1. A multi-faceted discipline

Ecotoxicology has struggled to find its place as a scientific discipline in its own right, and has thus been regarded alternately as a sub-discipline of toxicology, studying the harmful effects of chemicals on organisms other than humans and domestic animals, or as a sub-discipline of ecology, which studies the consequences of pollution on ecosystems. Environmental toxicology studies the toxic substances emitted into the environment to which humans may be exposed after they have been distributed and possibly transformed in natural...