Ecotoxicology of High Mountain Animals

Dear Colleagues,

Currently, the high mountain fauna is affected by three major groups of pollution. The first is the immediate impact of human activities like mining, livestock, energy production, and tourism including hiking or climbing.  They cause synanthropy and stress in animals, local extinction, and many other effects.

The second group of problems seriously affecting alpine fauna in times of climate change is related to atmospheric pollution.  Trace element pollution resulting from anthropogenic emissions is evident throughout most of the atmosphere and has the potential to create environmental and health risks.  Many trace elements are long-range transported and deposited in remote alpine regions.  Mainly plastic nanoparticles, organic compounds, and heavy metals play a special role in the atmospheric contamination of alpine habitats.  Some heavy metals when in trace amounts are essential for life, but in excess they are heavily toxic.  Their distributions can change among different environmental compartments, accumulating in alpine invertebrates and vertebrates through biomagnification effects in the food chain.  They may differ from other toxic substances in that they are non-degradable and indestructible in the mountain environment.   Thus, their contents steadily increase in soils and subsequently accumulate in mountain plants, terrestrial and water insects, fish, frogs, lizards, eagles, marmots, and chamois.  For example, in fish from mountain lakes and streams, heavy metals may enter through the body surface, the gills, or the digestive tract and their toxic effects may influence physiological functions, individual growth rates, abundance, reproduction, density, or mortality.

A third aspect of high mountain pollution is related to the current melting of glaciers.  The mountain area is one of the most aggregated areas of glaciers.  The ice cover, frozen soil, and glacier lakes have been found to serve as reservoirs for contaminants.  The atmospheric pollution information can be stored in ice for hundreds of years in high-altitude regions.  Today, under global warming, contaminants stored in such reservoirs can be re-released into freshwater ecosystems. Water fluxes affect life high up in the mountains, forests, and agricultural landscapes.  For example, mercury inputs to fish from rivers below glaciers have increased mainly as a result of melting glaciers. Thus, the release of pollutants from the melting cryosphere should be of great concern.

As the level of contamination of alpine fauna varies from region to region, this special issue focuses on different aspects of contamination of alpine animals.  We expect contributions on the following topics in the field of ecotoxicology of alpine fauna: food chains and accumulation of heavy metals, mercury biomagnification,  effects of atmosphere-deposited anthropogenic pollutants and glacier-released pollutants, persistent organic pollutants, effects of local pollutants – waste, garbage.  If you are interested in publishing in this special issue of Toxics, please do not hesitate to contact us.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Diversity.

Prof. Dr. Marián Janiga
Prof. Dr. Vladimir Onipchenko
Guest Editors

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