25
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Disease and Disorders of Freshwater Unionid Mussels: A Brief Overview of Recent Studies

      review-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The use of aquatic invertebrates in biomedical research and as environmental sentinels has dramatically grown in recent decades, with an increased need in understanding of comparative pathology. The Unionids freshwater mussels are a group of worldwide distributed bivalves residing small ditches and ponds, lakes, canals and rivers, often used as animal test in eco-toxicological studies. Once one of the most abundant bivalve molluscs in ancient rivers around the world, now many of them are declining in many countries and consequently are nearly extinct in many areas. The causes of this decline are not fully understood but alteration and degradation of the freshwater habitat seemed to play a central role. To date, link causality to the observed losses during episode of mussel die-offs has been more difficult to establish, and disease and pathogen presence have been scarcely considered. In this article we provide a brief overview of unionids freshwater mussel conservation status, also describing reported diseases and pathogens and illustrating a few relatively well-documented studies.

          Related collections

          Most cited references47

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Freshwater Protected Areas: Strategies for Conservation

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Metallothioneins in metal regulation and toxicity in aquatic animals

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Water quality guidance for protection of freshwater mussels (Unionidae) from ammonia exposure.

              Ammonia toxicity data for freshwater mussels (Unionidae), a significantly imperiled taxa, were used to derive estimates of concentrations that would not likely be harmful in acute and chronic exposures and to assess the protectiveness of current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) water quality criteria to this family of organisms. Thirty acute (24-96-h) median lethal concentrations (LC50s), covering 10 species in eight unionid genera, were used to calculate genus mean acute values (GMAVs) ranging from 2.56 to 8.97 mg/L total ammonia as N at pH 8. Freshwater mussels are at the sensitive end of the range when added to the GMAVs from the database used to derive the U.S. EPA criteria maximum concentration (CMC). We derived two estimates of acute exposure water quality guidance for the protection of freshwater mussels (CMC(FM)) by a recalculation of the CMC after adding freshwater mussel GMAVs to the U.S. EPA data set. The CMC(FM)s of 1.75 and 2.50 mg/L total ammonia as N at pH 8 average 60% less than the U.S. EPA CMC of 5.62 mg/L total ammonia as N at pH 8 for application when salmonids are present. These values average about 75% less than the CMC for application when salmonids are absent. No chronic ammonia exposure data existed for unionids. Thus, we applied a range of estimated acute:chronic ratios to the acute toxicity data set, expanded with the freshwater mussel GMAVs. to estimate continuous ammonia concentrations that may be protective of freshwater mussels. These estimates ranged from 0.3 to 1.0 mg/L total ammonia as N at pH 8, about 20 to 75% less than the U.S. EPA criteria continuous concentration (CCC) of 1.24 mg/L total ammonia as N at pH 8 and 25 degrees C. The current numeric criteria for ammonia may not be protective of mussels, more than half of whose nearly 300 species are in decline in North America. While the CMC(FM) and CCC(FM) are not equivalent to revised U.S. EPA criteria, they are offered as interim guidance for the protection of freshwater mussels.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Physiol
                Front Physiol
                Front. Physiol.
                Frontiers in Physiology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-042X
                01 November 2016
                2016
                : 7
                : 489
                Affiliations
                Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II Naples, Italy
                Author notes

                Edited by: Youji Wang, Shanghai Ocean University, China

                Reviewed by: Begum Yurdakok Dikmen, Ankara University, Turkey; David Bruce Conn, Berry College, USA

                *Correspondence: Francesca Carella francesca.carella@ 123456unina.it

                This article was submitted to Aquatic Physiology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Physiology

                Article
                10.3389/fphys.2016.00489
                5088359
                94b928bf-da5a-4799-b5e1-eaff756c554c
                Copyright © 2016 Carella, Villari, Maio and De Vico.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 22 July 2016
                : 10 October 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 1, Equations: 0, References: 99, Pages: 8, Words: 6671
                Categories
                Physiology
                Mini Review

                Anatomy & Physiology
                unionidae,freshwater mussels,animal disease,comparative pathology
                Anatomy & Physiology
                unionidae, freshwater mussels, animal disease, comparative pathology

                Comments

                Comment on this article