Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2601, Australia.
Science Division, Office of Environment and Heritage, PO Box 29, Lidcombe, New South Wales 1825, Australia.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2018 Dec 3;374(1764):20180003. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2018.0003.
Coal mining and extraction of methane from coal beds generate effluent with elevated salinity or major ion concentrations. If discharged to freshwater systems, these effluents may have adverse environmental effects. There is a growing body of work on freshwater invertebrates that indicates variation in the proportion of major ions can be more important than salinity when determining toxicity. However, it is not known if saline toxicity in a subset of species is representative of toxicity across all freshwater invertebrates. If patterns derived from a subset of species are representative of all freshwater invertebrates, then we would expect a correlation in the relative sensitivity of these species to multiple saline waters. Here, we determine if there is a correlation between the acute (96 h) lethal toxicity in freshwater invertebrates to synthetic marine salts (SMS) and sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO) added to dechlorinated Sydney tap water. NaHCO is a major component of many coal bed effluents. However, most salinization in Australia exhibits ionic composition similar to seawater, which has very little HCO Across all eight species tested, NaHCO was 2-50 times more toxic than SMS. We also observed strong correlations in the acute toxicity of seven of the tested species to SMS and NaHCO The strongest relationship (LC50 = 0.906) was dependent on the exclusion of one species, (Decopoda: Atyidae), which was the most sensitive species tested to NaHCO, but the second-most tolerant of SMS. We conclude that differences in the toxicity of different proportions of major ions can be similar across a wide range of species. Therefore, a small subset of the invertebrate community can be representative of the whole. However, there are some species, which based on the species tested in the current study appear to be a minority, that respond differently to saline effluent and need to be considered separately. We discuss the implications of this study for the management of saline coal bed waters.This article is part of the theme issue 'Salt in freshwaters: causes, ecological consequences and future prospects'.
采煤和从煤层中提取甲烷会产生盐分或主要离子浓度升高的废水。如果排放到淡水中，这些废水可能会对环境产生不利影响。越来越多的关于淡水无脊椎动物的研究表明，在确定毒性时，主要离子的比例变化可能比盐度更重要。然而，目前还不清楚在一组物种中的盐度毒性是否代表所有淡水无脊椎动物的毒性。如果从一组物种中得出的模式代表所有淡水无脊椎动物，那么我们预计这些物种对多种咸水的相对敏感性会存在相关性。在这里，我们确定在淡水无脊椎动物对合成海水盐（SMS）和添加到脱氯悉尼自来水的碳酸氢钠（NaHCO）的急性（96 小时）致死毒性之间是否存在相关性。NaHCO 是许多煤层废水的主要成分。然而，澳大利亚的大多数盐化作用具有与海水相似的离子组成，海水的 HCO 很少。在所有测试的八个物种中，NaHCO 的毒性比 SMS 高 2-50 倍。我们还观察到七种测试物种对 SMS 和 NaHCO 的急性毒性之间存在很强的相关性。最强的关系（LC50 = 0.906）取决于一种物种的排除， （Decapoda：Atyidae），它是对 NaHCO 最敏感的测试物种，但对 SMS 的耐受性第二高。我们的结论是，不同比例的主要离子的毒性差异在广泛的物种中可能相似。因此，无脊椎动物群落的一小部分可以代表全部。但是，有些物种，基于当前研究中测试的物种，似乎是少数，它们对盐水废水的反应不同，需要单独考虑。我们讨论了这项研究对管理盐水煤层水的意义。本文是主题为“淡水中的盐：原因、生态后果和未来前景”的特刊的一部分。
