A WATER QUALITY ISSUES ANALYSIS FOR THE JOHNSTONE RIVER BASIN
Report No. 11/05
for Terrain NRM
Stephen Lewis and Jon Brodie
Australian Centre for Tropical Freshwater Research, James Cook University
Final report April 2011
Agrochemicals
Herbicides
… Insecticides
…Russell and Hales (1993) detected the insecticide residues DDE and dieldrin in oysters, mussels, mudcrabs, bony bream and catfish in the Johnstone River, although levels were thought to be of little concern. More recently, Negri et al. (2009) detected dieldrin and heptachlor in mudcrabs of the Johnstone River estuary….
Chlorpyrifos (up to 0.7 μgkg-1) and DDE (up to 0.3 μgkg-1) residues have been detected in the sediments of the Johnstone River estuary (Duke et al., 2003) while residues of lindane (0.08 – 0.19 μgkg-1), dieldrin (0.15 – 0.37 μgkg-1) and DDE (0.16 – 0.25 μgkg-1) have been detected in sub-tidal sediments in the Johnstone River in monitoring conducted in 1998 (Haynes et al., 2000). The organochlorine insecticides among these (dieldrin, heptachlor, lindane, DDT (DDE)) were banned from use in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s.