Impact of Pesticide Toxicity in Aquatic Environment

Abstract

The intensified agricultural crop production for growing high yield varieties requires the indiscriminate use of pesticides and fertilizers, which protect the crop from pests, thus helps in improving the quality and quantity of crops. The aquatic environment gets contaminated by the application of pesticides through several routes: runoff, spray drift, and leaching, which pose serious health risks to the aquatic ecosystem as well as to human beings. This exposure can directly affect all levels of biological organization, including primary producers, microorganisms, invertebrates, or fish. Thus, monitoring methods should be adopted for controlling the runoff events in the spraying method, such as suspended matter sampler for particle-associated pesticides that can be used for controlling the number of toxic substances in water bodies.