A database of avian blood spot examinations for exposure of wild birds to environmental toxicants: the DABSE biomonitoring project

Abstract

DABSE, a database for avian blood spot examination for exposure to toxicants, is a new biomonitoring project in wild birds that has the goal of providing reference values of harmful agents, as measured in whole blood stored as dried blood spots. Once these “normal” values have been established, the diagnosis of environmental contaminant-mediated ill-health (such as manifestations of sickness, increased mortality, a reduction in population, poor breeding success, abnormal behavior) in an individual bird or in a population could be facilitated by comparing exposure values in the investigation to reference values of the same species in the database. One might then identify the cause and pave the way for a mitigating response. The toxicant component of DABSE is being examined at the low ng ml⁻¹ level in 200 µl of whole blood. As these analyses are invariably very costly, an effort has been made to lower these costs and so enable more testing by quantitating representative compounds as markers for the whole group. These markers are invariably found in birds' blood at the highest concentration of all the constituents in that group. The toxicant groups comprise:- (a) elements—arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury and selenium; (b) organochlorine pesticides, markers being p,p′-DDT, p,p′-DDE, β-HCH, HCB and oxychlordane; (c) polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the marker being congener 153; (d) polybrominated diphenyl esters (PBDEs), the marker being congener 47; (e) perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), the markers being perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). DABSE will be expanded to determine exposure to infectious diseases and perhaps acute toxicoses.