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Abstract
A sublethal dose of Imidacloprid, considered actually as the most widely used insecticide against biting and sucking insects, was administered to Drosophila melanogaster for detecting effects on biological traits. The choice of this species as organism-model potentially opens the possibility to explore more deeply the processes involved in those effects because, among other reasons, there is a large accumulation of biological knowledge on this species and because it propitiates multiple approaches in laboratory and nature. The flies were treated along 15 consecutive generations. F1 parents were randomly taken among virgin flies from the stocks, but the parents of the successive generations were the first 15 couples emerged in the previous one. The number of progeny (productivity) and the duration of the emergence period were analyzed in every generation revealing insecticide toxicity in 12 of the 15 generations. The observation of an increase in the number of progeny over the generations, which occurred in both control and treated experiments (although maintaining higher productivity in the control), suggested an effect of the use of the first 15 emerged couples in successive generations. A comparative analysis of the mortality of the F15 adult flies exposed to imidacloprid by contact, which involved flies from the control, treatment and from the stocks that originated the experiments, reinforced this idea, indicating a genetic interplay of the emergence speed with productivity and adult tolerance to the insecticide, a subject that may be better explored in another study. Toxicity was also observed for the traits longevity, viability during development from egg to adult and oviposition rate. Considering the present intensive use of imidacloprid, the harmful effects observed in these important biological characteristics may be considered able to decrease the adaptive value of D. melanogaster populations exposing them at risk of decline.
Highlights
Imidacloprid {1-[(6-chloro-3-pyridinyl)methyl]-N-nitro2-imidazolidinimine, which is registered in more than a hundred countries in the world, is considered the most widely used insecticide for killing sucking and biting insects [1]
In honeybees (Apis mellifera), probably the more intensively studied non-target organism, imidacloprid is considered one of the causes of bee populations decline occurring since 1990 [5,6,7,8]. This insecticide has been assigned to a bee malady termed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) [9]
Flies treated with imidacloprid and controls were comparatively analyzed as to their effects on the following traits: 1) productivity; 2) duration of the emergence period; 3) longevity; 4) oviposition rate; 5) viability from egg to adult stages and 6) mortality of adult flies
Summary
Imidacloprid {1-[(6-chloro-3-pyridinyl)methyl]-N-nitro2-imidazolidinimine, which is registered in more than a hundred countries in the world, is considered the most widely used insecticide for killing sucking and biting insects [1]. D. melanogaster, with a great amount of biological information accumulated in more than a hundred years of studies, may favor the understanding of new observations foreseeing the possibility of a deeper study about the findings. This species has been successfully used as an organism-model for analysis of normal and pathological mechanisms involved with essential human biological processes, including metabolism, development and physiology [15,16]. The results in D. melanogaster confirmed the harmful effects of imidacloprid and raised interesting questions to be answered in future works
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