Aquatic Toxicology and Its Need

Aquatic ecotoxicology (AE) is an integral part of a healthy environmental process especially with the increasing use of technology and synthetic materials. Additionally, AE assists in understanding various branches required to maintain the proper function of an ecosystem with or without anthropogenic interference. Everyday use of material ultimately ends up in the ecosystem either before use (by-product) or after use (waste). Here ecotoxicology acts as a scale for responsible technology makers to check their products safety before launching with another branch of science known as risk assessment. Once contaminants are released into the environment, ecotoxicology helps to estimate their chronic and acute impacts on the aquatic ecosystem, which is then used to take measures required by government agencies to improve the health of the ecosystem. Ecotoxicology working process will be described in subsequent chapters. This chapter will explain the detailed process of AE in a system and describes its need for and importance of application of different ecosystem services, in addition to its role in climate change scenario. Ecotoxicological studies are conducted in a standard way following protocol by government agencies like the US Environmental protection agency (USEPA) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These organizations provide recommendations required by many regulatory frameworks for environmental or ecological hazard and risk assessment (ERA) of chemicals and provide a standard way of performing lab-based studies with standard protocols that need to be maintained throughout the study (Chap. 6 ), with specified end points (Chap. 7 ). The outcome of a standard protocol-based study helps the regulators to define policies and implement laws to maintain a healthy ecosystem. The aim of these standard tests is to maintain reliability, reproducibility, and comparability across the tests with specific test species, which makes it a reliable standard to follow by other member countries for their environmental risk assessment. Now the point comes where they can be used and how they can be applied to other fields of science. The chapter describes in detail below.