A limnologist in Colombia is tracing plastic pollution down to the microscopic level: looking at its impact on plankton in the nation’s swamps and lakes.
According to OECD projections, it is estimated that 82 million tons/year of plastic waste is mismanaged globally, of which 5.8 million tons per year end up in rivers and lakes. This is of particular concern in Colombia, which has a high diversity of plankton especially in its tropical lakes.
Silvia Lucía Villabona Gonzalez a professor at the Universidad Catolica de Oriente explains very little is known about the dynamics of plastic pollution and its impact on freshwater ecosystems, so her research traces the transfer of microplastics through the aquatic food web (phytoplankton, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates and fish).
“Studying zooplankton has made it possible to demonstrate environmental changes in different aquatic ecosystems, since their presence, growth and reproduction depend on a set of physical conditions, chemical processes in the water and conditions related to food supply,” she says, adding that their rapid response to different types of emerging pollutants is also well established.
“In many countries, including Colombia, there are no environmental regulations on this type of pollutants in waters, she says, adding that the project has generated research alliances with with institutions in other countries, such as the Universidade de Pernambuco in Brazil and UNAM in Mexico and has been extended to various types of ecosystems such as rivers, reservoirs and swamps.
“We have registered for the first time in Colombia, the rotifer Kellicottia bostoniensis, considered invasive in other countries of South America, Europe and Asia,” she says, adding that studies carried out in urban wetlands have shown that despite that in spite of the limiting conditions of these ecosystems, several rotifer species and some microcrustaceans can live there.
“If zooplankton disappears, it would be one of the greatest losses of taxonomic, genetic and functional diversity in the world,” she says, adding that without them, aquatic food webs would be substantially altered, disrupting ecosystems on land and water.
“Although Colombia is a global hotspot of biodiversity, its zooplankton fauna remains remains poorly explored,” she says, adding that most research to date has been focused on the Magdalena-Cauca river basin and the least studied regions are the remote Chocó, Orinoco and Amazon basins.
“Therefore, it is necessary to the ecological and taxonomic studies of these small animals to understand their biodiversity and role in the functioning of ecosystems,” she says.
A Passion For Colombia’s Lakes
Villabona was born and raised in the Colombian inland city of Bucaramanga but as a child constantly traveled to the sea.
“I wondered how animals as tiny as corals could work,” she says, adding that she would go on to study biology at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Bucaramanga, Colombia, researching how local microorganisms were migrating between the surface and the bottom of the lakes during the day/night cycle.
Villabona would go on to do a master’s degree and a PhD in biology at the University of Antioquia, in Medellin, Colombia, focusing on the zooplankton of the Ayapel marsh, which are highly diverse, because the presence of aquatic plants favors a greater availability of microhabitats.
Villabona explains that researchers from the Global South have the advantage of living “in the most diverse territories with the greatest diversity of ecosystems and therefore the greatest biodiversity in the world,” and have learned to generate robust results from this hometown advantage, with little funding.
“We have taken this as an opportunity to create a Global South scientific community and generate inclusive and and generate inclusive and multicultural networks such as the Latin American Limnology Network,” she says, adding that these networks contact researchers who live in similar environmental, political, economic and social circumstances.
Colombia’s Water Security
Elsewhere in Colombia, a community facing deforestation and risks to their water supply are working with international researchers to assess those risks.
Carolina Montoya Pachongo, a research fellow at the Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub at the University of Leeds, is leading a project to analyse water-insecurity risks in river basins, starting in Colombia.
The residents of the southern Colombian municipality of Cajibío, Cauca have been forced to rely on firewood and charcoal as an economic activity, leading to localized deforestation.
For the first time, the water risk from this situation is being assessed by Montoya Pachongo and her collaborators from the Universidad del Cauca using a new approach dubbed MUISKA by the researchers.
“For risk analysis, it is also crucial to include relevant parties in the research to produce a valid analysis,” Montoya Pachongo says, “We did this in Cajibío; participants identified their water-insecurity conditions and their systemic connections with root causes and consequences, prioritized several risks to be fully assessed, and identified preliminary actions to manage some risks.”
