Evaluation of two different biomarkers for use in the assessment of toxic chemical exposure in California sea lions ( Zalophus californianus)

Evaluation of two different biomarkers for use in the assessment of toxic chemical exposure in California sea lions is studied. The California sea lion trauma and cancer subgroups indicate that the type of health problem is not an appreciable factor for background rates of DNA damage or the treatment-associated increase in DNA damage. Each treatment caused similar degrees of DNA damage in the sea lions compared to the humans. The Comet Assay super(TM) is a measure of the amount of DNA damage from single- or double-strand breaks, thus the observations suggest that lymphocytes from humans and from this population of sea lions have similar background levels of DNA damage. Some of the known environmental toxicants that California sea lions encounter have been reported to increase DNA strand breaks, as measured by the comet assay and expressed as an increase in tail extent moment (TEM).