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Vol. 44 No. 1, 2005
Monitoring Behavioral Responses to the Heavy Metal Cadmium in the Marine Shrimp Hippolyte inermis Leach (Crustacea: Decapoda) with Video Imaging
Hubert Untersteiner1,*, Gerwin Gretschel2, Tom Puchner2, Sonja Napetschnig2, and Helmut Kaiser1
1Institute of Zoology, University of Graz, Universitätsplatz 2, 8010 Graz, Austria
2School of Marine Biology Valsaline, Valsaline 31, 52100 Pula, Croatia
Hubert Untersteiner, Gerwin Gretschel, Tom Puchner, Sonja Napetschnig, and Helmut Kaiser (2005) In this study, the subacute toxicity of the heavy metal cadmium to Hippolyte inermis
Leach was investigated. Subacute effects were evaluated using changes
in the locomotory behavior (i.e., moving velocity and moving distance)
as indicators. The locomotory activity was analyzed by means of
real-time image analysis, using a video camera and a Pentium PC
equipped with a standard low-cost frame grabber. For a sequence of 3000
images per treatment, where 10 shrimp were moving simultaneously, the
trajectories were reconstructed as binary image sequences. The
locomotory activity of the test organisms was analyzed under normal
conditions (without heavy metal stress) and after application of a
subacute Cd stress. Test animals were stressed by Cd of the following 3
concentrations: 1 (C1), 2 (C2), and 3.5 ppm (C3).
Shrimp were exposed to the heavy metal concentrations for 12 h under
static conditions. At initiation (0 h) of Cd exposure, the test animals
showed a significant (p ≤ 0.05) decrease in the average swimming velocity at C3. After 3 h of Cd exposure, the median moving velocity was for the first time highly significantly (p ≤ 0.01) reduced with the 1 ppm Cd treatment.
Key words: Subacute toxicity, Ethotoxicology, Cadmium, Hippolytidae.
*Correspondence: Tel: 43-676-5172556. Fax: 43-316-425654. E-mail: hubert.untersteiner@aon.at
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