Mechanism of Toxicity in Aquatic Life

The term toxicity can be defined as the level of the chemical substance that poses damage to a living organism. The aquatic environments are facing the problems of the toxic chemicals much more as we are directly or indirectly associated with the same environment. There are various fields that are integrated in the aquatic toxicology to find the activity of the toxicant that can lead to the signs and even death of the organism. The aquatic environments are contaminated with different kinds of pesticides which are having different levels of toxicity. There is various mechanism of the mutagenicity of these pesticides, but the most important one is the use of oxidative stress as biomarkers because there occurs a positive correlation between the genotoxicity and oxidative stress. The exposure of these pesticides resulted in the increase in the oxidative stress, which may reflect increase in the lipid peroxidation in erythrocytes. The various anti-oxidative enzymes like superoxide, glutathione, dismutase, and catalase (CAT) also fluctuate significantly in the blood of these exposed organisms. Thus, we can say that the genotoxic effects of the pesticides are accompanied by the change in the concentrations of these enzymes. In a nutshell, we can say that the findings suggest that genotoxic effects are not alone responsible but are related with changes in the antioxidant enzymes and oxidative stress.