“…The widespread occurrence of imposex in Japanese gastropods has been found recently as a consequence of organotin pollution (Horiguchi, Shiraishi, Shimizu, Yamazaki, & Morita, 1995;Horiguchi, Hyeon-Seo, Shiraishi, Shibata, Soma, Morita et al, 1998). In addition to being a problem in Japan, marine organisms and seawater highly contaminated with butyltins have been reported during the last few years from the coastal waters of developed countries such as Spain, Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, USA and Canada (Chau, Maguire, Brown, Yang, Batchelor, & Thompson, 1997;Minchin & Minchin, 1997;Morcillo & Porte, 1998;Michel & Averty, 1999;Elgethun, Neumann, & Blake, 2000;Nehring, 2000;Thomas, Fileman, Readman, & Waldock, 2001;Power & Keegan, 2001;Michel, Averty, Andral, Chiffoleau, & Galgani, 2001), which have legislation similar to that in Japan. Furthermore, even higher trophic level organisms such as marine mammals and fish-eating birds from coastal areas of Japan and other developed nations, including USA and European countries, accumulated butyltin compounds at mg/g concentrations (Iwata, Tanabe, Miyazaki, & Tatsukawa, 1994;Kim, Tanabe, Iwakiri, Tatsukawa, Amano, Miyazaki et al, 1996;Guruge, Tanabe, Iwata, Tatsukawa, & Yamagishi, 1996;Kannan, Senthilkumar, Loganathan, Takahashi, Odell, & Tanabe, 1997;Tanabe, Prudente, Mizuno, Hasegawa, Iwata, & Miyazaki, 1998;Law, Blake, & Spurrier, 1999).…”