engleski

Power grid vs aquatic organisms: laboratory emulation

Content: Europe is one of the largest continuously urbanized areas of the world. To facilitate our urban needs and make our lives easier we almost fully rely on electricity and to get it we construct power generation, transmission, and distribution systems. This human activity is among the fastest growing environmental pressures in Europe today. Our interest in this study was in the effects of the electric fields created by the transmission, and distribution systems. Of course, electromagnetic fields are also naturally generated by the Earth and surrounding universe and since we are still here it is clear that the living world is well adapted to these natural sources. Earth produces relatively strong magnetic field while electrically Earth is practically inert. That is why we focused our study on the electric fields constructing a plate capacitor to emulate electric field stress that can be observed near power grid system. We exposed two aquatic protist species (Paramecium caudatum and Euglena viridis) to a range of strengths of electric fields. Exposure to electric fields resulted in decrease of population and in increase in stress enzyme activity in both species. In addition, individuals exposed to electric field changed in morphology, decreasing in size perpendicular to their fission plane.

electric field, protists, Paramecium, Euglena, stress enzymes

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