Trace metal monitoring in marine organisms and their living habitats permit to trace chronic or acute contaminations of marine ecosystems due to human activities. While dissolved trace metal concentrations give us an overall and punctual view over biota contamination status, bioindicator species put their bioavailable and possible toxic fraction in an obvious. However, difficulties mainly inherent to metal measurements in seawater lead field ecotoxicologists to study marine pollution essentially through the use of bioindicators alone. The technique of diffusive gradients in thin films (DGT) for the measurement of trace metals in aqueous solutions was introduced in the mid-ninetieth by Davison and Zhang. This passive probe accumulates labile trace metal species in proportion to their bulk environmental concentrations by maintaining a negative gradient between the environment and an ionexchange resin (Chelex). DGTs average natural water trace metal concentrations over the deployment period, concentrate them and avoid matrix interferences, notably due to dissolved salts in seawater. Their deployment in passive and experimental monitoring studies permits to reliably measure labile trace metal concentrations and, jointly analysed with bioindicators, to estimate their bioavailability to marine organisms.
