The effects of heavy metal contamination in host plants to cabbage aphid performance and morphology

The potential impacts of different heavy metal accumulations in host plants to cabbage aphid, Brevicorvne brassciae, was investigated by applying copper, lead, zinc and cadmium separately. Significant effects of the heavy metals were found on both the performance and morphology of the aphid population, which were significantly reduced when reared on contaminated cabbage plants, compared with control. There were also differences among the heavy metal treatments, and Cd caused the highest reduction in both performance and morphology, while Cu resulted in least decrease. The implications of these findings for the environmental pollution, and its subsequent effects for the aphid-host plant relationships, were discussed. The results showed that aphid-host plant relationship is a good candidate for studying heavy metal pollution effects to ecological communities.