Toxicokinetic Toxicodynamic (TKTD) Modeling of Ag Toxicity in Freshwater Organisms: Whole-Body Sodium Loss Predicts Acute Mortality Across Aquatic Species

ToxicoKinetic ToxicoDynamic (TKTD) models are considered essential tools to further advance acute toxicity prediction of metals for a range of species and exposure conditions, but they are currently underutilized. We present a mechanistic TKTD model for acute toxicity prediction of silver (Ag) in freshwater organisms. In this new approach, we explicitly link relevant TKTD processes to species (physiological) characteristics, which facilitates model application to other untested freshwater organisms. The model quantifies the reduction in whole-body sodium concentration over time as a function of the target site inhibition over time, the target site density and the species-specific sodium turnover rate. Freshwater species are assumed to die instantly when they have lost a critical amount of their initial whole-body sodium concentration. Results show that mortality is significantly related to sodium loss (r(2) = 0.86) for various aquatic organisms and exposure durations. The model accurately predicts lethal effect concentrations for different freshwater organisms, including Daphnia magna, rainbow trout and juvenile crayfish, and is able to capture the observed size-specific variation of nearly 2 orders of magnitude in empirical LC(50)s.