A Review of Interspecies Toxicity Extrapolation in Birds and Mammals and a Proposal for Long-term Toxicity Data

Terrestrial risk assessments for pesticide exposure is generally based on a limited number of toxicity data. The protection target for these assessments requires an extrapolation from species for which toxicity data are available to other species with unknown sensitivity to be able to protect these as well. Our ability to extrapolate toxicity endpoints between species is a major source of uncertainty in risk assessment. Most analyses of interspecies extrapolation in avian risk assessments have dealt with acute toxicity data. It was suggested that, in the absence of a strong rationale to the contrary, we should assume that reproductive data is at least as variable as acute data and that strategies developed for acute data could be applied to long term toxicity data as well. Considering only the two main bird test species for which reproduction data are available (Mallard and Northern Bobwhite), a comparison of the interspecies standard deviation for both acute and reproduction data suggests that the two are equally variable. Analysis of a very limited data set also suggests that this conclusion holds regardless of which endpoint is triggered in the reproduction study. However, the relative sensitivity of the two species established from acute test data appears to be reversed in the case of reproductive data. In addition there seems to be no reason to believe that bodyweight is a factor in helping birds cope with the rigours of chronic dosing, which is in contrast with the acute dosing situation. This suggests that the best extrapolation technique for reproduction test data should be independent of phylogeny and independent of bodyweight scaling. The simplest such method is the one that was proposed by Luttik and Aldenberg (1995, 1997) for both birds and mammals.