Chemical contaminants (e.g. metals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals) are changing ecosystems via effects on wildlife. Indeed, recent work explicitly performed under environmentally realistic conditions reveals that chemical contaminants can have both direct and indirect effects at multiple levels of organization by influencing animal behaviour. Altered behaviour reflects multiple physiological changes and links individual- to population-level processes, thereby representing a sensitive tool for holistically assessing impacts of environmentally relevant contaminant concentrations. Here, we show that even if direct effects of contaminants on behavioural responses are reasonably well documented, there are significant knowledge gaps in understanding both the plasticity (i.e. individual variation) and evolution of contaminant-induced behavioural changes. We explore implications of multi-level processes by developing a conceptual framework that integrates direct and indirect effects on behaviour under environmentally realistic contexts. Our framework illustrates how sublethal behavioural effects of contaminants can be both negative and positive, varying dynamically within the same individuals and populations. This is because linkages within communities will act indirectly to alter and even magnify contaminant-induced effects. Given the increasing pressure on wildlife and ecosystems from chemical pollution, we argue there is a need to incorporate existing knowledge in ecology and evolution to improve ecological hazard and risk assessments.
Understanding animal movement is essential to elucidate how animals interact, survive, and thrive in a changing world. Recent technological advances in data collection and management have transformed our understanding of animal “movement ecology” (the integrated study of organismal movement), creating a big-data discipline that benefits from rapid, cost-effective generation of large amounts of data on movements of animals in the wild. These high-throughput wildlife tracking systems now allow more thorough investigation of variation among individuals and species across space and time, the nature of biological interactions, and behavioral responses to the environment. Movement ecology is rapidly expanding scientific frontiers through large interdisciplinary and collaborative frameworks, providing improved opportunities for conservation and insights into the movements of wild animals, and their causes and consequences.
For decades, we have
known that chemicals affect human and wildlife
behavior. Moreover, due to recent technological and computational
advances, scientists are now increasingly aware that a wide variety
of contaminants and other environmental stressors adversely affect
organismal behavior and subsequent ecological outcomes in terrestrial
and aquatic ecosystems. There is also a groundswell of concern that
regulatory ecotoxicology does not adequately consider behavior, primarily
due to a lack of standardized toxicity methods. This has, in turn,
led to the exclusion of many behavioral ecotoxicology studies from
chemical risk assessments. To improve understanding of the challenges
and opportunities for behavioral ecotoxicology within regulatory toxicology/risk
assessment, a unique workshop with international representatives from
the fields of behavioral ecology, ecotoxicology, regulatory (eco)toxicology,
neurotoxicology, test standardization, and risk assessment resulted
in the formation of consensus perspectives and recommendations, which
promise to serve as a roadmap to advance interfaces among the basic
and translational sciences, and regulatory practices.
Pharmaceutical contamination is an
increasing problem globally.
In this regard, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)a
group of antidepressantsare particularly concerning. By disrupting
the serotonergic system, SSRIs have the potential to affect ecologically
important behaviors in exposed wildlife. Despite this, the nature
and magnitude of behavioral perturbations resulting from environmentally
relevant SSRI exposure among species is poorly understood. Accordingly,
we investigated the effects of two field-realistic levels of the SSRI
fluoxetine (61 and 352 ng/L) on sociability and anxiety-related behaviors
in eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) for 28 days. Additionally, we measured whole-body tissue concentrations
of fluoxetine and norfluoxetine. We found that fluoxetine altered
anxiety-related behavior but not sociability. Specifically, female
fish showed reduced anxiety-related behavior at the lower treatment
level, while males showed an increase at the higher treatment level.
In addition, we report a biomass-dependent and sex-specific accumulation
of fluoxetine and norfluoxetine, with smaller fish showing higher
relative tissue concentrations, with this relationship being more
pronounced in males. Our study provides evidence for nonmonotonic
and sex-specific effects of fluoxetine exposure at field-realistic
concentrations. More broadly, our study demonstrated that neuroactive
pharmaceuticals, such as fluoxetine, can affect aquatic life by causing
subtle but important shifts in ecologically relevant behaviors.
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