Biomaginification

Biomagnification Biomaginification is the movement of pollutants up the food chain. As they move up the food chain they become more concentrated.

Food Chains

Food chain A food chain is a flow chart which fallows the flow of energy It always starts with a primary producer which is very abundant in the environment As one fallows a food chain they will see that the higher species on it have small numbers in terms of population

Why? Because most of these pollutants can not be excreted, or cleaned by the body of an organism they stay within that organism. At the low levels of the food chain they are not harmful because there is so little of them in any one plant or animal. As it goes higher up the chain however the concentrations grow and often have bad effects on the animal

Example DDT

DDT Pesticide which in the 50’s was like candy to everyone. It was a great thing because it killed all pests and didn’t hurt anything OR so they thought

DDT As the DDT was distributed and sprayed everywhere, birds of pray started dieing out. No one could figure out why until someone linked the DDT with the Bird population decline. They were so high on the food chain when they ate their pray they were exposed to very high levels of DDT

DDT and Birds It turned out that the DDT was making the eggs of the birds soft and thus their young was dieing out. DDT’s were band after huge environmental outcries and bird populations took years to recover some still haven’t

Rap up The DDT moved up the food chain and what was once a a non harmful chemical in small concentrations became deadly to birds in large ones This is the concept of Biomagnification. The same thing often happens with fish in lakes.