Interactions between pesticides and wildlife.

Abstract

The Sixties were a decade of enlightenment for fishery and wildlife sci­ ence as these disciplines pondered the effects of pesticides upon fish, birds, and mammals. Before this period, knowledge of what happened when toxi­ cants entered the environments of wildlife was largely confined to the bene­ fits from pesticides as tools in the management of fish and wildlife and to limited measurements of acute toxicity of some economic poisons to a few species of birds, mammals, and fish. Up to 1960, the concept of pesticide­ caused chronic effects in wildlife was accepted as a possibility, but little proof had been advanced, and only those with long-focus vision predicted the poten­ tial impact of pesticides on animal populations. Wildlife science elected not to enjoy the luxury of ignorance but, rather, to accept its responsibility and intensify its investigations on pesticides and wildlife. Federal agencies, State agencies, and universities enlarged their funds, personnel, and scope of interest so that, nationwide, we supported a truly comprehensive effort directed to insecticide-wildlife relationships. The rationale providing the thrust for this campaign was similar to the expres­ sion that We can never do merely one thing, because the world is a system of fantastic complexity. Wildlife-pesticide studies have been conditioned by the thought that man does more than one thing when he disperses pesti­ cides. The studies, therefore, have probed many segments of the fish, bird, and mammal habitat, have considered acute, subacute, chronic, and indirect effects on wildlife, and have sought understanding at the cell, tissue, organ, organism, and population levels of organization. The reader perceives progress, as from time to time reviews have ap­ peared in the literature to provide updated summaries of the state of knowl­ edge. The first of these (136) covered fish, wildlife, and pesticides up to 1956, and emphasized acute toxicity effects. Later reviews (39,40,93, 143), made it clear that the trends away from dominance of acute toxicity mea­ surements led both inward, to measure physiological effects inside the bodies of the animals, and outward to gain an understanding of ecological effects. These shifts have been brought about through increased sophistication and sensitivity in chemical analytical instrumentation, added effort on pesticide