February 1975 • Volume 6 • Number 2

Do We Monitor Too Much? It is not so many years ago that it first became widely

appreciated that it was possible to pollute the sea on such a scale as to endanger human life and cause serious damage to natural resources. With the tragic deaths at Minamata from mercury poisoning due to an uncontrolled industrial dis- charge, a dramatic event like the wreck of the Torrey Canyon, and the widely publicized damage to Baltic fisheries by pollution, a considerable body of opinion became alarmed. While no-one quite claimed that all the seas were dead (though once or twice it was suggested they were pretty close to that condition) the 'precipice principal' came into fashion in many quarters. This was that all might appear well until with minimal warning some limit would be overstepped and there would follow an irretrievable collapse of the marine ecosystem.

Not surprisingly, with frightening notions like this circulating there were strong demands that we should find out what was going on in the sea and that some kind of finger should be kept on the pulse of the marine environ- ment generally. There was an irresistible drive to collect data (almost any data would do; the act of collecting it was in itself reassuring) and monitoring came into its own. Routine measurement of a few basic parameters had of course been going on for many years in some places but this was rather overlooked in the new-found enthusiasm for fact-finding. In the circumstances it was almost inevitable that almost anything that could be measured should be measured, and that since the measurement and recording of simple physical and chemical parameters could most readily be mechanized and automated, this is where a lot of the thrust went. What would be done with all this information when it came flooding in and whether, in fact, it served any useful purpose, were things that received cursory consideration at the time.

Pollution control in freshwaters has been a major pre- occupation for many years, chiefly because we rely on them for drinking water supplies. Monitoring this environ-

ment has become a science. It is possible to select a manageably small number of parameters to measure and to use this information to get a reliable impression of the health of a river or lake, and an indication of what remedies may be needed if all is not weU. The fact that public drinking water supplies are not a menace to public health, and rivers and lakes are mostly as biologically healthy as we choose to make them is a testimony to the success of monitoring programmes in freshwaters.

At least, that was true, but with the widening range of exotic chemicals now getting into water courses and un- certainty about what effect they may have in the long run, an element of doubt has crept in. And if monitoring of rivers appears less of a routine operation than before, there is even more doubt about monitoring coastal waters and the o c e a n s .

The ultimate objective of monitoring is not to find out the concentration distribution of, say, mercury in coastal waters. Mercury concentration is of no practical interest unless it presents an unacceptable hazard to human health or produces an ecological change that for one reason or another we would prefer not to happen. In other words, to an overwhelming extent we are concerned with the biological consequences of pollution. Measurement of physical or chemical parameters is of value only to the extent that they can be translated into statements about the biological effect they have (including damage to human health as a biological effect). Sufficient is known about the relatively simple freshwater ecosystem for this translation to be made, but this is rarely true of the marine environment.

Our first concern must be to avoid hazards to human health. Whereas it is relatively easy to set standards for acute poisons, in that lethal doses are generally known, and for pathogens, pollutants such as heavy metals, organo- chlorines and radioactivity are cumulative poisons and present an entirely different problem. Human exposure to

Accumulation of Caesium - 137

Estuarine Eutrophication •

• Chlorinated Hydrocarbons in Bivalves

Fish Disease • Soviet Programme

Pergamon Press Limited • Oxford 6 New York

Do We Monitor Too Much? 17

News

Sierra Club Fears Environmental Step Backward 19

Soviet Environmental Protection Program me 19

Russians (And Others) Take Cornish Fish 19 More Oil in Bantry Bay 20 Growing Population of Polar Bears 20

Reports

Sub-lethal Effects of Chlorinated 20 Hydrocarbons on Bivalves

D. Roberts Caesium - 137: Its Accumulation in a 24

Littoral Community 114. J. Broom, P. D. Grimwood and E. G. Bellinger

Fin Erosion in Winter Flounder 26 J. Ziskowski and R. Murchelano

Eutrophication of a Partially Enclosed 29

Estuarine Mudflat E. Fahy, R. Goodwillie, J. Rochford and D. Kelly

Conferences

First International Conference on Toxic 32 Dinoflagellate Blooms

Marine Ecology and Oil Pullution 32 Preventing Oil Pollution 32

Copyright © 1975 Pergamon Press Ltd.

them is through sea food which selectively accumulates and concentrates the contaminant. There is little point in measuring its concentration in seawater; the more effective and direct approach, and the one usually adopted is to monitor concentrations in the food organism itself. But with such poisons there are, in practice, no such things as safe' or 'unsafe' doses, what matters is total intake over an

extended period and that depends on the feeding habits of the local human population. It is rational for Japan, where a high proportion of food comes from the sea, to set much more stringent regulations than a country like Britain where a fairly low proportion of the dietary intake has a marine origin.

It must be recognized that whatever public health standards are set they are almost entirely arbitrary. Although not regarded as a fit subject for discussion, some decision must be taken subconsciously or explicitly about a level of health risk that is 'acceptable' . It is no good saying that there must be no risk, when most things we eat or drink are bad for us and a good many ~ n g s we do every day are fraught with lethal dangers. And to ask that there should be 'minimal risk' or 'no increased risk' is, in the last resort, meaningless, lake it or not, we have to decide what level of risk we shall accept and arrange regulation to try not to exceed that level. The chief complaint is that because it is unfashionable to debate the acceptability of particular risks, little a t tempt is made to quantify them and

18

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examine them rationally, and the result is control measm ey. whicil, while probably good enough, have httle rationai basis

With so many imponderables and so much arbitrariness when it comes to defining objectives of pollution conln;l, great refinement of monitoring techniques is largely a waste of effort. This is infinitely more so when it comes to setting standards to avoid biological damage in the broader sense. We have only a vague idea about where contaminants go m the marine environment and less idea about how they behave. Knowledge of how they may affect individual organisms is restricted to a mere handfid of species and even were pollution to kill off a proportion of the more susceptible organisms, we have no idea whether or ~ot that would have any perceptible impact on the ecosystem as a whole, and more particularly on those parts of it thai have any interest to us. And even if we did know this, we are still far from having any rational basis for deciding what level and what kind of ecological change would be 'acceptable' . Since we are totally unable to state even our ultimate objectives in any detail, measurement of concentrations of potentially damaging substances in coastal, still less in oceanic waters, tells us practically nothing we really want to know.

Monitoring of pollutants in the sea will of course go on, but if it is appreciated that it cannot be an end in itself and is ultimately a wasteful exercise, there will be increasing pressure to refine the monitoring programme so that we concentrate on measuring parameters that tell us some- thing. It is revealing that in studies of pollution in the Baltic recently reported upon by an ICES/SCOR Working Group under the chairmanship of Dr G. Kullenberg (ICES Cooperative Research Report 42) at least as m u ~ effort has gone into understanding the Baltic marine ecosystem as in monitoring chemicals and other pollutants. For the future, the international programme there will be over- whelmingly concerned with getting better understanding of the hydrography and with biological observations and experiments designed to optimize the monitoring programme.

The Report of the ICES Advisory Committee on Marine Pollution for 1974 (published as ICES Cooperative Research Report 43) obviously has the same thought. It reports on the wholesale and widespread monitoring that is already going on in the North Sea and adjacent waters and on measures to bring the monitoring programmes of different countries into line with each other. But it 'also notes that while 'continued monitoring of toxic substances in fish and shellfish, and in some parts of the marine ecosystem is required' it is also ' important to keep the efforts and resources deployed in this activity in balance with those required for programmes of fundamental research'.

Whatever sum is available for marine pollution investiga- tions, monitoring programmes could easily swallow the lot and still not provide adequate coverage. The most urgent need is to find how monitoring can be cut to the barest essentials and a very large fraction of the effort should go into fundamental oceanographic research, particularly in shallow waters, as a means to that end. Progress will un- doubtedly be slow but at least it is progress, which is more than can be said for much of the routine data c~,llecting which now goes on around the world.