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Ecotoxicological information

Short-term toxicity to fish

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Description of key information

Data are available for TAME and MTBE. The 96-h LC50 for TAME is 580 mg/l in the freshwater fish Onchorhynchus mykiss.
For marine fish the 96-h LC50 is 574 mg/l for MTBE found in Menidia beryllina. A safety factor of 10 will be applied on this value.
The outcome of these studies is used to support the derivation of an effect concentration as a weighted average of the predicted values for the components of the substance.

Key value for chemical safety assessment

Additional information

Based on the considerations described in the document “Read-across substantiation C5-6 branched alkylmethyl-ethers” (incl. the supporting references Tuppurainen et al., 2007 and Niska et al., 2008), it can be concluded that the available information can be used to predict the short-term toxicity to fish of the substance ‘C5-6 branched alkylmethyl-ethers’ with sufficient certainty.

In order to take the indicated higher ecotoxicological potential of the other components of the C5-6 branched alkylmethyl-ethers (compared to the TAME) into account, a weighted average value was calculated:

Endpoint

Weighted average (mg/l)

Acute toxicity to fish

85

The outcome of the following studies is used to support the derivation of an effect concentration as a weighted average of the predicted values for the components of the substance (see attachments for details):

For fish, there are three guideline studies on TAME available. The studies are either semi-static or flow-through. The most critical study is therefore chosen as the key study. The lowest observed effect concentration is a 96-h LC50 value of 580 mg/l in Onchorhynchus mykiss (Springborn Laboratories Inc., 1994a). As no data is available for marine fish, the data from MTBE are used for read-across, the lowest effect concentration in marine fish for MTBE is a 96-h LC50 of 574 mg/l in inland silverside (Menidia beryllina) (BenKinney et al., 1994), applying a safety factor of 10 to this value results in an effect concentration of 57.4 mg/l for TAME.