Category Archives: Research

Excursion to Mals in South Tyrol: Pesticide monitoring along an altitudinal gradient

In May 2022, a couple of M.Sc. Ecotoxicology students along with Carsten Brühl went to South Tyrol (Italy) to investigate the distribution of pesticides in alpine environments. A part of the group were students from the module Methods in Ecotoxicology, that includes a block lecture and a laboratory test and this year also a field part to perform exposure measurements. The Landau group met with Johann Zaller from BOKU Vienna, author of Daily Poison.

In this blogpost, two of those students, Ken Mauser and Nina Engelhard, present the reason for going to South Tyrol, some brief details about the study and their experience.

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How will insecticides affect streams under climate change?

How climate change will alter the effects of toxicants is a key concern in the 21st Century. Rising water temperature can increase the toxicity of some contaminants to stream-dwelling animals in laboratory conditions, as has been shown for the most widely used insecticides in the world – the neonicotinoids. But until this study, whether this translates to more realistic environmental scenarios remained to be tested. In this blogpost, Sam Macaulay talks about his mesocosm experiment studying the effects of rising water temperatures and neonicotinoids on stream invertebrate communities.

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Food web rewiring drives long-term compositional differences and late-stressor interactions at the community level

In this blogpost, Francesco Polazzo talks about how pesticides can cause a drastic change in the organisation and strength of interactions of aquatic food webs. Particularly, after pesticide exposure, changes in the strength of trophic interactions seem to be driving long-lasting effects in community structure. When multiple pesticides act together, they modify both food web structure and interaction’s strength, causing late-stage non-additive effects between stressors. 

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Finding needles in haystacks – Detection of TiO2 nanoparticles in soil

In a recent publication from the Environmental and Soil Chemistry group, we present a method enabling us to detect anthropogenic TiO2 nanoparticles in soil despite the presence of a high natural background. The method relies of colloidal extraction and trace elements ratio using ICP-MS. 

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Most microplastics in rocky intertidal snails stem from paint

In this blogpost, Sonja Ehlers reports how microplastic loads in rocky intertidal snails from the North Sea, Mediterranean and Atlantic Ocean are consistent across space and time. The majority of the contained microplastics consisted of paint chips that likely derived from ships or maritime equipment. Such paint chips can contain toxic antifouling substances and heavy metals.

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Updated article: Insects in nature reserves are contaminated with a cocktail of pesticides

Update 02.03.2022 – Here is a link to a new video of the study on insects contaminated with a mix of pesticides in nature reserves.

Video 1: A new video of the study on insects contaminated with a mix of pesticides in nature reserves. (Credits: C. Brühl)

In this blog post Carsten Brühl explains the background and findings of their paper on pesticide residues measured on insect samples from nature conservation areas in Germany published in Scientific reports.

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Why coffee makes you alert after a heavy lunch: Mixture neurotoxicity explained through the lens of zebrafish behaviour

In this blogpost, Fola Ogungbemi talks about the effects of mixtures of neuroactive substances. Risk assessment of chemicals is usually conducted for individual chemicals whereas mixtures of chemicals occur in the environment. Considering that neuroactive chemicals are a group of contaminants that dominate the environment, it is then imperative to understand the effects of mixtures of neuroactive substances.

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