Fig. 3

Time series bodily concentrations after initial exposure to an environment with a constant concentration of chemical. a The full body concentration of chemical as a function of time. The black, red, and blue curves represent the average accumulation of chemical throughout the body in the 7C, 6C, and 1C models, respectively. The error bars represent the standard deviation in the concentrations at each time point from n = 10³ simulations. For each simulation we varied the body parameters tested in the sensitivity tests over a log-normal distribution with a mean equal to the literature-derived values. b The chemical concentration in the brain as a function of time for the 6C (red) and 7C (black) models. c The chemical concentration in the gonads as a function of time for the 6C (red) and 7C (black) models. d The chemical concentration in the liver as a function of time for the 6C (red) and 7C (black) models. Note that the small error bars in these figures are likely resultant from the models being generally insensitive to the sampling of the parameter values from log₂ distributions, with the model demonstrating variances only up to about 10⁻¹ (See Additional file 1, section 5). While larger error bars could be obtained by sampling parameter values from a wider distribution, our main concern is the average behavior of the time series given the sensitivity of the model