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Essay On Environmental Pollution

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Pollutants are impacting aquatic organisms distributed by daily human activities and natural occurrences. An extensive amount of pollutants such as pesticides, heavy metals, and hydrocarbons can result in direct significant damage, e.g. death. However lower levels of these harmful substances can be stored in an organism and increase as it continues and follows up the food chain, a process called biomagnification or bioaccumulation, having the greatest effect on the top predator of that food chain. A common result of the pollutants can lead to stress, changing of the immune system, inhibit lysozyme activity, damage gills, metabolism, and growth. Other factors include an excessive amount of nutrients in the environment. Nitrogen can make its way into aquatic ecosystems when there is an increase in nitrous oxide in the air, allowing eutrophication. Algae and bacteria feed off the nitrogen, so a high number of these organisms appear and use oxygen around them as the feed, causing hypoxic zones, or dead zones. Acidification, an increase in the ecosystem’s pH acidity from acid rain, which occurs from an increase in CO2 from air pollution. Aquatic organisms have a range of tolerance, and water with high acidic pH will lead the organism out of the range of tolerance, resulting in stress of the organism, and eventually death. Further studies are being pursuited to see larger impacts of globalized pollution on aquatic species and their ecosystems.

Keywords: Pollutants, pesticides,

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