Immunotoxicological Effects of Environmental Contaminants in Teleost Fish Reared for Aquaculture

Contamination is one of the major problems associated with the environmental sciences. Many of the environmental pollutants affect to the different aquatic animals to certain degree depending on the toxic substance, concentration, self-life and animal behaviour and biology. Direct ingestion of environmental contaminants and bioaccumulation of toxic substances in bivalves, crustaceans, molluscs or fish for human supply is a serious task to consider in human nutrition. Furthermore, it is known that to provide the necessary proteins that need and will need the world's population must intensify efforts in production of both proteins of plant origin and animal origin. Among the latter is predicted that aquaculture will be one of the fields over the coming years will increase. In this regard, aquaculture is trying for some decades to compensate this negative balance for human consumption. Among the important issues to consider in the aquaculture business the impact of the environmental contaminants in the species produced for humans need to be controlled by the farmer. In this specific field, most of studies have evaluated the toxic effects in terms of fish viability or induction of tumors using different fish models. However, relevant fish species for aquaculture are less used in these experiments. Moreover, the impact of the environmental contaminants in the immune response of these fish, and consequently in the disease resistance, have received much less attention.