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 conse-quence 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 shedlight on the fate of chemicals in the environment, and improving our understanding of how they can affect nat-ural ecosystems. However, chemical contamination is not occurring in isolation, but rather against a rapidlychanging 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 ofchemicals on marine ecosystems. Current approaches that lack an evolutionary perspective within the contextof ongoing and future local and global stressors will likely lead us to under or over estimations of the impactsthat chemicals will exert on marine organisms. It is therefore urgent to define whether marine organisms can ac-climate, i.e. adjust their phenotypes through transgenerational plasticity, or rapidly adapt, i.e. realign the popu-lation phenotypic performances to maximizefitness, to the new chemical environment within a selectivehorizon defined by global changes. To foster a significant advancement in this research area, we review brieflythe history of ecotoxicology, synthesis our current understanding of the fate and impact of contaminantsunder global changes, and critically discuss the benefits and challenges of integrative approaches toward developing an evolutionary perspective in marine ecotoxicology: particularly through a multigenerational ap-proach. The inclusion of multigenerational studies in Ecological Risk Assessment framework (ERA) would pro-vide significant and more accurately information to helppredict the risks of pollution in a rapidlychanging ocean.