Impact of Pollutants on Coastal and Benthic Marine Communities

Abstract

In recent years, sources, types and levels of contaminants in the marine environment have increased as a consequence of anthropogenic activities worldwide. Chemical substances are usually present in the marine environment at different concentrations. They are accumulated in the tissues of marine organisms exerting damaging effects at different levels of organization, from organisms to communities and ecosystems. The understanding of their effects and distribution has increased substantially since the early reports on the biological effects of marine pollution and associated monitoring problems. This Chapter has been divided into five main sections: (i) molecular, cellular and tissue level biomarkers in assessing effects, reviewing the use of biomarkers in monitoring effects; (ii) biological effects at organism and population level; (iii) bioassay studies at organism level, focusing on ecotoxicology and discussing toxicity estimation and bioassay limitations; (iv) ecological effects at community level, including structural parameters, such as richness, diversity, etc., but also the proportion of opportunistic and sensitive species, discussing the multiple pressure interactions; and (v) measuring pollutant effects in integrative assessments, both in evaluating risk and assessing the ecological status of the ecosystems. The main objective of the Chapter is to bring together the knowledge on the biological effects of pollution, developed in recent years, at different biological levels of organization.

High Species Richness and Extremely Low Abundance of Cumacean Communities Along the Shelf and Slope of the Gulf of Guinea (West Africa)

“…Moreover, we have to remember that despite the fact that Ba was a significant factor in the analysis, other variables such as hydrocarbons and other heavy metals such as Cd, Cu, and Ni could also be responsible for combined influence on cumacean communities (Sobczyk et al, 2021). In such cases, it is difficult to unequivocally assess the influence of one out of multiple stressors on benthic communities (Borja et al, 2011;Lenihan et al, 2018), even by advanced multivariate analysis and especially when we analyse communities of less abundant taxa-like cumaceans. The results of the PCA are not strong, since first PC axis explained only 10% of variance, which is due to very low abundance, large number of singletons, and highly patchy distribution of majority of species.…”