Collected reprints: Abstract 3698
Collected reprints
Abstract
Vanhaecke, P.; Persoone, G.; Claus, C.; Sorgeloos, P. (1980). Research on the development of a short term standard toxicity test with Artemia. The Brine Shrimp Artemia, Ecology, Culturing, Use in Aquaculture 1: 263-285
Standardization of toxicity tests on aquatic organisms to detect the impact of chemicals on freshwater or marine ecosystems is an urgent necessity.
From the variety of methods, criteria, and test species proposed, simple standardized tests for algae, crustaceans, and fish are now close to being adopted at the international level for the freshwater environment. Despite the same urgency, very little has been achieved for the marine environment. Artemia is an extremely suitable test-species since, contrary to all other organisms, it does not require continuous maintenance of stock cultures. Unfortunately none of the Artemia toxicity tests that have been worked out so far can be adopted as such as a representative standard test, because they attribute too little importance to parameters, which influence the results and the repeatability.
Starting from the pertinent literature information on the use of Artemia as a test species for toxicity studies and from literature data on the factors influencing the hatching and molting of brine shrimp, we studied the parameters of importance for a routine short-term toxicity test with an acceptable reproducibility, which are:
- selection of the instar stage of the nauplii
- determination of the test's duration
- sensitivity of early versus late hatching nauplii
- influence of the storage conditions of the cysts
- sensitivity of different geographical strains and batches of Artemia
- selection of a standard reference toxicant
- determination of the accuracy and repeatability of the test
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