Effect of environmental pollutants on marine mammal health: spanning complexity, biological scales, and multiple stressors

NRS invited seminar by Dr. Jean-Pierre Desforges, Postdoctoral Researcher, McGill University. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Marine mammals are among the most contaminated animals on the planet. This is due largely to their position at the top of marine food webs as apex predators. However, as large bodied mammals living in the sea, this group of animals is understandably difficult to study. Thus, while among the most susceptible to environmental pollution accumulation, little is known of pollutant effects in marine mammals. Dr. Desforges will explore the evidence for pollutant effects across marine mammal populations and identify priority groups of environmental chemicals. Laboratory based methods to study marine mammal toxicology will be presented, focusing on the impact of environmental pollutants on important immunological endpoints. Additionally, Dr. Desforges will explore the need to integrate traditional ecotoxicology with stress ecology in order to capture the real world scenario in which wildlife are concomitantly exposed to a wide array of stressors, be they natural or anthropogenic. To this end, this talk will introduce ecological modelling based on dynamic energy budgets as an important approach to explore complex stress landscapes.