Biological Indicators of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress

Introduction

Biological Indicators of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress. Edited by S. M. Adams. American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, Maryland. 2002. 644 pages. $89.00 (cloth); $69.00 (paper) ($62.00 and 48.00 to AFS members).

This book presents a comprehensive summary of all aspects of the use of biological endpoints to assess anthropogenic stress on aquatic environments, with a strong bias for endpoints involving fishes. It examines all of the responses of individual organisms to stress in the environment: biochemical, molecular, physiological, genetic, immunological, histopathological, bioenergetic, reproductive, and behavioral. The book goes on to describe population-, community-, and ecosystem-level methods for evaluating environmental damage in aquatic environments. Also included are chapters on the statistical considerations of biomonitoring and the integration of measures of stress across multiple levels of biological organization. The 16 individual chapters are by and large outstanding, with only a few minor disappointments.

The predecessor of this book, Biological Indicators of Stress in Fish (Adams 1990), though an invaluable text for any aquatic environmental scientist, was written at a time when biologically based assessment tools were just beginning to emerge. The new book is not just an updated version of the former one but goes well beyond it in scope. Its best attribute is that it is not just a collection of individual essays but treats each chapter as a component of the overarching science on which the book is based. This is accomplished by means of a well-coordinated format for each chapter that consists of an introduction, a concise outline of the various tools available, case studies, and a summary that includes future research directions. It is also apparent that there has been a great deal of intellectual cross-fertilization among the authors of the various chapters. The introductory and summary chapters (by Adams and Peter Hodson, respectively) do an outstanding job of placing the intervening material into a holistic, state-of-the-art framework on biological indicators. A plethora of recent books is available on the topic of biomarkers and ecotoxicology. What sets this book far apart from the others is the emerging theoretical framework it presents, a framework that appears not only in the first and last chapters but also in those covering specific levels of biological organization. Based on the primary literature, it is safe to say that the emerging theoretical considerations that form the foundations of this book are not yet widely accepted. Thus, this book fills a strong need for a reference work to bring the science forward—for young and old minds alike. The discipline of ecotoxicology has always been a poor marriage between ecology and classical toxicology. It is encouraging to see that in this book these two areas are finally being molded into one harmonized discipline.

Biological Indicators of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress ends by identifying future research needs. The most obvious of these is to better understand how different levels of biological organization are, or are not, predictive of each other. Hopefully, the next book in this series will be better able to address these important questions.

In summary, this book represents one of the best |reference texts available on the use of biological endpoints in determining stress on aquatic ecosystems. It is a must-have for intermediate- and advanced-level scientists and resource managers and will certainly surpass its predecessor as a classic reference text.