Frontiers in quantifying wildlife behavioural responses to chemical pollution

Abstract

Animal behaviour is remarkably sensitive to disruption by chemical pollution, with widespread implications for ecological and evolutionary processes in contaminated wildlife populations. However, conventional approaches applied to study the impacts of chemical pollutants on wildlife behaviour seldom address the complexity of natural environments in which contamination occurs. The aim of this review is to guide the rapidly developing field of behavioural ecotoxicology towards increased environmental realism, ecological complexity, and mechanistic understanding. We identify research areas in ecology that to date have been largely overlooked within behavioural ecotoxicology but which promise to yield valuable insights, including within-and among-individual variation, social networks and collective behaviour, and multi-stressor interactions. Further, we feature methodological and technological innovations that enable the collection of data on pollutant-induced behavioural changes at an unprecedented resolution and scale in the laboratory and the field. In an era of rapid environmental change, there is an urgent need to advance our understanding of the real-world impacts of chemical pollution on wildlife behaviour. This review therefore provides a roadmap of the major outstanding questions in behavioural ecotoxicology and highlights the need for increased cross-talk with other disciplines in order to find the answers.

Predicting the impacts of chemical pollutants on animal groups

“…A particularly exciting new experimental approach is to combine biologging technology with targeted exposure devices (e.g., slow-release exposure implants; [88]) that isolate chemical exposure to specific individuals, allowing for the direct quantification of chemically induced behavioural effects in nature, as well as the flexibility to study both control and exposed organisms in the same natural system. The aforementioned automated approaches provide near-continuous sampling of individual behaviours and social interactions providing unparalleled opportunities to not only understand how contaminants affect social groups, but also how changes in social connections and structures in response to chemical exposures can affect related ecological phenomena (e.g., cultural transmission) [89,90].…”

Environmental Occurrence and Predicted Pharmacological Risk to Freshwater Fish of over 200 Neuroactive Pharmaceuticals in Widespread Use

“…There is now considerable interest in including behavioural effects in ecotoxicity testing of chemicals [ 10 , 32 ]. If their inclusion is to be of significant use in protecting the aquatic environment from any chemicals that could potentially affect the behaviour of aquatic organisms, the following factors need to be addressed.…”

“…The latter provided, for the first time, a series of consensus statements and useful recommendations aimed at accelerating the regulatory uptake of future behavioural ecotoxicology research. Moreover, a recent review by Bertram et al (2022) [ 32 ] discussed some of the major outstanding questions in behavioural ecotoxicology and proposed a possible way forward. These examples indicate that many scientists around the world are now recognizing the limitation of current practices and are calling for new initiatives aimed at advancing the field in a more organic and coherent manner.…”

“…On the other hand, behavioural observations of fish in the field can be influenced by numerous confounding factors that hamper the assessment of the causal relationship between drug exposure and effect. If it is necessary, as seems highly likely, to prioritise research in this area, an international discussion on the regulatory and scientific aspects of in vivo behavioural testing (for both adult fish and larvae) should be a high priority; otherwise, research effort will be largely wasted [ 10 , 32 , 56 ].…”

Toward a decade of ocean science for sustainable development through acoustic animal tracking

“…The effects of pollutants on marine animals have been mainly studied in laboratory‐based settings (Carlsson et al, 2009; de Jong et al, 2018; Kasumyan, 2001). However, the results from such experiments can seldom be directly extrapolated to complex wild ecosystems (Bertram et al, 2022; Calisi & Bentley, 2009). Using AT, behavioral data can be directly obtained from a wild population while measuring other environmental variables such as pollution levels (Barcelo‐Serra et al, 2021).…”