A COMPARISON OF DUCKWEED AND STANDARD ALGAL PHYTOTOXICITY TESTS AS INDICATORS OF AQUATIC TOXICOLOGY

This work investigates using duckweed in toxicity testing of consumer product chemicals of interest to Procter & Gamble, and compares duckweed sensitivity to algae sensitivity to the same toxicants. Algae are the test species of choice for testing of such chemicals. Duckweed brings additional benefits since they’re more globally distributed than the traditional algal test species, providing an additional representative of aquatic plants to the risk assessment process, and are a practical choice for flow-through test designs. The results show that for all the toxicants investigated, duckweed and algae are not acutely different in sensitivity. For the surfactants tested, duckweed may be less sensitive than algae. Duckweed is as good of an indicator of aquatic toxicity as algae; the data shows that the two organisms cannot be used interchangeably