Environmental Laboratory - Focus on Pesticide Analysis
all those different pesticides, as there are just so many. This is a broad research goal for us, to make those methods more accessible for your everyday analysis.
Q: Going back to what you about the need for more collaboration, why is it diffi cult to arrange these joint research efforts?
That’s a tough question and I wish I had a really easy answer! I know there have been lots of people trying to bring other scientists and researchers together. I guess one thing could be that we are all so caught up in deadlines? Using myself as an example, I’m a post-doc, I’m trying to publish and just got lots of deadlines, I’m trying to get lots of things done, so sitting down and working out a schedule with other researchers is just one more thing I’d have to do. I’m sure this is true for everyone else too, we are just all so busy, but I guess it could be made easier.
I’m sure if there was funding available specifi cally for these kind of efforts where people come together and work on a project as a team, that would improve collaboration in the future. It would be really helpful – it would be fantastic.
Q: So do you think that the crowdsourced research you mentioned earlier could fi ll a void whilst these collaborations remain diffi cult to arrange?
I think that involving the public is a very powerful tool. Laws get changed because of the public, because of what they need and what they want for the environment, and getting the public on board looking at the watersheds nearby is a no-brainer in my opinion. That would be so easy, having them all on board and working together for the same goal and making them care about the watersheds agencies are trying to save and conserve. Once the public gets involved there is just so much work that can get done. I think it’s a really powerful tool and a good way to generate data. Again, I know it’s not standardised but there are programmes that provide identifi cation keys to the public which
can be used to identify organisms. It’s not your “top” science obviously, but it’s still very valuable information. As I said earlier, monitoring is just such very hard work, so having a few more pairs of hands to help would be great, I’m sure.
Q: We spoke a few months ago about the work you’re doing looking at the sub-lethal effects of pesticides on organisms in watercourses – have there been any new developments in this work?
In the past I was looking at the effects of pesticides only, but in the light of climate change you cannot ignore the fact that certain environmental parameters will change in the future. No matter where we are in the world the temperature will change, and salinity will change in certain watersheds due to more ocean waters coming into watersheds – that’s what is happening currently in California because we don’t have enough rain or melting snow packs – so there is a pressing need for us toxicologists to also look at multiple stressors, not just contaminants as individual stressors. I am therefore currently working on bringing many of these stressors together and looking at the effects on organisms that I am interested in, and hopefully from that I can draw conclusions for that particular watershed and what this means for the future. So I’m mainly analysing data at the moment, and I will have more information soon, but it seems very promising right now.
Q: So are you expecting to see a combined effect of climate change and pesticides that would be greater than the sum of each on their own?
Yes, that is what we are expecting. Based on the research that we have done, and from data that has been published from other groups, either on climate change without an exposure to contaminants or an exposure to a contaminant at different temperatures. We know that some pesticides are more toxic the higher the temperature such as organophosphates for example.
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Pyrethroids get more toxic the cooler it gets. We won’t only be experiencing hotter temperatures in the future but also colder ones and we have to take into account both of these changes.
We are defi nitely expecting different toxicities in combination with environmental stressors such as changes in salinity or temperature. In my preliminary results we have found that different salinity affects toxicity - I haven’t even taken temperature into account in the exposure that I recently did, but even a small increase in salinity changes the organism’s response. Without any salinity, in freshwater, we saw that the organisms were fi ne, but with increased salinity we could see a decrease in their swimming behaviour and even in their survival which is very worrisome in my opinion, I think therefore that there is a pressing need in the future to combine those stressors because of these fi ndings.
Q: It sounds very interesting. Climate change is still such an unknown quantity in some respects still but if your work can show that in certain areas where the climate is changing that we need to back away from the use of certain pesticides and insecticides that is a hugely important thing.
It is, I couldn’t agree more. And unfortunately ecotoxicology is mainly focussed just on the effect of contaminants and doesn’t take into account the other factors, and ecologists and climate change experts don’t necessarily take into account the contaminants as a factor – it just depends on their own perspective I guess – and so there is now a push in research to combine those two sectors. I think this will hopefully give us some really good ideas on how to avoid the sixth mass extinction event.
Simone Hasenbein
Simone Hasenbein, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Scholar, School of Veterinary Medicine, Dept. of Anatomy, Physiology and Cell Biology, University of California, 1089 Veterinary Medicine Drive, Davis, CA 95616, USA • Tel: +1 (530) 752-3141 • Email:
shasenbein@ucdavis.edu • Twitter: @simonehasenbein • Web:
https://simonehasenbein.com/
Innovative New Rapid Test Kit Launched for the Most Commonly Detected Pesticide in Drinking Water in the United States
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Many research studies have associated long term exposure to atrazine with being toxic to wildlife, impairing the human immune system and causing birth defects. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has acknowledged the harmful effects and has limited its use to only be applied by a pesticide professional, with the exception for lawn care, turf and conifer trees.
In 2013, 73.7 million pounds of the chemical compound was applied in the United States and was used on more than half of all corn crops and up to 90% of sugar cane. High levels of contamination in water have been found especially in the Midwest and Southern United States making the requirement for a quick test kit to measure the amount of atrazine in water essential.
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This innovative technology saves operators and laboratories both time and resources when compared to costly analytical instrumentation that can take over an hour to achieve results. This enables plant operators to take faster corrective action when atrazine levels spike due to storm water runoff.
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