An Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in Iceland. Fish and different aquatic creatures are more and more affected by pharmaceutical air pollution within the waterways they name dwelling; now, scientists try to determine how that may have an effect on their conduct.
Cavan Pictures/Getty Pictures
disguise caption
toggle caption
Cavan Pictures/Getty Pictures
An Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in Iceland. Fish and different aquatic creatures are more and more affected by pharmaceutical air pollution within the waterways they name dwelling; now, scientists try to determine how that may have an effect on their conduct.
Cavan Pictures/Getty Pictures
A fish walks right into a pharmacy …
It is the beginning of a joke – with echoes in actuality. Type of.
Fish aren’t being prescribed anti-anxiety medication. However they are experiencing the results.
That is as a result of fish and different aquatic creatures are being affected by growing ranges of drug air pollution – from human waste or pharmaceutical manufacturing unit runoff – that then seep into our waterways. Researchers have discovered greater than 900 completely different pharmaceutical components in rivers and streams around the globe. They usually’re not but positive how this might change animals’ conduct within the wild.
“We won’t, , dump a bunch of prescription drugs into the river,” says Jack Model, biologist on the Swedish College of Agricultural Sciences.
As a substitute, Model’s workforce did the subsequent neatest thing: They performed a managed research that implanted prescription drugs in Atlantic salmon in Sweden and monitored their migration towards the Baltic Sea.
The outcomes had been stunning.
Within the salmon, clobazam – an anti-anxiety drug – appeared to enhance migration success.
However that does not imply scientists ought to begin prescribing salmon anxiousness treatment anytime quickly. The researchers famous that clobazam had different behavioral results, like making the Atlantic salmon bolder and fewer social. And relating to salmon life past migration, there are nonetheless a whole lot of unknowns.
Need to hear extra tales about animal conduct? E mail us and tell us at [email protected].
Take heed to Brief Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Hear to each episode of Brief Wave sponsor-free and assist our work at NPR by signing up for Brief Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and edited by Emily Kwong and Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the information. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.
