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

水生动物生活在通用溶剂中。水有很强的溶解一系列有机和无机化学物质的能力。因此，水生动物已经进化出复杂的化学通讯系统，通过感知水中的各种化学物质来接收周围环境的信息。这些信息化学物质传递着食物或捕食者的位置、潜在配偶的遗传质量和繁殖状况、迁徙路线的位置等信息。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。尽管我们在30多年前就知道一些水污染物，比如金属，会干扰鱼的嗅觉，但我们还没有完全认识到这种污染物引起的感官缺陷的程度，也没有认识到它的生态意义。我们的工作涉及研究代表不同水平的典型水生食物网的动物的金属损伤化学感觉，包括代表浮游动物和主要消费者的水蚤，以及代表捕食者和次要消费者的鱼类。我们工作的目标是了解金属是如何干扰化学感觉的，以及这些影响是如何损害诸如捕食者躲避、进食和繁殖等重要过程的。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，并在人口、社区或生态系统水平上显现出来。由于这些系统提供了一些娱乐和经济资源，加拿大人对水生环境的保护一直名列前茅。因为这项工作为我们提供了一个独特的机会来确定化学交流在多大程度上参与了对生态系统功能至关重要的基本过程，我们可以开始确定人类活动对基本生态系统过程的影响程度。监管机构和工业界都将对这项工作感兴趣，以开发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.