Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Ecosystems are affected by a wide variety of different stressors such as toxic contaminants, habitat modification, invading species, climate warming ect., that contribute to reductions in the productivity and health of indicators species such as sport fish.  New tools are being developed to supplement traditional fisheries assessment techniques that will enable measurement and comparison of fish feeding rates and growth conversion efficiencies in environments subject to different gradients and types of stressors.  Two such techniques include the i) use of state-of-the-art non-steady state bioaccumulation models of organic chemical tracers to track fish feeding rates and ii) use of fatty acid signatures as biomarkers of fish growth and feeding ecology. This proposal is requesting funding to obtain a duel channel high resolution gas chromatograph with micro electron capture detector and flame ionization detector to support calibration studies that will validate the use of such tools as ecological tracers in aquatic ecosystems. Organic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have become distributed throughout the globe and thus have potential application as ecological tracers.  These chemicals have been shown to track food web interactions, and by measuring changes in concentration in animals through time, can be used to estimate animal feeding rates.  The requested infrastructure will provide the most sensitive instrumentation available needed to measure ultra-trace levels of chemicals such as PCBs in systems removed from point sources. Tissue accumulation of specific fatty acids, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), have been shown to be useful indicators of animal health and growth and more recently have been used as tracers of animal feeding ecology. The requested infrastructure will also provide a high throughput instrument to characterize fatty acid profiles in fish collected from multiple systems, meeting the combined needs of organic chemical and fatty acid analyses of three faculty members at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and one faculty from Environmental Engineering, University of Windsor.