“…This causes widespread contamination of the marine environment (Iwata et al, 1995;Kannan et al, 1997;Tanabe et al, 1998;Galloway et al, 2004). In the marine Molluscan, for example, masculinization (imposex) has been observed on various seashores (Chiavarini et al, 2003;ten Hallers-Tjabbes et al, 2003;Santos et al, 2004) because, as is known, TBT functions as an aromatase inhibitor (Fent, 1996;Matthiessen and Gibbs, 1998;Heidrich et al, 2001;Cooke, 2002;Oberdö rster and McClellan-Green, 2002). In addition, this phenomenon is adapted as a biomonitoring tool for marine pollution by TBT (Axiak et al, 2003).…”