A Chronic Toxicity Test with the Marine Copepod Acartia tonsa

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Abstract
A chronic toxicity test was developed for studying the effects of five toxicants (effluents) on the survival and reproduction of Acartia tonsa, a marine zooplankton. The test involves the exposure of copepods to three concentrations of each material (320, 100, and 32 ppm) for an entire life cycle. It is divided into three parts: (1) the reproduction of laboratory-cultured Acartia tonsa in breeding chambers containing the three concentrations of toxicants under static conditions; (2) sexual maturation of the F1 organisms in the toxicant concentrations under flow-through conditions; and (3) the reproduction of the F1 organisms under the same conditions as those established for Part 1, and the monitoring of the organisms' reproductive success, defined as the number of viable F2 offspring. The results of the chronic tests were compared with data from an acute study conducted earlier. The chronic tests showed a significant reduction in organism survival, when compared with the acute tests (in the range of 1.0 to 0.1 percent of the 48-h LC 50 value). This paper highlights the relative simplicity of the chronic Acartia tonsa test procedure and demonstrates its twofold usefulness: (1) in the identification of a long-term effect and (2) in the comparison of the chronic toxicity of differing materials.

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