Written over a period of several decades by a national and international authority on trace metals in living marine organisms, the compendium on trace metal concentrations in marine plants and invertebrates has two main objectives. The first is to summarize the available world literature on trace metal and metalloid concentrations in tissues of representative field populations of marine, estuarine, and oceanic [elasmobranchs, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals] algae and macrophytes, protists, sponges, coelenterates, molluscs, crustaceans, insects, chaetognaths, annelids, echinoderms, and tunicates and their significance to organism health and to the health of their consumers. The following elements are emphasized: aluminum, antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, bismuth, boron, cadmium, cerium, cesium, chromium, cobalt, copper, gallium, germanium, gold, iron, lanthanum, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, niobium, rhenium, rhodium, rubidium, ruthenium, selenium, silicon, silver, thallium, tin, titanium, tungsten, vanadium, yttrium, zinc, and zirconium. The second is to synthesize existing information on biological, chemical and physical factors known to modify uptake, retention, and translocation of each element by selected groups of marine organisms under field and laboratory conditions. Recognition of the importance of these modifiers and their accompanying interactions is essential to the understanding of metals kinetics in marine systems and to the interpretation of baseline residue data in marine [vertebrates] plants and invertebrates.