Use of stickleback for biomonitoring strategy
Résumé
The three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus, is a freshwater fish species commonly used in ecotoxicological studies to assess pollutant effects in laboratory and field conditions. This fish has a wide repartition area and can live in contaminated streams. These advantages make it a good sentinel species, interesting for environmental monitoring studies. Therefore, we propose to develop an active biomonitoring strategy which integrates a multi-biomarker approach and which can be used in various stream conditions. Nevertheless, before monitoring caged sticklebacks, it seems to be important to better understand the effects of caging conditions (confinement, food deprivation, fish density, number of replicates, etc) on fish physiology and metabolism. Moreover, the great advantage of an active biomonitoring strategy is the use of standardized animals. Our statistical analysis of in-house laboratory data obtained with standardized animals aims to reduce data misinterpretation during biomonitoring studies. Finally, the environmental reality does not concern only one pollutant but a cocktail of chemical, biological, and physical contaminants which induce a combination of stresses. For this purpose, we want to determine in which way sticklebacks under chemical stress could respond to a sudden biological stress. The proposed examples, from various fields and laboratory studies, give a global view of our use of sticklebacks in biomonitoring contexts.