significance of planarians

Planarians play an important role in water based ecosystems and can serve as bioindicators. Planarians can be used to determine the quality of a freshwater source. Abundance and presence of planarians can provide information about a given ecosystem or body of water. Planarians are sensible to environmental changes and pollution of the ecosystem they reside in. If pollution levels are above a certain degree, planarians would not be able to reproduce and eventually will die off. Other factors that can cause the distribution and presence of planarians to be skewed negatively are temperature and ecological processes. Extreme water temperatures can cause the environment to be uninhabitable for planarians.