The interpretation of food web dynamics are in terms of a single food chain rather than interconnected food chains.

Students overstate the importance of the initial contact with pollutants while failing to appreciate the cumulative or concentration effect of pollution.

Students tended to think of pollutants as causing direct effects by entering into habitats and organisms either through hydrologic or food chain flows, rather than setting in motion chains of events that carried on without the pollutant itself travelling from organism to organism.

Students did not realize that chemical pollutants are changed in form as they move through the food chains and webs.