Water Toxicity

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heyheyjude
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Feb 07, 2016 5:03 am
Occupation: Student

Water Toxicity

Post by heyheyjude »

Hello, for my project at school I want to use a living organism to test the toxicity levels of water. I know that Daphnia magna has been used for these types of projects a lot, my question is are there any other living organisms that can be used to test toxicity levels in water?
donnahardy2
Former Expert
Posts: 2671
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2005 12:45 pm

Re: Water Toxicity

Post by donnahardy2 »

Hi heyheyjude,

Welcome to Science Buddies!

Water toxicity is a great topic for a science fair project. Here is the project idea using Daphnia from this website:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p043.shtml

Daphnia are used as a standard method for testing water toxicity because they reproduce quickly and are very sensitive to environmental toxins. Adding Daphnia to the test water and measuring the number of survivors is fairly easy to do.

You could use other water invertebrates such as snails, clams, crayfish, leeches, planaria, insects, or perhaps plants, but you would need a method to measure the effect of the toxins on the organism that you select. I would not recommend using fish because these are vertebrates and you would need approval from your local scientific review committee to do an experiment with fish.

What organism do you have available for testing? Why don't you want to use Daphnia?

Donna Hardy
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