Abstract:
Water bodies are an indispensable part of human life where their
quality determine human life. Monitoring the water quality in terms of water
temperature, dissolved minerals and amount of bacteria present in the water is
essential for healthy life. Beetle has been used as an indicator of water quality,
but scarcely studied in Malaysia. This study was undertaken to determine the
quality of water at Fraser’s Hill and Pangkor Island using physicochemical and
biological methods. Water quality assessment was carried out by measuring
water temperature, pH, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen
Demand (COD), Dissolved Oxygen (DO), ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3-N) and
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). Water Quality Index (WQI) was obtained by
calculating the mean values of above measurements. All water quality
measurements were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance (p≤0.05) and
the levels of significance of the differences between the localities checked using
ANOVA. The water quality indices (WQI) of the water bodies in Fraser’s Hill
(94.01) and Pangkor Island (82.21) were rated as Class I and Class II,
respectively. This was confirmed by the diversity of the water beetle species
(Fraser’s Hill 0.69; Pangkor Island 0.52) found at these locations. The
information that beetles are good indicators of pollution means that this could
serve as an additional tool for rapid assessment of water quality, in addition to
chemical and physical analysis.
