Toxicity Identification Evaluations

Toxicity Identification EvaluationsAqua Survey has a long history of successfully performing toxicity identification evaluation of effluent samples. For many years the only laboratory tool available to try to identify the causative toxicant or toxicants in an effluent sample that had tested toxic in a bioassay or was thought to have caused a fish-kill in its receiving waters was taking an educated guess as to what the toxicant might be and then using wet chemistry to try to find the potential toxicant at levels known to cause an adverse effect such as death. This was a real hit or miss method that rarely produced unambiguous results. Toxicity Identification Evaluations (TIEs) take advantage of a basic scientific fact: Only living organisms can directly detect toxicants (causative); at best, analytical chemists can only correlate contaminant levels with observed toxicological effects.