Extrapolating Contaminant Effects from Individuals to Populations: A Case Study on Nanoparticle Toxicity to Daphnia Fed Environmentally Relevant Food Levels

Louise M. Stevenson; Katherine E. Krattenmaker; Edward McCauley; Roger M. Nisbet

doi:10.1007/s00244-022-00950-7

Extrapolating Contaminant Effects from Individuals to Populations: A Case Study on Nanoparticle Toxicity to Daphnia Fed Environmentally Relevant Food Levels

Louise M. Stevenson, Katherine E. Krattenmaker, Edward McCauley, Roger M. Nisbet

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Ecological risk assessment (ERA) is charged with assessing the likelihood a chemical will have adverse environmental or ecological effects. When assessing the risk of a potential contaminant to biological organisms, ecologists are most concerned with the sustainability of populations of organisms, rather than protecting every individual. However, ERA most commonly relies on data on the effect of a potential contaminant on individuals because these experiments are more feasible than costly population-level exposures. In this work, we address the challenge of extrapolating these individual-level results to predict population-level effects. Previous per-capita population growth rate estimates calculated from individual-level exposures of Daphnia pulicaria to silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) at different food rations predict a critical daily food requirement for daphnid populations exposed to 200 μg/L AgNPs to avoid extinction. To test this, we exposed daphnid populations to the same AgNP concentration at three different food inputs, with the lowest ration close to the extinction threshold predicted from data on individuals. The two populations with the higher food inputs persisted, and the population with the lowest food input went extinct after 50 days but did persist through two generations. We demonstrate that we can extrapolate between these levels of biological organization by parameterizing an individual-level biomass model with data on individuals’ response to AgNPs and using these parameters to predict the outcome for control and AgNP-exposed populations. Key to successful extrapolation is careful modeling of temporal changes in resource density, driven by both the experimental protocols and feedback from the consumer. The implication for ecotoxicology is that estimates of extinction thresholds based on studies of individuals may be reliable predictors of population outcomes, but only with careful treatment of resource dynamics.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	361-375
Number of pages	15
Journal	Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology
Volume	83
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-022-00950-7
State	Published - Nov 2022

Funding

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation ( http://www.nsf.gov/ ) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, http://www.epa.gov/ ) under Cooperative Agreement EF-0830117, EPA’s Science to Achieve Results grant R835797, and The Worster Family Research Award for undergraduate–graduate student research and mentorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We thank B. Martin and E. Muller for helpful discussion and C. Briggs, P. Holden, and anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. We also thank E. Wear for help with DAPI staining. The present study was supported by the US National Science Foundation ( http://www.nsf.gov/ ) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, http://www.epa.gov/ ) under Cooperative Agreement EF-0830117, EPA’s Science to Achieve Results grant R835797, and The Worster Family Research Award for undergraduate–graduate student research and mentorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ).

Funders	Funder number
National Science Foundation
U.S. Department of Energy
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	EF-0830117, R835797
University of California, Santa Barbara

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10.1007/s00244-022-00950-7

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title = "Extrapolating Contaminant Effects from Individuals to Populations: A Case Study on Nanoparticle Toxicity to Daphnia Fed Environmentally Relevant Food Levels",

abstract = "Ecological risk assessment (ERA) is charged with assessing the likelihood a chemical will have adverse environmental or ecological effects. When assessing the risk of a potential contaminant to biological organisms, ecologists are most concerned with the sustainability of populations of organisms, rather than protecting every individual. However, ERA most commonly relies on data on the effect of a potential contaminant on individuals because these experiments are more feasible than costly population-level exposures. In this work, we address the challenge of extrapolating these individual-level results to predict population-level effects. Previous per-capita population growth rate estimates calculated from individual-level exposures of Daphnia pulicaria to silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) at different food rations predict a critical daily food requirement for daphnid populations exposed to 200 μg/L AgNPs to avoid extinction. To test this, we exposed daphnid populations to the same AgNP concentration at three different food inputs, with the lowest ration close to the extinction threshold predicted from data on individuals. The two populations with the higher food inputs persisted, and the population with the lowest food input went extinct after 50 days but did persist through two generations. We demonstrate that we can extrapolate between these levels of biological organization by parameterizing an individual-level biomass model with data on individuals{\textquoteright} response to AgNPs and using these parameters to predict the outcome for control and AgNP-exposed populations. Key to successful extrapolation is careful modeling of temporal changes in resource density, driven by both the experimental protocols and feedback from the consumer. The implication for ecotoxicology is that estimates of extinction thresholds based on studies of individuals may be reliable predictors of population outcomes, but only with careful treatment of resource dynamics.",

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Extrapolating Contaminant Effects from Individuals to Populations: A Case Study on Nanoparticle Toxicity to Daphnia Fed Environmentally Relevant Food Levels. / Stevenson, Louise M.; Krattenmaker, Katherine E.; McCauley, Edward et al.
In: Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, Vol. 83, No. 4, 11.2022, p. 361-375.

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

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Extrapolating Contaminant Effects from Individuals to Populations: A Case Study on Nanoparticle Toxicity to Daphnia Fed Environmentally Relevant Food Levels

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