The Swire Institute of Marine Science and School of Biological Sciences, the University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China.
Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
Chemosphere. 2014 Jun;105:31-43. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2013.10.066. Epub 2013 Nov 26.
Due to a lack of saltwater toxicity data in tropical regions, toxicity data generated from temperate or cold water species endemic to North America and Europe are often adopted to derive water quality guidelines (WQG) for protecting tropical saltwater species. If chemical toxicity to most saltwater organisms increases with water temperature, the use of temperate species data and associated WQG may result in under-protection to tropical species. Given the differences in species composition and environmental attributes between tropical and temperate saltwater ecosystems, there are conceivable uncertainties in such 'temperate-to-tropic' extrapolations. This study aims to compare temperate and tropical saltwater species' acute sensitivity to 11 chemicals through a comprehensive meta-analysis, by comparing species sensitivity distributions (SSDs) between the two groups. A 10 percentile hazardous concentration (HC10) is derived from each SSD, and then a temperate-to-tropic HC10 ratio is computed for each chemical. Our results demonstrate that temperate and tropical saltwater species display significantly different sensitivity towards all test chemicals except cadmium, although such differences are small with the HC10 ratios ranging from 0.094 (un-ionised ammonia) to 2.190 (pentachlorophenol) only. Temperate species are more sensitive to un-ionised ammonia, chromium, lead, nickel and tributyltin, whereas tropical species are more sensitive to copper, mercury, zinc, phenol and pentachlorophenol. Through comparison of a limited number of taxon-specific SSDs, we observe that there is a general decline in chemical sensitivity from algae to crustaceans, molluscs and then fishes. Following a statistical analysis of the results, we recommend an extrapolation factor of two for deriving tropical WQG from temperate information.
由于缺乏热带地区的盐水毒性数据，因此通常采用北美的温带或冷水物种以及欧洲的特有物种的毒性数据来制定保护热带咸水物种的水质准则（WQG）。如果大多数咸水生物对化学物质的毒性随水温升高而增加，那么使用温带物种的数据和相关的 WQG 可能会导致对热带物种的保护不足。鉴于热带和温带咸水生态系统之间的物种组成和环境属性存在差异，这种“从温带到热带”的推断存在可以想象的不确定性。本研究旨在通过综合荟萃分析比较温带和热带咸水物种对 11 种化学物质的急性敏感性，通过比较两组物种敏感性分布（SSD）来实现。从每个 SSD 中得出第 10 个百分位数有害浓度（HC10），然后为每种化学物质计算从温带到热带的 HC10 比值。我们的研究结果表明，除镉外，温带和热带咸水物种对所有测试化学物质的敏感性明显不同，尽管这种差异很小，HC10 比值范围从 0.094（非离子氨）到 2.190（五氯苯酚）。温带物种对非离子氨、铬、铅、镍和三丁基锡更敏感，而热带物种对铜、汞、锌、苯酚和五氯苯酚更敏感。通过比较有限数量的特定分类群 SSD，我们观察到化学敏感性从藻类到甲壳类动物、软体动物再到鱼类呈总体下降趋势。对结果进行统计分析后，我们建议从温带信息推断热带 WQG 时采用 2 的外推因子。
