Rivers and estuaries have allowed and sustained human settlement and related activities for thousands of years (e.g. Morhange et al., 2005). These water bodies have been used for activities such as irrigation, industry, transportation, fisheries, tourism and the related development of industrial and recreational facilities, and have subsequently been polluted by waste discharges, intentional and accidental spills, urban, industrial and agricultural runoffs (McLusky and Elliott, 2004; Shannon et al., 2011). These various sources of pollution all carry a wide range of inorganic and organic pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic and monoaromatic hydrocarbons (Vane et al., 2011), heavy metals (Jose et al., 2011), radioactive compounds (Villa et al., 2011) and a range of pharmaceuticals and pesticides (Arias et al., 2011; Munaron et al., 2011) that accumulate in water, sediment and living organisms (Whaltham et al., 2011; Schnitzer et al., 2011; Barua et al., 2011). Consequences have been observed from the molecular to the ecosystem level through e.g. immunological, cellular, reproductive and developmental impairments, and teratogenic effects that have widely been reported for a wide range of aquatic species (Noaksson et al., 2005; Thompson et al., 2007; Galante-Oliveira et al., 2009; Yang et al., 2010).