THE VALUE OF SIMULATED POND COMMUNITIES IN MESOCOSMS FOR STUDIES OF AMPHIBIAN ECOLOGY AND ECOTOXICOLOGY

We provide a review of literature concerning the use of artificial pond communities in static, outdoor, above-ground tanks (mesocosms) for ecological studies of amphibians. This approach has been widely used to evaluate the interaction of biotic variables, and less often biotic and abiotic variables. Although simulated pond communities offer unusually attractive properties for evaluating the effects of xenobiotics on aquatic ecosystems, this approach has received only limited attention as a potential model system for studying the effects of toxicants on amphibian communities. We provide a summary of results and experimental designs from past studies in order to illustrate the general protocols used and complex interactions between biotic and abiotic variables that can be simulated in artificial pond communities. We recommend that community ecologists who make use of this system generally become more aware of the importance of abiotic factors in pond simulations, and that they model the abiotic parameters of the particular system that they are attempting to simulate. We strongly recommend the use of this experimentally tractable system for aquatic community ecotoxicological research, since it is through such a multispecies, top-down simulation approach that we can begin to understand the processes by which xenobiotic factors impact more complex natural systems. We propose the acronym MATOX to designate use of this Multispecies Amphibian TOXicity community-level bioassay.