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 house; now, scientists try to determine how that may have an effect on their habits.
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Cavan Photos/Getty Photos
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 house; now, scientists try to determine how that may have an effect on their habits.
Cavan Photos/Getty Photos
A fish walks right into a pharmacy …
It is the beginning of a joke – with echoes in actuality. Kind of.
Fish aren’t being prescribed anti-anxiety medicine. 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 totally different pharmaceutical substances in rivers and streams around the globe. And so they’re not but positive how this might change animals’ habits within the wild.
“We won’t, you already know, dump a bunch of prescription drugs into the river,” says Jack Model, biologist on the Swedish College of Agricultural Sciences.
As an alternative, Model’s group did the following neatest thing: They performed a managed examine that implanted prescription drugs in Atlantic salmon in Sweden and monitored their migration towards the Baltic Sea.
The outcomes have 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 medicine anytime quickly. The researchers famous that clobazam had different behavioral results, like making the Atlantic salmon bolder and fewer social. And on the subject of salmon life past migration, there are nonetheless lots of unknowns.
Need to hear extra tales about animal habits? E-mail us and tell us at shortwave@npr.org.
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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and edited by Emily Kwong and Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the details. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer.
