ENVIRONMENTAL RELEVANCE: A NECESSARY COMPONENT OF EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN TO ANSWER THE QUESTION, 'SO WHAT?'

摘要

As Paracelsus said, "the dose makes the poison." Put in the context of ecotoxicology, this infers that the presence of a chemical in the environment (i.e., contamination) does not necessarily equate to an impact in wildlife. Instead, it is the level of exposure of the chemical in the environment combined with its inherent toxicity that determines the impact. Although several cutting-edge ecotoxicological experiments are now being done, the large majority are still carried out at unrealistic exposure concentrations and conditions and using endpoints not considered ecologically relevant. This begs the question "are we as ecotoxicologists doing ourselves, and society, an injustice by not carefully designing hypothesis-driven experiments that determine the effects of a chemical in the real environment?"