BIOACCUMULATION OF CONTAMINANTS THROUGH FOOD WEBS

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This pilot project aims towards developing a proposal to apply basic ecological food-web research to the closely related biomedical problem of contaminant bioaccumulation in ecosystems. Bioaccumulated contaminants threaten the health of organisms including humans that consume fish and other organisms from the environment. Two primary activities are proposed. The first establishes a rigorous connection between basic ecological issue of food-web structure and the applied problem of calculating the potential for species within ecosystems to bioaccumulate lipophilic toxic contaminants. The activity involves theoretical, analytical and empirical explorations. The second activity establishes a procedure to apply the quantitative polymerase chain reaction (QPCR) to the analysis of feeding relations among organisms. Specific pilot project tastes include 1) conducting library research on the biomagnification factors associated with feeding relations, 2) exploring the availability of data quantifying the feeding relations of omnivores, and 3) evaluating QPCR methods in the literature and in the lab that are both appropriate for analyzing feed relations and use locally available equipment. It is anticipated that completing these tasks will provide a strong foundation for a subsequent proposal to estimate the bioaccumulative potential of ecosystems through food-web studies.