Long-term assessment of insecticides treatments in West Africa: aquatic entomofauna.

For the control of the Onchocerca volvulus vector in West Africa, up to 18,000 km of rivers from 1975 and up to 50,000 km from 1989 had been partly sprayed weekly with insecticides as part of the Onchocerciasis Control Programme (OCP). To evaluate the possible short-term and long-term effects of the application of insecticides on the non-target fauna, an aquatic monitoring programme was set up during the initial phase of the programme. By analysing the invertebrate data, which were collected using various sampling strategies from four different countries between 1977 and 1996, this paper evaluates the long-term changes of the invertebrate populations with respect to their taxonomic composition as well as their trophic structures. The discussed results of the applied numerical analysis strategy suggest that neither the taxonomic nor the trophic structures are greatly altered from the range of biological, flow-related variation that normally occurs in the studied river systems. This allows us to conclude that the biological variation found here is ecologically acceptable.

Analysis of the effects of rotational larviciding on aquatic fauna of two Guinean rivers: the case of permethrin.

Within the Onchocerciasis Control Programme about 50,000 km of west African rivers have been regularly sprayed with larvicides to control the vector of dermal filariasis caused by Onchocerca volvulus. Since the beginning of the programme invertebrates and fish data were collected to monitor adverse effects on non-target organisms. The regular series of biological and hydrological data collected in two Guinean rivers were analysed to evaluate the effects of rotational larviciding with particular attention to permethrin, as preliminary acute toxicology tests and semi-field experiments suggest it has stronger effects on non-target fauna in respect to other larvicides. Invertebrates and fish variations in biomass and species richness are seasonal and flow-related and the results presented here do not support any evidence of specific effects of permethrin application on the biological targets monitored. Larvicide applications influence community structures, putting pressure on some taxonomic groups, causing, for example, the rarefaction of some taxa. In spite of the above results, the scarcity of some invertebrate systematic units does not result in a significant reduction of total invertebrate density because of the corresponding increase in other systematic units. In nature the studied aquatic communities would rarely be in equilibrium because of frequent natural stresses, such as drought and spate events, the biological variations discussed are to be considered ecologically acceptable.