| UC Toxics News: Spring 2006
Susan Anderson, longtime TSR&TP affiliate and leader of the EPA Pacific Estuarine Ecosystem Indicator Research (PEEIR) Consortium began her talk by reassuring students that it does all work out. She and TSR&TP Director John Knezovich were postdoctoral researchers together and spent a great deal of time commiserating about their research and future careers. She attributed much of her success to the TSR&TP. “The most significant thing is how the EPA center group was built through TSR&TP connections. Relationships with people are what make these research collaborations work and how our group was able to get the multimillion dollar grant.” Anderson spoke about how integrated science can help policy makers. Techniques to assess contaminants are outdated. An integrated approach was needed to link ecology and toxicology. Anderson’s group chose the resident species approach, focused on salt marshes. They integrated lab and field experiments with ecological sampling, transplant experiments, and lab validation studies. This approach gave them the ability to discriminate multiple stressors on a single fish in a novel way - having nested indicators and sampling all the organisms at once. Instead of running standard toxicity tests, they determined that simple lab observations and commercially available kits can be used to observe reproductive tumors and cell death that result from toxicity. They found working with crabs was even simpler than fish. A hand lens can be used to observe measures of reproductive performance, and hence to assess levels of contamination at coastal sites. “How do we implement this work and how do we tell agencies what to do?” Anderson asked. She said they have learned to develop a portfolio of indicators and focus on the things that get to the condition of the organism. She recommended taking samples and archiving them so diagnostic tools can be used if measures of toxicity are observed. “Integrated science allows us to tackle problems of scale, discriminate multiple stressors and to look at the complexity that nature is demanding. We hope integrated science will be the wave of the future and hope that people will adapt and embrace the approach.” |
