Toxic and harmful microalgae of the World Ocean.

This monograph reviews marine micro-algal species from all origins around the globe for their toxic or harmful character. We have considered the ex-pressions toxic and harmful in their widest sense, and have classified them into five groups: (i) high biomass bloom-forming species (harm from oxy-gen depletion and/or physical effects), (ii) producers of toxins affecting man through food consumption, (iii) species harmful to man through direct contact, including aerosolised routes, (iv) microalgae toxic to other marine organisms (e.g. fish or invertebrates) and (v) those that do not cause any of the above problems but have been found to produce toxins in culture as assessed by bioassays or chemical analysis. With this classification, 174 taxa are listed. This study has been undertaken in the context of the work carried out by different task teams of the Intergovernmental Panel on Harmful Algal Blooms (IPHAB) of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC of UNES-CO). Many efforts have been made to retrieve information from the peer- reviewed literature; much information has also been found from extensive and systematic reading of grey literature, including conference proceed-ings (mainly International Conferences on Harmful Algae and International Conferences on Molluscan Shellfish Safety) and reports of the ICES Working Group on Harmful Algal Bloom Dynamics. It is our intent that this review will serve the scientific community at large and provide a sound literature base for updating the IOC species list as appropriate. The references listed in this book will be made available to this community for regular updates. The authors are aware of the aims both of IPHAB to make a Global HAB Status Report and of GlobalHAB, a recent initiative to foster and enlarge research at the global scale to document and understand the changing occurrence and distribution of harmful algal blooms. In the first chapter, we reviewed literature to examine factors that may contribute to the changing distribution of harmful algal blooms around the planet. In addition to straightforward environmental factors such as nutri-ent loads and ratios, we also consider a number of more complex issues such as increased awareness and monitoring, ballast water discharges, climate change (including global warming) and overfishing. Subsequently, the liter-ature was examined for occurrence of individual species, and any apparent distributional changes. In this second part, a short taxonomic description is given for each species as well as its global distribution, major regional harmful or poisoning events and information on toxins produced, as appro-priate. We have found the numerous changes in taxonomic classification and associated name changes particularly challenging for assessing trends, and so have listed the basionym and syno nyms where appropriate. As this study aims to make a comprehensive review, we apologise for any omissions or misrepresentations and welcome comments from area managers, taxono-mists and the scientific community at large. The third section collates in-formation from the first two, as well as from other studies, that have exam-ined trends over longer periods, i.e. typically over several decades. Overall, studies converge to conclude that blooms are on the increase in many areas world-wide. Finally, while it has not been possible to treat every individual toxin analogue separately within the framework of this monograph, we have cross-referenced the toxin groups and taxonomic groups in two tables to give an overview of the toxin groups produced by all the species considered. An interesting finding of this review was that large uncertainty exists for most ichthyotoxic species concerning the compounds responsible for their toxicity to fish. The systematic literature search on taxa, toxins and regional events includes publications up to December 2014. The review is published as a bilingual edition (English and French) to serve as large a community as possible.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Lassus, Patrick, Chaumérat, Nicolas, Hess, Philipp, Nézan, Elisabeth
Other Authors:	Reguera, Beatriz
Format:	Report biblioteca
Language:	English
Published:	International Society for the Study of Harmful Algae and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation 2015
Subjects:	HAB, Harmful Algae Bloom, Oxygen depletion, Fish, Invertebrates, Taxonomy, Ichthyotoxic, Phytoplankton, Microphytobenthos,
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/1834/42206
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