Sublethal Effects

The USGS Environmental Health Program seeks to understand how environmental factors, especially contaminants and pathogens, influence human health and ecosystems. It focuses on studying the distribution and effects of toxic substances, environmental stressors, and their pathways. The program prioritizes collaboration with State, Federal and local governments; Tribes; non-government organizations...

The Energy Resources Life Cycle Integrated Science Team focuses on the potential for environmental contaminant exposures that might originate from energy resource activities including extraction, production, transportation, storage, waste management, and restoration. Perceived health risks to humans and other organisms will be distinguished from actual risks, if any. If actual risks are identified...

The Minerals Resources Life Cycle Integrated Science Team focuses on contaminant exposures in the environment that might originate from mineral resource activities including, transportation, storage, extraction and waste management. Perceived health risks to humans and other organisms will be distinguished from actual risks, if any. If actual risks are identified the science produced by this team...

About the Research. The Environmental Health Program supports scientists in the Behavioral Toxicology Core Technology Team (CTT) at the Columbia Environmental Research Center. The scientists identify how contaminants alter the behavior of organisms and what implication those changes may have on individuals, populations, and communities.

Increasing scientific and public awareness of the widespread distribution of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in U.S. drinking-water supplies, aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, wildlife, and humans has raised many public health and resource management questions that U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) science can inform. The USGS Environmental Health Program's PFAS Integrated Science Team...

The team is determining the movement and behavior of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from their sources in the environment, as they move through exposure pathways in ecosystems including watersheds and aquifers, their incorporation into food webs, and molecular to population scale effects on fish and wildlife. These studies are accomplished at a variety of spatial scales from regional...

The team develops advanced methods to study factors driving algal toxin production, how and where wildlife or humans are exposed to toxins, and ecotoxicology. That information is used to develop decision tools to understand if ​toxin exposure leads to adverse health effects in order to protect human and wildlife health.

The Ecologically-Driven Exposure Pathways Integrated Science Team identifies how ecological pathways and physiological processes within a single organism can alter exposure and toxicity of contaminants and pathogens and seek to understand outcomes at different scales from individuals to populations and ecosystems.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists and their partners utilize laboratory and field studies and existing information to improve understanding of anticoagulant rodenticide exposure and effects to wild birds.

Environmental Health Program scientists, in collaboration with other USGS scientists, are developing complementary field and laboratory methods and capabilities to detect and quantify a range of target and nontarget per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and indicator compounds at low levels (parts per trillion) in a variety of environmental matrices. The PFAS Integrated Science Team is...

Scientists performed laboratory studies with American kestrels and zebra finch to determine the effects of brominated flame retardant exposure on hatchlings. They found evidence that exposure while in the egg disrupted thyroid function in female American kestrel hatchlings and affected nestling body condition in zebra finch hatchlings, but no other effects were detected.

The presence of testicular oocytes (intersex) in male smallmouth bass ( Micropterus dolomieu) in the Missisquoi River in Vermont varied over the period of the study and was not related to concentrations of known endocrine disrupting chemicals in the River. Although previous studies have shown linkages between endocrine disrupting chemical exposures and intersex in fish, these results indicate that...