Population dynamics hide phenotypic changes driven by subtle chemical exposures: implications for risk assessments

Ecological risk assessment of chemicals focuses on the response of different taxa in isolation not taking ecological and evolutionary interplay in communities into account. Its consideration would, however, allow for an improved assessment by testing for implications within and across trophic levels and changes in the phenotypic and genotypic diversity within populations. We present a simple experimental system that can be used to evaluate the ecological and evolutionary responses to chemical exposure at microbial community levels. We exposed a microbial model system of the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila (predator) and the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens (prey) to iron released from Magnetic Particles (MP-Fe(dis)), which are Phosphorus (P) adsorbents used in lake restoration. Our results show that while the responses of predator single population size differed across concentrations of MP-Fe(dis) and the responses of prey from communities differed also across concentration of MP-Fe(dis), the community responses (species ratio) were similar for the different MP-Fe(dis) concentrations. Looking further at an evolutionary change in the bacterial preys’ defence, we found that MP-Fe(dis) drove different patterns and dynamics of defence evolution. Overall, our study shows how similar community dynamics mask changes at evolutionary levels that would be overlooked in the design of current risk assessment protocols where evolutionary approaches are not considered.