Abstract
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has defined national in-stream water-quality criteria (WQC) for 157 pollutants. No WQC to protect aquatic life exist for total dissolved solids (TDS). Some water-treatment processes (e.g., pH modifications) discharge wastewaters of potentially adverse TDS into freshwater systems. Strong correlations between specific conductivity, a TDS surrogate, and several biotic indices in a previous study suggested that TDS caused by a coal-mine effluent was the primary stressor. Further acute and chronic testing in the current study with Ceriodaphnia dubia in laboratory-manipulated media indicated that the majority of the effluent toxicity could be attributed to the most abundant ions in the discharge, sodium (1952 mg/L) and/or sulfate (3672 mg/L), although the hardness of the effluent (792 ± 43 mg/L as CaCO3) ameliorated some toxicity. Based on laboratory testing of several effluent-mimicking media, sodium- and sulfate-dominated TDS was acutely toxic at approximately 7000 μS/cm (5143 mg TDS/L), and chronic toxicity occurred at approximately 3200 μS/cm (2331 mg TDS/L). At a lower hardness (88 mg/L as CaCO3), acute and chronic toxicity end-points were decreased to approximately 5000 μS/cm (3663 mg TDS/L) and approximately 2000 μS/cm (1443 mg TDS/L), respectively. Point-source discharges causing in-stream TDS concentrations to exceed these levels may risk impairment to aquatic life.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Dr. Rebecca Currie, Matthew Hull, T. Chad Merricks, Patrick Barry, and Brian Denson for suggestions and assistance in the laboratory and field. We also thank Drs. David Soucek, E.F. Benfield, and Roderic Millward as well as two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful suggestions regarding the manuscript.
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Kennedy, A.J., Cherry, D.S. & Zipper, C.E. Evaluation of Ionic Contribution to the Toxicity of a Coal-Mine Effluent Using Ceriodaphnia dubia. Arch Environ Contam Toxicol 49, 155–162 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-004-0034-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00244-004-0034-z