ABSTRACT
It is our hope that the chapters we have compiled in this book accurately reflect the state of the science of toxicology of marine mammals as the field crosses the bridge into the twenty-first century. This is an area of research that will most likely make its major future advances through the applications of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that are often international in scope. This is because of the complexity of the challenges posed to the study of the effects of high numbers of chemical substances in long-lived and wide-ranging mammals of the seas and large inland waters. Indeed, the marine mammals comprise many species of diverse evolutionary origins that inhabit nearly all major aquatic reaches of the globe, occupy numerous feeding niches and trophic levels, and scale across orders of magnitude differences in body sizes, from the 4 kg marine otters (Lontra felina) to the blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) at 150 tonnes. Superimposed on challenges to working with marine mammals, and the complexity and numbers of contaminants and biotoxins in their environment, are the evergrowing specializations of toxicology into subdisciplines.
