Assessment of the Metal Bioaccumulation in Three Species of Freshwater Bivalves Bhalchandra Waykar • Satish Madhukar Shinde Received: 24 March 2011 / Accepted: 21 June 2011 / Published online: 2 July 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract The metal concentration and body burden of three species of fresh water bivalves, Parreysia cylindrica, Parreysia corrugata and Corbicula striatella were estimated in laboratory experiment after exposure to chronic concentration of arsenic (0.1719 ppm), cadmium (0.23 ppm), copper (0.13 ppm), mercury (0.06 ppm), lead (2.4 ppm) and zinc (5.1 ppm) separately up to 30 days. Dry weight of each animal was used to calculate metal concentrations (lg/g) and the metal body burden (lg/ individual). It was observed that zinc, lead and copper concentration and metal body burden was highest in the Corbicula striatella, mercury and arsenic was highest in Parreysia corrugata and cadmium was highest in Parrey- sia cylindrica. Therefore, Corbicula striatella is being proposed as sentinel organism for monitoring of zinc, lead and copper, Parreysia corrugata for mercury and arsenic, and Parreysia cylindrica for cadmium in fresh water ecosystem. Keywords Bivalves Á Metal concentration Á Body burden Á Accumulation Conventionally, metal monitoring of water has been carried out by analyzing the concentration of metals in water and sediments. However, information obtained through this method is inaccurate (Kennish 2000; Issam et al. 2003). Inaccurate information creates misleading decision-making for water quality assessment. To overcome this problem, the idea has been proposed to use a biomonitoring organ- ism to indicate metal pollution. During the past few dec- ades, many species have been studied to determine their potential as a biomonitoring organism and mollusk have become a popular choice for metal monitoring for several reasons (Hung et al. 2001). Bivalve accumulate measurable contaminant body burdens from environmental condition that are near or below the limit of detection in chemical analysis (Ullven 1993).The bivalves are sedentary, wide- spread and have a long life span, filter feeder, accumulate metals from food, water and also from the ingestion of inorganic particulate materials, hence fulfilling the criteria as good bioindicators (Huang et al. 2007). Generally these indicators are able to evaluate the level of metal pollutants, but the problem of individual vari- ability within and between sample batches still remains and this causes problems on the interpretation of the results. For this instance, body size or weight of the organism is one of the parameters that influence the uptake and bioaccumu- lation of the elements in the body. If the metal concen- trations are expressed as concentration per unit body weight (lg/g), then one can expect the highest value to be recorded amongst the smallest individuals and could therefore render a misleading interpretation (Boyden 1974). Ibrahim and Mat (1995) shown that the total metal content is directly proportional to the body weight. The body burdens of metals in most bivalves have been used to identify and map areas with exceedingly high levels of trace metals and organic pollutants; hence they can be used as biomonitors for aquatic environment. In order to use the bivalve as bioindicators in pollution- monitoring programmes, there is a need to develop a bio- accumulation database using various bivalve species. The data generated might be used in finding the most B. Waykar Á S. M. Shinde (&) Department of Zoology, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Aurangabad, 431004 Maharashtra, India e-mail: satish.shinde02@gmail.com B. Waykar e-mail: bbwaykar@gmail.com 123 Bull Environ Contam Toxicol (2011) 87:267–271 DOI 10.1007/s00128-011-0354-4