ABSTRACT
The field of wildlife toxicology involves the assessment of chemical hazards in the environment to wildlife populations. The differences among wildlife species are large and contribute to the complexity of wildlife toxicology investigations. Declines in productivity at sublethal exposures to dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane were observed in the field, and several experimental investigations involving breeding populations of wildlife species were begun. In 1982, concentrations of selenium in mosquitofish at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge and Reservoir in the San Joaquin Valley of California were about 100 times higher than determined for fish collected at a nearby area that did not receive agricultural drainwater. The field of wildlife ecotoxicology began as an outgrowth of wildlife ecology and wildlife management, and recruitment of the skills of professional toxicologists to the task occurred only as the field developed. The cholinesterase-inhibiting pesticides are a large group of chemicals that grew out of developmental work on nerve gasses conducted largely during the Second World War.
