In our rivers, insect larvae, such as mayflies and dragonflies, are particularly vulnerable to the toxic effects of pesticides found in flea and tick treatments.
These species and many others serve as essential food sources for fish, birds, and bats. Therefore, when these pesticides enter our rivers, they disrupt the balance of the entire ecosystem, causing ripple effects that impact the wider environment.
Bees and Other Pollinators
Fipronil and Imidacloprid are powerful pesticides, obviously designed to kill parasites on your dog or cat. But they don’t just kill fleas and ticks.
Imidacloprid is a neonicotinoid. Neonicotinoids (Neonics for short) are neurotoxins – they attack the nervous system of insects.
Neonics are approximately 7000 times more toxic to insects than DDT - a synthetic organochlorine pesticide originally used in the 1940s to control insect-borne diseases like malaria and typhus. While highly effective, it was banned in most countries in the 1970s due to its extreme environmental persistence and toxicity to wildlife.
Fipronil is also a neurotoxin and behaves in a very similar way.
They are extremely toxic to bees and other pollinators:
they kill bees and other pollinators on contact
low doses damage pollinators’ health, disrupt their foraging behaviour and ability to navigate, as well as causing them to be more vulnerable to disease and damaging the larvae.
Watch this webinar with Professor Dave Goulson on Insect Declines, Pesticides and Pet Parasiticides:
Aquatic Life
In the UK, over 4,100 invertebrate species spend at least part of their lifecycle in freshwater.
Exposure to pesticides found in flea and tick treatment can be lethal to aquatic invertebrates, even from a single exposure event, and can impair feeding behaviour, growth or reproduction over longer time scales.
Dragonflies and damselflies are particularly sensitive to imidacloprid, which can harm the wider ecosystem due to knock-on or cascading effects through the food web, which may persist even long after the chemical pollutant itself
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Birds
Research from the University of Sussex has discovered widespread contamination by pesticides, commonly found in pet flea and tick treatments, in the feathers, eggs and even chicks of wild birds.
Birds are drawn to pet hair/fur found in the environment to use to make their nests warm, however if the animal which that hair/fur comes from has been given spot-on flea or tick treatment, then the pesticides will pass onto the birds feathers, their eggs and sadly their chicks.
In one study, every sample that was collected from bird nests contained pesticides, with a high prevalence of chemicals linked to household pet flea and tick treatments.
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