Trophic Magnification: Bioaccumulation Simulator

This simulator models how a persistent, fat-soluble contaminant — the kind of pollutant behind real-world mercury and PCB advisories — accumulates as it moves up a four-level aquatic food chain: phytoplankton, zooplankton, small fish and a top predator fish. Each level runs its own one-compartment toxicokinetic equation, taking in the contaminant directly from water and from its diet while losing it at a first-order elimination rate that gets slower at higher trophic levels. Adjust the elimination rate, ambient water concentration and dietary assimilation efficiency to see body-burden concentrations — rendered as organism colour, from blue through yellow to red — compound level by level, and read the live trophic magnification factor that quantifies how much the contaminant amplifies at each step of the chain.