Caracterización fisicoquímica, biológica y microbiológica en aguas de lastre de buques de tráfico internacional

Abstract

During the years 2005 and 2006 the sampling to those international traffic ships ballast water which arrived in the Bay of Cartagena, located at the south western Caribbean Colombia Zone and between 75o30 - 75o36W and 10o26'-10o16N, continued. This work was carried out with the objective of continuing the assessment on if whether work on board the ballast tanks, was carried out according to the guide lines issued by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), in order to diminish the risk of species introduction in the shore zones. The achieve the objectives, samples of ballast water of 75 ships coming from different international ports were taken, through the man holes, from the direct discharges to the sea, from the deck disballast or from the tank access pipelines. Those water samples were processed in the laboratory, where in each one of them the physical-chemical conditions were characterized, such as nutrients, solved oxygen, temperature, salinity, pH, turbidity, total solids in suspension; the biological ones such as fito-plankton, zooplankton, photosynthetic pigment concentration; microbiological such as intestinal enterococos, Salmonella sp., Psedumonas sp., total Coliforms, Escherichia coli, fungus. Likewise the previous 2002, 2003 and 2204 characterizations at this same port, in this study there port of the appropriate environmental conditions for sustaining the biological communities in the tanks continued. Also the new planktonic species continued to be reported, among which Oithona setigera, Oithona hegolandica, Miocrostella sp., Diartrodes sp., Oculosetella sp., Corystoide chilensi, Parapagurus Diógenes, and Sagitta minima can be mentioned. In addition, it was possible to evidence that according to the agreement on the handling of ballast water and sediment by IMO in 2004, 29% of the monitored vessels surpassed the permissible discharge levels with respect to the Escherichia coli and the 11% of Intestinal enterococos germ indicator.