Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Estuaries and coastal zones are under environmental pressures internationally due to urban development, agriculture, and climate change. In the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence sediments, nutrients and contaminants from land have been observed to have significant adverse impacts on these environments. Foremost among high risk contaminants are pesticides that are highly toxic to invertebrates, particularly crustaceans such as lobster. The collapse of lobster populations in parts of the Northumberland Strait and changes to fish and invertebrate populations and the detection of pesticide residues in local estuaries provide strong preliminary evidence to support the hypothesis that pesticides may be exerting significant impacts on the nearshore marine environment in the Southern Gulf. Biological tools using ecologically and economically important crustacean invertebrates, namely lobster and amphipods, will be used to evaluate the sensitivity of these invertebrates to the pesticides of interest and to determine if estuarine sediments are toxic to those organisms. Field studies will be conducted to determine if other factors, in combination with, or other than pesticides, are influencing amphipods. In addition to pesticide and sediment toxicity, emerging molecular techniques will be developed for lobster in order to evaluate subtle sublethal effects of pesticides. This research will also develop rapid and economical chemical techniques to screen sediment for pesticides. Those new techniques, and other highly sensitive techniques, will be used to measure pesticides in sediments from the Northumberland Strait and estuaries bordering it in order to determine if chemical residues can be related to the biological results. In the course of the development of biological and chemical monitoring tools, the question of whether pesticides are having significant biological effects in the Northumberland Strait will be answered in addition to the development of practical techniques to monitor serious harm from contaminants in the region.