Purpose: How can a class lab help us understand the concept of biomagnifications and bioaccumulation?

Toxicants are discharged into the environment due to the burning of fossil fuels by factories and daily human activities such as driving a car. When the environment becomes contaminated with these toxicants, the animals in that environment become expose to the toxicants and will also be contaminated. This usually has a negative impact on the animals because they would develop health issues or even worse, they could die. This event usually occurs in the food chain when toxic chemicals are exposed to the environment. Bioaccumulation is the buildup of toxic concentrate from the first organism in the food chain while biomagnifications is when the concentrate of the pollutants increase from one trophic level to another. Biomagnifications occurs only if the pollutants are persistent, mobile, and insoluble in water. A non persistent, pollutant has a half life of 30 days or less, meaning it will break down before it becomes dangerous. If it is not mobile it will stay held in the soil and absorbed by organisms. If the toxin is soluble in water, the organism will excrete it. or class activity we are using DDT as our pollutant. DDT stands for Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. This chemical is commonly used with pesticides and they can also biomagnify. DDT has a half life of 15 years, if you use 100kg of DDT after 100 years a pound of it will still be there. DDT has low toxicity to humans but it is more affected in bugs.