Meeting Abstract
Increases in sensory pollution within an environment can impair an organism’s ability to extract information necessary to make spatial decisions regarding orientation behavior. Within an aquatic environment, many animals rely heavily on the information structured in olfactory cues for such behaviors. Anthropogenic chemical pollution in an aquatic ecosystem inhibit animals from extracting information from chemical signals by decreasing olfactory sensitivity and causing physiological damage to epithelium, before reaching lethal levels of toxicity. We investigated whether a behavioral mechanism (antennular flicking) involved in chemically mediated behaviors of the rusty crayfish, Orconectes rusticus, was altered following exposure to ecologically relevant sublethal levels of copper . The first portion of this study investigated if the success rate of locating a food source and flick rate was altered following 120 hours of copper exposure. During the next portion, we mimicked a clean-up scenario during which crayfish previously exposed to copper were subsequently placed in unpolluted water before behavioral assays. Crayfish exposed to copper were significantly less successful in their ability to orient to a food odor than crayfish living in water without elevated copper. Over the course of the experiment, crayfish previously exposed to copper and then placed in unpolluted water improved in successful location of the food odor source. Furthermore, sublethal exposure to copper altered the antennular flicking rates of crayfish and subsequent placement in unpolluted water also impacted the flicking rates of exposed crayfish. These results indicate that the mechanism by which copper impairs chemoreception in the rusty crayfish is reversible if ecosystem management and mediation practices are put into place.
