Analyzing the Impact of Residential Chemicals upon the Heartbeat of Daphnia magna

The controversial consensus among toxicology researchers is that the country's regulation of chemicals has always been insufficient. One critical aspect that has been debated is the government's ability to determine the criteria of what makes a commercially available chemical dangerous, especially considering that these chemicals haven’t undergone rigorous testing. In this experiment, the Daphnia magna’s heart rate change was evaluated through the serial dilution of residential chemicals, particularly for insecticides and herbicides. We utilized the change in the bpm of the Daphnia magna as an indicator of stress, which was used to analyze the environmental stress associated with the tested chemicals. An important parameter, the Cardiac Disturbance Indicator (CDI), was defined as the sum of the average heartbeat changes at the set time points we measured. Results showed a broad spectrum of CDI from 0.0 to 90%, while the magnitude of CDI could be predicted by considering other published toxicological data. The CDI was found to be a somewhat useful surrogate for scrutinizing any harmful effects in future studies.