Belinda Huerta

• Environmental Sciences
• Professor (Assistant) at Southern Connecticut State University

The evolutionary origins of sexual preferences for chemical signals remain poorly understood, due, in part, to scant information on the molecules involved. In the current study, we identified a male pheromone in lake char (Salvelinus namaycush) to evaluate the hypothesis that it exploits a non-sexual preference for juvenile odour. In anadromous cha...

Biological monitoring constitutes an integrated approach for the assessment of environment risk of pollutants discharged in wastewater effluents. Among the techniques associated with biological monitoring, the use of biomarkers—molecular, biochemical responses—and bioindicators—individual to community responses—are the most prevalent applied method...

Introduction Adult sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) cease feeding and migrate to spawning streams where males build nests, undergo final sexual maturation, and subsequently produce and release large quantities of bile acid pheromones that attract mature females. These animals are predicted to rearrange their metabolic pathways drastically to suppor...

Reintroduction programs are important tools for wildlife conservation. However, captive rearing environments may lead to maladaptive behavior and physiological alterations that reduce survival probability after release. For captive rearing programs that raise individuals captured from the wild during early ontogeny for later release, there is a lac...

Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are a group of synthetic organic surfactants that have become a global concern because of their toxicity and widespread presence in the aquatic environment and organisms globally. In this study, a new analytical method has been developed and validated for the analysis of 15 perfluorinated compounds in dif...

Introduction Adult sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) cease feeding and migrate to spawning streams where males build nests, undergo final sexual maturation, and subsequently produce and release large quantities of bile acid pheromones that attract mature females. These animals are predicted to rearrange their metabolic pathways drastically to suppor...

Per‐ and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are contaminants of concern due to their widespread occurrence in the environment, persistence, and potential to elicit a range of negative health effects. PFAS are regularly detected in surface waters, but their effects on many aquatic organisms are still poorly understood. Species with thyroid‐dependent...

Water scarcity is increasingly a global cause of concern mainly due to widespread changes in climate conditions and increased consumptive water use driven by the exponential increase in population growth. In addition, increased pollution of fresh water sources due to rising production and consumption of pharmaceuticals and organic chemicals will fu...

Costs to producing sexual signals can create selective pressures on males to invest signaling effort in particular contexts. When the benefits of signaling vary consistently across time, males can optimize signal investment to specific temporal contexts using biological rhythms. Sea lamprey, Petromyzon marinus, have a semelparous life history, are...

The lampricides 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophemol (TFM) and niclosamide have been used for over 60 years to control the invasive sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) population in the Laurentian Great Lakes. In this review, we summarize these findings in the context of the mode of action of both lampricides, with a focus on: (1) the physiology of uptake,...

Predator encounters during early life can elicit behavioral and physiological responses that have fitness consequences during subsequent prey life stages. In threatened lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) and other lithophilic-spawning fishes, newly hatched larvae (free embryos) are exposed to abundant predators including aquatic insect larvae tha...

Wastewater (WW) reuse and biosolid application for vegetable crop culture is a practice applied worldwide. This strategy helps mitigate the pressure on water resources and improve the fertility of soil. Wastewater reuse is currently not included in chemical risk assessment, but its application has risk of potential accumulation of contaminants of e...

Sexual signals evolve via selective pressures arising from male-male competition and female choice, including those originating from unintended receivers that detect the signal. For example, males can acquire information from other males signaling to females and alter their own signal. Relative to visual and acoustic signals, less is known about ho...

Use of the first fish pheromone biopesticide, 3-keto petromyzonol sulfate (3kPZS) in sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) control requires an understanding of both how the amount 3kPZS applied to a trap relates to catch, and how that relationship varies among stream types. By conducting 3kPZS dose-response experiments over two years and across six vari...

Quantifying transgenerational effects of stress is important to predict outcomes of anthropogenic disturbances for wildlife species. Maternal stress can programme physiological and behavioural phenotypes in offspring, which may be maladaptive if maternal and offspring environments are mismatched. We investigated effects of a match and mismatch betw...

Biliary atresia (BA) is a rare neonatal disease with unknown causes. Approximately 10% of BA cases develop in utero with other congenital defects that span a large spectrum of disease variations, including degeneration of the gall bladder and bile duct as well as malformation of the liver, intestines, and kidneys. Similar developmental alterations...

Population control of invasive sea lamprey relies heavily on lampricide treatment of infested streams. The lampricide 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol (TFM) is thought to impair mitochondrial ATP production through uncoupling oxidative phosphorylation. However, the effect of TFM on the entire electron transport chain (complexes I to V) in the mitoch...

The relationships between pheromone stimuli and neuropeptides are not well established in vertebrates due to the limited number of unequivocally identified pheromone molecules. The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is an advantageous vertebrate model to study the effects of pheromone exposure on neuropeptides since many pheromone molecules and neuro...

There is concern that psychoactive drugs present in the aquatic environment could affect the behaviour of fish, and other organisms, adversely. There is considerable experimental support for this concern, although the literature is not consistent. To investigate why, fish were exposed to three concentrations of the synthetic opiate tramadol for 23–...

This study investigated the occurrence of 135 contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) – pharmaceuticals, pesticides, a set of endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) (parabens, bisphenols, hormones, triazoles, organophosphorus flame retardants and triclosan), UV-filters, perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) and halogenated flame retardants (HFRs) – in 5...

Fish are good indicators of aquatic environment pollution because of their capability to uptake pollutants contained in water. Therefore, accumulation of pharmaceutical compounds in freshwater and marine fish and other aquatic organisms has been studied extensively in the last decade. In this context, the present study investigates the occurrence o...

This study was aimed to determine the abundance of four antibiotic resistance genes (blaTEM, ermB, qnrS and sul I), as well as bacterial community composition associated with the intestinal mucus of wild freshwater fish species collected from the Foix and La Llosa del Cavall reservoirs, which represent ecosystems with high and low anthropogenic dis...

Recent species-extrapolation approaches to predict the potential effects of pharmaceuticals present in the environment on wild fish are based on the assumption that pharmacokinetics and metabolism in humans and fish are comparable. To test this hypothesis, we exposed fathead minnows to the opiate pro-drug tramadol and examined uptake from the water...

In many arid and semi-arid systems, biological communities in river ecosystems are submitted to flow interruption and desiccation, as well as to the impact of urban wastewaters. In this work, we studied (using a LC-LTQ-Orbitrap) the metabolomic response of biofilm communities exposed to both hydrological and chemical stressors. Fluvial biofilms wer...

We used a short-term microcosm approach to investigate the influence of two different subinhibitory concentrations of ciprofloxacin (0.01 and 0.1 μg/ml) on both the abundance of a plasmid-mediated quinolone resistance determinant (qnrS) and the structure and composition of bacterial communities from impaired and pristine water supply reservoirs. Th...

Scientific Reports 6 : Article number: 21978 10.1038/srep21978 ; published online: 26 February 2016 ; updated: 20 June 2016 The original version of this Article contained typographical errors.

Psychoactive drugs are frequently detected in the aquatic environment. The evolutionary conservation of the molecular targets of these drugs in fish suggest that they may elicit mode-of-action mediated effects in fish as they do in humans, and one the key open question is at what exposure concentrations these effects might occur. In the present stu...

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) framework represents a valuable conceptual tool to systematically integrate existing toxicological knowledge from a mechanistic perspective to facilitate predictions of chemical-induced effects across species. However, its application for decision-making requires the transition from qualitative to quantitative AOP...

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are one of the main sources of pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting compounds in freshwater ecosystems, and several studies have reported bioaccumulation of these compounds in different organisms in those ecosystems. River biofilms are exceptional indicators of pollution, but very few studies have focused on...

Antibiotic resistance has become a major health concern; thus, there is a growing interest in exploring the occurrence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in the environment as well as the factors that contribute to their emergence. Aquatic ecosystems provide an ideal setting for the acquisition and spread of ARGs due to the continuous pollution...

The presence of emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals (PhACs) in the aquatic environment is well known, but their bioaccumulation in aquatic organisms has only been studied in the last years. It is, therefore, an issue of emerging concern, particularly in Mediterranean regions, where the WWTP effluents may represent a high percentage of some...

We assessed the tolerance acquired by stream biofilms to two non-steroidal anti-inflammatory-drugs (NSAIDs), ibuprofen and diclofenac. Biofilms came from a stream system receiving the effluent of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). The response of biofilms from a non-polluted site (upstream the WWTP) was compared to that of others downstream with...

In this study we characterised the ciprofloxacin-resistant strains isolated in biofilm and sediments from a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) discharge point and its receiving river. We also examined the prevalence of qnrA, qnrB, qnrS and aac(6')-Ib-cr genes in these isolates and determined whether they harbour plasmid-encoded β-lactamases such as...

The presence of pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment is an ever-increasing issue of concern as they may have the potential for unintended effects on nontarget species. Scientific literature on the subject has established the possibility of bioaccumulation in exposed biota through other environmental compartments. Analytic methodology for the...

Antibiotic resistance represents a growing global health concern due to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics. There is, however, little information about how the selective pressure of clinical antibiotic usage can affect environmental communities in aquatic ecosystems and which bacterial groups might be responsible for dissemination of antibiotic...

A new sensitive method based on pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) and purification by gel permeation chromatography (GPC) prior to ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) was developed for the determination in fish homogenate, liver and muscle of twenty pharmaceuticals compounds and metabolit...

The presence of pharmaceuticals in the aquatic environment is an ever-increasing issue of concern as they are specifically designed to target specific metabolic and molecular pathways in organisms, and they may have the potential for unintended effects on nontarget species. Information on the presence of pharmaceuticals in biota is still scarce, bu...