ABSTRACT
Cetaceans are long living, are mobile within rather vast home ranges which in many cases are predictable, and are very often situated at the top of the long and complex marine food webs, usually relying on a wide range of prey organisms. These characteristics combine to make cetaceans good integrators of mid- or long-term changes in marine pollution loads in wide bodies of water. This chapter reviews the potentials and difficulties involved in monitoring organochlorine pollutant loads in cetaceans through biopsy techniques, and presents some new data concerning the questions raised as to the reliability and practical usefulness of this technique. The unpublished results on tissue organochlorine residue levels were obtained following standard analytical techniques as detailed by A. Aguilar and A. Borrell. Until the mid-1980s, most studies of organochlorine pollutants in cetaceans had been performed on specimens caught by commercial whaling operations or found stranded on beaches.
