Most fisheries in Australia are at sustainable levels or are overexploited. There is obviously a need to maximise yields from these resources. Consequently it is vital for fishery management to be able to discriminate between the effects of harvesting the resource versus the impacts of anthropogenic inputs on populations.

Funds are sought from FRDC to conduct a pilot program for developing methods of determining the impacts of chronic toxicity on fish eggs and larvae. This approach allows the measurement of the entire pollution load of an ecosystem. The successful application of this technique will allow fisheries managers to quantify the total toxicant loadings in habitats and to evaluate the potential impacts these toxicant loads have on fishery stocks.

The results of this Pilot study will have general applicability to temperate and subtropical systems. The usefulness of similar techniques to monitor ecosystem health has been demonstrated for tropical systems by Klumpp and von Westernhagen.