Limnology Papers Focus On Pollutant Levels In Fish And Fresh Water Systems

In the past few years, the problem of ocean pollution has captured the attention of the media and the public, especially in the wake of such disasters as the washing up of medical waste on the New Jersey shoreline in the summer months of 1988. The media and the public have yet to focus in the same way on the problem of pollution of inland freshwater, including lakes, ponds and streams. Scientists working in the field of limnology, however, have been quietly studying this issue for more than two decades. Their work deserves, and is now beginning to receive, wider recognition. One way to study the work of these scientists is to examine the journals dedicated to publishing limnology articles. In 1988 the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) classified it among some 3,200 journals it indexes for the Science Citation index as limnology titles. Of these journals; four exhibit relatively high-impact factors for this discipline: Limnology and Oceanography, Water Resources Research, Water Research, and Archiv far Hydrobiologie (see accompanying Table 1). Table 2 (on page 27) lists the five limnology papers from these four journals that were most cited by researchers over the last 30 years. The two most-cited limnology papers appeared in Water Research in the late 1960s. These two articles deal with the measurement of toxicity in fish; each has been cited well over 300 times. The article by John B. Sprague, who was at the Fisheries Board of Canada Biological Station in New Brnnswick and is now at the department of zoology, University of Guelph, Ontario, is a review of the basic methods then available for testing pollutant levels in fish. According to the author, the article was published at a particularly propitious time, because environmental research, including testing of potential pollutants’ effects on aquatic organisms, was becoming increasingly important during the period in which the paper appeared. The second most-cited paper was published two years before Sprague’s; it, too, deals with fish toxicology. Donald I. Mount and William A. Brungs, who were with the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration in Cincinnati and are now with the Environmental Research Laboratory of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Duluth, Minn. (Mount) and in Narragansett, R.I. (Brungs), described an inexpensive yet reliable apparatus for testing various amounts of toxic substances in flowing water for long periods. Mounts notes that the paper appeared before “Earth Day [1970] and the environmental awareness movement”; consequently, it initially did not receive much attention. But once water quality became an issue, the paper and the device became quite popular. The journal Water Research also published the third most-cited paper. This article, which has garnered 320 — citations, looks at the effect of soils and sediments from rivers and ponds on the sorption of hydrophobic organic pollutants (such as DDT). It is the most recently published paper of the five—just 10 years old. The authors, all at the Environmental Research Laboratory of the EPA in Athens, Ga., examined the “environmental fate” of hydrophobic compounds based on the sizes of the particles that make up various river and pond sediments. The highly cited paper was a core, or key, publication in ISI’s 1988 research front, or specialty area, on soil sediments in aquatic systems. Related papers, which all cited this core publication, examine several water pollutants, including pesticides, metals, pulp mill effluents, sewage, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). By contrast, the paper by Narinder Kumar Kaushik, Department of Environmental Biology, University of Guelph, and Hugh Bernard Noel Hynes, Department of Biology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, dis- cusses the effect of natural additions to water, particularly fallen leaves in woodland streams. The paper, which ranks fourth with more than 280 citations is based on a 1963 report by Hynes (Intl. Congress Zool., 16:324- 9, 1963). Kaushik and Hynes’ 1971 paper in Archiv für Hydrobiologie explored the hypothesis that when leaves decompose in streams, the leaves’ protein content increases, making them an important energy source for- invertebrate communities living in the water. Linmology Classics Limnology and Oceanography, the highest-impact journal among limnology titles, published the fifth most-cited paper. This report, with more than 270 citations, discusses the structure of freshwater animal communities that were established in 20 experimental ponds. According to first author Donald Hall, of the department of zoology at Michigan —State University, East Lansing, the onds were ecologic test tubes that allowed his team to explore the structural dynamics of aquatic invertebrate communities, including the niche concept and diversity and stability questions. In 1981, ISI identified this paper as a “Citation Classic,” and Hall wrote a commentary about the article’s genesis and history. In fact, all except the third most-cited paper were featured in the “Citation Classics” pages of Current Contents. (See James T. Barrett, ed., Contemporary Classics in Plant, Animal, and Environmental Sciences, Philadelphia, ISI, 1986, pp. 171, 175,179, and 181.) Abigail Grissom is a freelance science writer based in Philadelphia.

Limnology Papers Focus On Pollutant Levels In Fish And Fresh Water Systems

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