Comunidades zooplanctônicas em um gradiente de vinhaça

Abstract

Aquatic communities are under severe threat from contaminants when inserted into agricultural matrices. Therefore, this study was carried out in mesocosms, which can be understood as artificial systems that simulate natural ecosystems, with zooplankton communities subjected to different concentration levels of vinasse, a common fertilizer generated from the distillation of sugarcane, to seek to understand how they respond to different concentration levels and how beta diversity metrics describe these responses. The species that composed the 15 different zooplankton communities were identified in the mesocosms before and after vinasse contamination, to verify their effect in relation to species exchange, nestedness, richness and abundance. As a result, it was found that the water had a loss of dissolved oxygen and a decrease in pH with increasing vinasse concentrations. The non-impacted communities had a temporal pattern of nestedness (subsets of the previous communities) and impacted communities changed the relative abundances of the most common species (exchange pattern). A common resistant species (Tropocyclops prasinus) and another that linearly decreased in abundance as vinasse concentrations increased (Notodiaptomus spinuliferus) were also observed, the latter being a potential indicator species of vinasse-contaminated systems. The effects of vinasse on aquatic communities were evident, suggesting caution in the indiscriminate use of the substance as a fertilizer in agricultural crops.