Analysis and Recognition of Behavioral Response of Selected Insects in Toxic Chemicals for Water Quality Monitoring

In this paper, Using an automatic tracking system, behavior of an aquatic insect, Chironomus sp. (Chironomidae), was observed in semi-natural conditions in response to sub-lethal treament of a carbamate insecticide, carbofuran. The fourth instar larvae were placed in an observation cage at temperature of and the light condition of 10 time (light) : 14 time (dark). The tracking system was devised to detect the instant, partial movement of the insect body. Individual movement was traced after the treatment of carbofuran (0.1ppm) for four days 2days : before treatment, 2 days : after treatment). Along with the other irregular behaviors, "ventilation activity", appearing as a shape of "compressed zig-zag", was more frequently observed after the treatment of the insecticide. The activity of the test individuals was also generally depressed after the chemical treatment. In order to detect behavioral changes of the treated specimens, wavelet analysis was implemented to characterize different movement patterns. The extracted parameters based on Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) were subsequently provided to artificial neural networks to be trained to represent different patterns of the movement tracks before and after treatments of the insecticide. This combined model of wavelets and artificial neural networks was able to point out the occurrence of characteristic movement patterns, and could be an alternative tool for automatically detecting presences of toxic chemicals for water quality monitoring. quality monitoring.