Causes and consequences of metal-impaired chemosensory function in aquatic animals

水生动物生活在一种通用溶剂中。 水具有溶解一系列有机和无机化学品的高容量。 因此，水生动物已经进化出复杂的化学通讯系统，用于通过感知水中的各种化学物质来接收有关其周围环境的信息。 这些信息化学物质传达有关食物或捕食者的位置，潜在配偶的遗传质量和生殖状态，迁移路线的位置等信息。 此外，用于检测和处理这些化学物质的分子机制在分类群中是保守的。 虽然我们已经了解了30多年，一些水污染物，如金属，可以干扰鱼的嗅觉，我们还没有完全了解这种污染物引起的感官缺陷的程度，我们也没有意识到它的生态意义。 我们的工作涉及研究金属受损的化学感觉的动物代表不同层次的一个典型的水生食物网，包括水蚤代表浮游动物和初级消费者，鱼类代表捕食者和二级消费者。 我们工作的目标是了解金属如何干扰化学感觉，以及这些影响如何损害重要过程，如捕食者回避，进食和繁殖。 通过了解金属对生物组织的细胞或亚细胞水平过程的影响，我们可以开始了解这些影响如何传播到更高的组织水平，从而在种群，社区或生态系统水平上表现出来。 由于这些系统提供的若干娱乐和经济资源，保护水生环境在加拿大人中一直名列前茅。由于这项工作为我们提供了一个独特的机会，以确定在何种程度上化学通信参与的基本过程是至关重要的生态系统功能，我们可以开始，以确定在何种程度上人类活动影响基本的生态系统过程。监管界和工业界都将对这项工作感兴趣，以便制定减轻这些影响并最终保护生态系统的方法。

Aquatic animals live in a universal solvent. Water has a high capacity for dissolving a range of both organic and inorganic chemicals. As such, aquatic animals have evolved sophisticated chemical communication systems for receiving information about their surrounding environment by sensing various chemicals in the water. These info-chemicals convey information about the location of food or predators, genetic quality and reproductive status of potential mates, location of migratory routes, and more. Moreover, the molecular machinery used to detect and process these chemicals is conserved among taxa. Although we have understood for over 30 years that some water contaminants, like metals, can interfere with a fish's sense of smell, we do not yet fully appreciate the extent of this contaminant-induced sensory deficit nor do we appreciate its ecological significance. Our work involves studying metal-impaired chemosensation in animals representing different levels of a typical aquatic food web, including water fleas representing the zooplankton and primary consumers, and fishes representing predators and secondary consumers. The goal of our work is to understand how metals interfere with chemosensation and how those effects impair vital processes like predator-avoidance, feeding, and reproduction. By understanding metal effects on processes at the cellular or subcellular levels of biological organization, we can begin to understand how those effects propagate to higher levels of organization to become manifest at the population, community, or ecosystem levels. Protection of aquatic environments consistently ranks highly among Canadians owing to the several recreational and economic resources these systems offer. Because this work affords us an unique opportunity to determine the extent to which chemical communication participates in essential processes that are vital to ecosystem function, we can begin to determine the extent to which human activities affect fundamental ecosystem processes. Both the regulatory and industrial communities will be interested in this work in order to develop approaches that mitigate these effects and ultimately protect ecosystems.