Two Arkansas State University professors have been awarded $246,000 by the U.S. Department of the Interior to support research in aquaculture.
Dr. Richard Grippo, associate professor of environmental biology, and Dr. Jerry Farris, professor of environmental biology, are the two researchers.
Over the next three years, Grippo and Farris will oversee research on the environmental risk assessment of potassium permanganate, an aquaculture therapeutant (fish drug) to help get it approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The research will look at the drug's short-term and long-term effects on a host of test organisms including catfish, the primary production species for which approval of the drug is being sought.
Potassium permanganate is widely used in aquaculture to treat parasitic and fungal diseases of fish.
The project will be conducted in two phases. The first phase will look at acute effects of the drug on standard test organisms (water fleas, minnows, midges and algae) at the Ecotoxicology Research Facility in the Department of Biological Sciences at ASU.
The ERF was constructed in 1992-93 under the direction of Farris, who also serves as the facility director.
The second phase will occur at the H. K. Dupree Stuttgart National Aquaculture Research Center in Stuttgart. Artificial ecosystems (mesocosms) will be used to simulate catfish ponds. Investigators will study the chemical fate of the drug and its effect on catfish at normal and high doses over a one year interval.
Melissa Hobbs, a doctoral candidate in the environmental science Ph.D. program at ASU, will conduct the research for a dissertation project. Grippo will chair Hobbs' dissertation advisory committee, and Farris, who also directs the Environmental Sciences program, will serve as a member of the advisory committee.
Dr. Billy Griffin, a microbiologist at the research center in Stuttgart, is also on Hobbs' committee and will be overseeing research activities.
Aquaculture in the Arkansas Delta is a $167 million industry with an economic impact of more than $1.2 billion.
Grippo and Farris have collaborated on several projects in the past, including an ecological evaluation of an ordnance site and harbor expansions in Missouri and modeling toxicant discharge at the former Eaker Air Force base in Blytheville.
Grippo joined the biology faculty in the fall of 1995 after teaching and conducting research as a faculty member in the School of Forest Resources at Pennsylvania State University. He received his doctoral degree from Penn State in 1991. His wife Anne is also a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences.
Farris joined the biology faculty in the fall of 1992 after serving as a faculty member in the Center for Environmental and Hazardous Materials Studies at Virginia Tech. He was manager of the Center's Ecosystem Simulation Laboratory and received his doctoral degree from Virginia Tech in 1986.