Citizen Science Initiative (CSI): Singapore
‘Healthy Organisms’, ‘Healthy Ecosystems’
Pollution Experiments using Ecotoxicology Biomarkers for the Classroom. These are some of the dangers the flora and fauna, (hereafter, biota) of the marine environment potentially face. However, knowing how the biota will cope long-term with such environmental stress still remains unknown. The need to understand
organism physiology and how organisms perform has never been so important, especially in the current modern era, known as ‘The Anthropocene’. With the ever-increasing pressure placed on the marine environment through climate change and pollution, the need to quantify the effects on the environment, thus, ‘ecosystem health’ is important if we are to make predictions on the long-term consequences. Chemical pollution of aquatic environments has always been and still is a key issue of ecotoxicology. Historically, ecotoxicological assays were designed to be descriptive testing approaches for rapid and cost-effective generation of toxicity data. Limitations of the traditional toxicity assays, for instance yield low environmental realism and predictive power for example, in environmental scenarios with low chemical concentrations, often in concentrations below analytical detectability, but yet give rise to ecological effects. Therefore, prompting the use of multiple suites of biomarkers and bioassays, as opposed to reliance on a single toxicity assay. The multiple biomarker approach is especially effective if applied across hierarchical levels of biology, ranging from molecular, biochemical, cellular, organ and through to whole-organism level. The focus of the biomarker approach is to assessing environmental with emphasis on ecological relevance. From an ecological perspective, chronic (sub-lethal) rather than critical (mortality) conditions more closely reflect the upper and lower tolerance limits determining species survival and distribution and therein extrapolation to habitat integrity and community health. The purpose of this Citizen Science Initiative (CSI: Singapore) page is to promote the use of simple, easy to use, cost-effective approaches for investigating organism health and is an extension of the ‘Pollution Experiments using Ecotoxicology Biomarkers for the Classroom’ workshop run by the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore. We invite students, teachers and all participants to upload content relevant to their experiences employing ecotoxicology biomarkers for pollution experiments. Share your photos, videos and tales of your scientific discoveries! For more information, visit the webpage:
http://www.nie.edu.sg/study-nie/admissions/graduate-studies-professional-learning/professional-development-programmes-and-courses/courses/pollution
Course Instructors:
Dr Beverly Goh Pi Lee
Dr Awantha Dissanayake (email: [email protected])
Chien Houng Lai
Glossary of terms:
Biodiversity (biological diversity):
The term 'biodiversity' is indeed commonly used to describe the number, variety and variability of living organisms. This very broad usage, embracing many different parameters, is essentially a synonym of 'Life on Earth'. http://www.unep-wcmc.org/what-is-biodiversity_50.html
Biomarkers: defined here as functional measures of exposure to stressors, which are expressed at the sub-organismal, physiological or behavioural level1. Environmental biomarkers in aquatic toxicology: Fiction, fantasy, or functional? Risk Assess. An Int. J. 2, 268–274 (1996).
