Shweta Upadhyay and Dharmendra Singh

Detergents are common household chemical cleaning agents widely used for diverse purposes in our daily life. Surfactants, the major constituents of detergents, possess high biological activity and tend to accumulate in organisms, causing adverse effects even at very low concentration and short-term exposure. In certain waterbodies, detergent concentrations are found to be considerably high.Freshwater fish such as Channa punctata are highly sensitive to household detergents like Ghari powder. In the present study, fishes were exposed to sublethal concentrations (1/10th and 1/5th of the 96 h LC₅₀ value of Ghari) for duration of 96 hours, during which dose and duration dependent behavioral alterations were observed in exposed fish. The exposed fishes exhibited erratic movements and abnormal behaviours such as loss of equilibrium. Oxygen consumption was found to increase with rising sublethal concentrations of detergent over time. However, the lowest oxygen consumption was recorded at 1/5th sublethal concentration as exposure time increased.

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