ABSTRACT
Distress signals from environmental sentinel animals such as marine mussels can be used as biomarkers of harmful effects and exposure to stressors including chemical contaminants. Such biomarkers include responses at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels of biological organization; and some of these can be prognostic for pathological reactions to environmental stress (Depledge et al. 1993; Depledge 1994, 1999; Moore et al. 2004a, b). A major challenge facing ecotoxicologists is to integrate individual biomarker responses into a set of tools and indices capable of detecting and monitoring the degradation in health of a particular type of sentinel organism.
