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The presence of pharmaceuticals, including illicit drugs in aquatic systems, is a topic of environmental significance because of their global occurrence and potential effects on aquatic ecosystems and human health, but few studies have examined the ecological effects of illicit drugs. We conducted a survey of several drug residues, including the potentially illicit drug amphetamine, at 6 stream sites along an urban to rural gradient in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. We detected numerous drugs, including amphetamine (3 to 630 ng L(-1)), in all stream sites. We examined the fate and ecological effects of amphetamine on biofilm, seston, and aquatic insect communities in artificial streams exposed to an environmentally relevant concentration (1 μg L(-1)) of amphetamine. The amphetamine parent compound decreased in the artificial streams from less than 1 μg L(-1) on day 1 to 0.11 μg L(-1) on day 22. In artificial streams treated with amphetamine, there was up to 45% lower biofilm chlorophyll a per ash-free dry mass, 85% lower biofilm gross primary production, 24% greater seston ash-free dry mass, and 30% lower seston community respiration compared to control streams. Exposing streams to amphetamine also changed the composition of bacterial and diatom communities in biofilms at day 21 and increased cumulative dipteran emergence by 65% and 89% during the first and third weeks of the experiment, respectively. This study demonstrates that amphetamine and other biologically active drugs are present in urban streams and have the potential to affect both structure and function of stream communities.

Bioremediation of oil contaminated soils is a cost-effective and widely used technology, but the time required is a major disadvantage. This time can be reduced by substituting pulverization for the traditional plowing. In laboratory experiments, soil respiration rates increased 3.44 times after the soil was pulverized. Field tests showed about 25% reduction in treatment time when a pulverizer was used to aerate and grind the soils instead of disc plowing.

Crude oil contaminated soil cores were collected from a basin that contained oily solids left from three decades of oil production. Hydrocarbon biomarker analyses revealed that the soil extracts were moderately biodegraded compared with the non-degraded source oil. The degree of biodegradation also decreased with core depth (7 cm to 1 m). These data were correlated to compositional changes observed in acidic NSO-compounds that were selectively ionized and mass resolved by negative ion electrospray Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (ESI FT-ICR MS). Among the NSO-compounds ionized, the increase in naphthenic acid concentration (e.g., acyclic and alicyclic carboxylic acids) best correlated with the increase in biodegradation (e.g., from non-degraded to moderately degraded) as determined by the hydrocarbon biomarker analyses. The most biodegraded surface extracts (7 cm) exhibited an 80% increase in the abundance of acids relative to the source oil. Use of an internal standard allowed the semi-quantitative determination of the total naphthenic acid concentration, which decreased significantly (P < 0.05) with soil depth. Furthermore, the shift to higher double bond equivalents (DBEs), from acyclic to alicyclic acids, indicated that the increase in acids in the soil extracts was predominantly due to biotic processes. This work demonstrates the potential of ESI FT-ICR MS as a semi-quantitative tool to monitor the production of naphthenic acids during crude oil biotransformation in the environment.