Studies of accidental contaminant release, chronic contamination and experimental manipulations have identified indirect contaminant effects in pelagic and benthic communities caused by many types of pollutants.
Even small contaminant effects can be distinguished from background mortality.
Manipulative experiments done in situ are important to measure ecologically relevant responses of contaminant effects on marine systems.
Allozyme surveys are relatively simple and common, and may provide data that are suggestive of contaminant effects.
Indirect contaminant effects may have profound implications in environments with strong trophic cascades such as the freshwater pelagic.
In 2013, the Ecotox initiated projects aimed at developing molecular tools to measure contaminant effects of wastewater effluent in resident brown trout.
Contaminant-induced changes in behavior, competition and predation/grazing rate can alter species abundances or community composition, and enhance, mask or spuriously indicate direct contaminant effects.
To distinguish already low contaminant effects from background mortality, we propose a correspondingly low spontaneous lethality rate (≤2.5%), which is in line with the results from Kammann et al. [40],[40].
Research on these contaminant effects suggests that the best possible solution to allowing fuel cells to operate in contaminated environments is by filtration of the harmful contaminants from the cathode air.
This revealed notable differences in TH-responsive gene transcripts including thra, thrb, thibz, klf9, col1a2, fn1, plp1, mmp2, timm50, otc, and dio2, suggesting differential regulation and susceptibility to contaminant effects.
