Linking new national active biomonitoring data with stream macroinvertebrate communities suggests large-scale effects of toxic contamination on freshwater ecosystems.

Since recent years, an increasingly large number of toxic chemicals enters watercourses threatening freshwater biodiversity. But ecological studies still poorly document the quantitative patterns linking exposure to complex mixture of toxic chemicals and species communities' integrity in the field. In this context, French monitoring authorities have recently deployed at a national scale in situ biotests using the feeding inhibition of the crustacean Gammarus as toxicity indicator.

Proteogenomic reconstruction of organ-specific metabolic networks in an environmental sentinel species, the amphipod Gammarus fossarum.

Metabolic pathways are affected by the impacts of environmental contaminants underlying a large variability of toxic effects across different species. However, the systematic reconstruction of metabolic pathways remains limited in environmental sentinel species due to the lack of available genomic data in many taxa of animal diversity. In this study we used a multi-omics approach to reconstruct the most comprehensive map of metabolic pathways for a crustacean model in biomonitoring, the amphipod Gammarus fossarum in order to improve the knowledge of the metabolism of this sentinel species.

Chronic metal contamination shapes the size structure of Gammarus fossarum populations in French headwater rivers.

Assessing the effects of multigenerational exposure of aquatic animal populations to chemical contamination is essential for ecological risk assessment. However, beyond rare examples reporting the sporadic emergence of a toxicological tolerance within populations that persist in contaminated environments, conclusive results are even more limited from field studies when it comes to the alteration of life-history traits. Here, we investigated whether long-term exposure to cadmium (Cd) influences size-related life-history traits (i.

ToF-SIMS imaging shows specific lipophilic vitamin alterations in chronic reprotoxicity caused by the emerging contaminant Pravastatin in Gammarus fossarum.

Blood lipid-lowering agents, such as Pravastatin, are among the most frequently used pharmaceuticals released into the aquatic environment. Although their effects on humans are very well understood, their consequences on freshwater organisms are not well known, especially in chronic exposure conditions. Gammarus fossarum is commonly used as sentinel species in ecotoxicology because of its sensitivity to a wide range of environmental contaminants and the availability of standardized bioassays.