The vast majority of single-species toxicity tests reported in the literature concerns acute or short-term exposures to individual chemicals, in which mortality is often the only endpoint. This is in sharp contrast with the actual situation at contaminated sites, where organisms may be exposed to relatively low levels of mixtures of contaminants under suboptimal conditions for their entire life span. Hence there is an urgent need to increase ecological realism in single-species toxicity tests by addressing sublethal endpoints, mixture toxicity, multistress effects, chronic toxicity and multigeneration effects.
Increasing ecological realism in single-species toxicity tests
Mortality is a crude parameter representing the response of organisms to relatively high and therefore often environmentally irrelevant toxicant concentrations. At much lower and environmentally more relevant toxicant concentrations, organisms may suffer from a wide variety of sublethal effects. Hence, the first step to gain ecological realism in single-species toxicity tests is to address sublethal endpoints instead of, or in addition to mortality (Figure 1). Yet, given the short exposure time in acute toxicity tests it is difficult to assess other endpoints than mortality. Photosynthesis of plants and behaviour of animals are elegant, sensitive and rapidly responding endpoints that can be incorporated into short-term toxicity tests to enhance their ecological realism (see section on Endpoints).
Since organisms are often exposed to relatively low levels of contaminants for their entire life span, the next step to increase ecological realism in single-species toxicity tests is to increase exposure time by performing chronic experiments (Figure 1) (see section on Chronic toxicity). Moreover, in chronic toxicity tests a wide variety of sublethal endpoints can be assessed in addition to mortality, the most common ones being growth and reproduction (see to section on Endpoints). Given the relatively short duration of the life cycle of many invertebrates and unicellular organisms like bacteria and algae, it would be relevant to prolong the exposure time even further, by exposing the test organisms for their entire life span, so from the egg or juvenile phase till adulthood including their reproductive performance, or for several generations, assessing multigeneration effects (Figure 1) (see section on Multigeneration effects).
Figure 1.Consecutive steps of increasing ecological realism in single-species toxicity tests.
In contaminated environments, organisms are generally exposed to a wide variety of toxicants under variable and sub-optimal conditions. To further gain ecological realism, mixture toxicity and multistress scenarios should thus be considered (figure 1) (see sections on Mixture toxicity and Multistress). The highest ecological relevance of laboratory toxicity tests may be achieved by addressing the above mentioned issues all together in one type of experiment, chronic mixture toxicity tests assessing sublethal endpoints. Yet, even nowadays such studies remain scarce.
Another way of increasing ecological realism of toxicity testing is by moving towards multispecies test systems that allow for assessing the impacts of chemicals and other stressors on species interactions within communities (see chapter 5 on Population, community and ecosystem ecotoxicology).
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