An Evaluation of the Emerald Shiner (Notropis atherinoides) as a Bioindicator of Urban Water Pollution in the Upper Niagara River
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using fishes as bioindicator species can be an effective method for detecting poor water quality in aquatic ecosystems. In the Niagara River, the emerald shiner (Notropis atherinoides) is a keystone species that is sensitive to ecosystem degradation and, therefore, fills the bioindicator role. Like other model bioindicators, emerald shiners are abundant and, when exposed to a persistent disturbance, exhibit individual signs of stress before the onset of population decline. This research evaluated the health of emerald shiners captured from the upper Niagara River, which is at times inundated with untreated sewage from combined sewer overflows (CSOs). Water samples were taken biweekly from seven sites in the upper Niagara River and one site in Lake Erie, to determine Escherichia coli’s most probable number (MPN)/100 mL from May-October 2016. Emerald shiners were captured from riverine sites and given an overall health score using the Health Assessment Index (HAI), which incorporates nine physiological parameters, plus their condition factor and liver bacterial infection. Most water samples were below the Environmental Protection Agency criteria for E. coli MPN in a class A stream. However, 35% of fish were positive for internal liver infection. Fulton’s condition factor for emerald shiners reflected measured signs of severe stress such as hemorrhaging and high parasite loads. The most stressed fish were captured in the eastern branch of the river, which is highly urbanized and includes the cities of Buffalo, NY and Tonawanda, NY which produce high CSO effluent. In comparison, the emeralds shiners in the western branch of the river, which is less developed along both the USA and Canadian shorelines, had overall better health markers. These results provide supporting evidence that emerald shiners are exhibiting immunological stress and current water pollution levels are stressing the shiner population in the river, despite compliance with EPA regulations for E. coli input. The future of this keystone species and the health of the ecosystem hinge on solving the issue of the excessive anthropogenic contamination in the Niagara River.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".