Operationalising water safety plans for Melbourne - a large city case study.

A wholesale/retail model delivers drinking water to over 5 million residents in metropolitan Melbourne (Australia). Water Safety Plans were implemented in 1999 ahead of being regulatory mandated in 2003. With over 20 years of WSP application, this collaborative paper by the wholesaler and retailer utilities presents practical examples of drinking water quality risk management in challenging operational environments, highlighting lessons learnt, improvements made and outcomes achieved.

Measurement of predatory behaviour in cow dung-colonising insect larvae, using compound-specific (13)C-tracing of dietary fatty acids.

Studies of the trophic interactions between organisms in opaque environments where direct observation can be difficult, such as soil or leaf litter, often require the use of indirect inferential approaches. Here, the use of compound-specific (13)C-tracing of dietary biomarker fatty acids is evaluated as a method for studying predation by larvae of the dung-breeding fly, Mesembrina meridiana (Diptera: Muscidae); the technique was used to differentiate dung from high-enrichment (13)C-labelled prey in their gut contents. Potential prey, (13)C-labelled larvae of the dung-breeding fly, Neomyia cornicina (Diptera: Muscidae), were placed into unlabelled dung microcosms in the laboratory.

A simple modification of a silicic acid lipid fractionation protocol to eliminate free fatty acids from glycolipid and phospholipid fractions.

When fractionating natural and standard lipid mixtures according to the most widely used method for the analysis of soil and other environmental materials, free fatty acids (FFAs) were not recovered quantitatively in the fraction expected to contain all simple lipids. Rather than being eluted from activated silicic acid adsorption chromatographic columns with chloroform, FFAs in standard lipid mixtures appeared only in the two subsequent fractions eluted with acetone and methanol, respectively. Substantial quantities of FFAs from cow dung lipid samples were eluted using chloroform as expected but appreciable amounts also eluted in the acetone (glycolipid) fraction.