The purpose of this study was to examine mercury in macroinvertebrate communities from grassland ponds with and without fish communities. We sampled macroinvertebrates from five ponds with fish and five ponds without fish, at the LBJ National Grassland in North Texas. In ponds without fish, the biomass of macroinvertebrates was significantly higher than in ponds with fish. The average mercury concentration of macroinvertebrates from ponds without fish was significantly higher than the average mercury concentration in ponds with fish. Because ponds without fish contained a higher biomass of macroinvertebrates and unique taxa with higher concentrations of mercury, the total amount of mercury in the macroinvertebrate community in ponds without fish was significantly higher than in the ponds with fish. In ponds with fish, the average mercury concentration of the fish community was 13 times greater than mercury concentration of the macroinvertebrates community. These data suggest that when fish are present, mercury accumulates in fish rather than in the macroinvertebrate community, which has implications for the movement of mercury into terrestrial ecosystems when macroinvertebrates emerge as aerial adults.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-04222010-085828 |
| Date | 22 April 2010 |
| Creators | Henderson, Byron Lee |
| Contributors | Matthew M Chumchal |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-04222010-085828/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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