What is it about?

We are seeing water pollution on the rise. Biological monitoring of water is therefore becoming increasingly important. Water bugs have so far been little involved in this task. In this article, we review the reasons for this and suggest areas where water bugs could be useful organisms for water biomonitoring.

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Why is it important?

Water bugs may be sensitive to types of water contamination to which other groups are not or not so sensitive, such as cadmium and mercury contamination or salinisation. Moreover, water bugs can also be used in new areas such as sound pollution of water bodies.

Perspectives

I have done research in two distant areas in my life. I have studied the Hungarian water bug fauna for decades and some ecotoxicological issues of soil animals. In this article, I have linked these two distant fields. To my knowledge, this is the first article on this subject.

Gabor Bakonyi

I have done my PhD in Ecotoxicology. Finding relevant and easy-to-handle model organisms is not easy. That is why, when I was asked to work on this article I was happy to oblige.

Borbála Szabó
Centre for Ecological Research

Water bugs are a neglected, but very diverse, wonderful group of water macroinvertebrates. I have been enjoying collecting them and analysing their data with Gábor, throughout decades, with result of several publications. This is now "crowning" them.

Tamás Vásárhelyi

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Pollution impacts on water bugs (Nepomorpha, Gerromorpha): state of the art and their biomonitoring potential, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, March 2022, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10661-022-09961-2.
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