Acquiring an evolutionary perspective in marine ecotoxicology to tackle emerging concerns in a rapidly changing ocean

Abstract

Tens of thousands of anthropogenic chemicals and wastes enter the marine environment each year as a consequence of the ever-increasing anthropogenic activities and demographic growth of the human population, which is majorly concentrated along coastal areas. Marine ecotoxicology has had a crucial role in helping shed light on the fate of chemicals in the environment, and improving our understanding of how they can affect natural ecosystems. However, chemical contamination is not occurring in isolation, but rather against a rapidly changing environmental horizon. Most environmental studies have been focusing on short-term within-generation responses of single life stages of single species to single stressors. As a consequence, one-dimensional ecotoxicology cannot enable us to appreciate the degree and magnitude of future impacts of chemicals on marine ecosystems. Current approaches that lack an evolutionary perspective within the context of ongoing and future local and global stressors will likely lead us to under or over estimations of the impacts that chemicals will exert on marine organisms. It is therefore urgent to define whether marine organisms can acclimate, i.e. adjust their phenotypes through transgenerational plasticity, or rapidly adapt, i.e. realign the population phenotypic performances to maximize fitness, to the new chemical environment within a selective horizon defined by global changes. To foster a significant advancement in this research area, we review briefly the history of ecotoxicology, synthesis our current understanding of the fate and impact of contaminants under global changes, and critically discuss the benefits and challenges of integrative approaches toward developing an evolutionary perspective in marine ecotoxicology: particularly through a multigenerational approach. The inclusion of multigenerational studies in Ecological Risk Assessment framework (ERA) would provide significant and more accurately information to help predict the risks of pollution in a rapidly changing ocean.

Keywords: Adaptation; Contaminants; Evolutionary biology; Global change; Multigenerational approach; Plasticity.