Environmental Science 3300F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: World Health Organization, Partition Coefficient, Rodenticide
12 Dec 2017
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Some things to think about we haven"t considered: purely cosmetic pesticide use, using poison baits for animal control, herbicides and herbicides in war. Rodenticides: rat poison, typically non-specific pest control chemicals, world health organization says humans will have to increase its food production by 60% Bioaccumulation: the concentrations of many compounds, especially organochlorines are much higher in fish than in the waters in which they swim, this is due to bioaccumulation. Why: bioconentration occurs because the compounds are much more soluble in fatty flesh than in water, they migrate by diffusion there when water passes over gills. Octanol is a surrogate for fat: the partition coefficient kow = *if the kow is high, its more likely to be adsorbed on organic matter. Fish eats many times its mass in food over a lifetime, and accumulates organochlorines, the concentration of the chemicals in it > those in its food supply: conc also increases as a fish ages.
