dwelling amphipod Corophium volutator (Pallas), the common mussel Mytilus edulis (L.), the symbiotic snakelocks anemone Anemonia viridis (Forskål), and the seagrass Zostera marina (L.). Organisms were exposed to static dispersant concentrations for 48-h and median lethal concentration (LC50), median effect concentration (EC50), and lowest-observable-effect concentration (LOEC) values obtained. The sublethal effects of 48-h exposures and the ability of species to recover for up to 72 h after exposure were quantified relative to the 48-h endpoints. Results indicated that the anemone lethality test was the most sensitive with LOECs of 20 ppm followed by mussel feeding rate, seagrass photosynthetic index and amphipod lethality, with mussel lethality being the least sensitive with LOECs of 250 ppm for both dispersants. The results were consistent with current theory that dispersants act physically and irreversibly on the respiratory organs and reversibly, depending on exposure time, on the nervous system. Superdispersant-25 was found overall to be less toxic than Corexit 9527 and its sublethal effects more likely to be reversible following short-term exposure.
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