[Pharmwaste] Human Drugs Are Polluting the Water-And Animals Are Swimming in It

Deborah DeBiasi deborah.debiasi at deq.virginia.gov
Mon May 13 14:59:00 EDT 2019


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/pharmaceutical-pollution/586006/



*Human Drugs Are Polluting the Water—And Animals Are Swimming in It*

Salmon on psychotropics, platypuses on prozac, and other strange tales from
the wild

*Rebecca Giggs <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/rebecca-giggs/>*

May 2019 Issue <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2019/05/>

[image:
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2019/04/DIS_Animals_Giggs_Salmon/lead_720_405.jpg?mod=1554748585]Esther
Aarts

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What impels small salmon, called smolts, out of their nursery brooks to the
ocean? Across thousands of miles, the fish transmogrify from fingerlings
into trollish adults—hook-jawed, toothy, and, in the case of many males,
humpbacked. Though reversing the journey does not rescind their
metamorphosis, the big fish famously return, waggling against currents,
vaulting over dams, and pushing together, like a blade, toward the very
gravel beds where, years earlier, they hatched.

The salmon “pulse,” as some people describe this recurrent migration, is a
marvel of animal tenacity. But it matters for reasons beyond natural
spectacle. The fish’s life cycle draws nutrients from forested areas to the
ocean and then back upstream, onto floodplains, into woodlands, and higher
still, to alpine lakes. En route, salmon bodies feed wolves, foxes, eagles,
otters, flies, and others. Grizzlies and black bears lug the fish into the
underwood
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/how-climate-change-cancelled-the-grizzly-salmon-run/537483/>,
plucking the richest organs and leaving the carcasses. Spruce forests in
the Pacific Northwest have been fertilized by salmon: Tree rings record
years of abundant fish as well as thinner seasons. Nearly a quarter of the
nitrogen available to a river’s encircling woodland may have been derived
from dropped or stranded salmon.

Those fish that manage to get back to their former cradle spawn; soon
after, most make it their graveyard. Their decomposing bodies nourish water
grasses and algae, which form a camouflaging habitat for future hatchlings
until they themselves turn into smolts and, like their forebears, depart.

Today, another kind of migration—a pernicious, microscopic one that folds
together the private lives of humans with those of riverine creatures—risks
disrupting this cycle, even as it offers (a meager silver lining) insight
into fish mentality and animal migration. Pharmaceuticals are emitted from
our bodies, homes, and factories, entering waterways and accumulating in
fish, bugs, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, and warm-blooded animals. Areas
around drug-manufacturing plants are hot spots for this kind of pollution.
So too are watercourses near hospitals and aging sewage infrastructure. But
medicinal compounds have also been detected in remote environments, imbuing
surface waters even in Antarctica.

Waterways can contain traces of many drugs—among them antifungals,
antimicrobials, and antibacterials, as well as ones for pain, fertility,
mood, sleeplessness, and neurodegenerative diseases. If current trends
persist, scientists estimate, the volume of pharmaceuticals diffusing into
fresh water could increase by two-thirds by 2050. Recent modeling shows
that a platypus living in a contaminated stream in Melbourne is already
likely to ingest more than half a recommended adult dose of antidepressants
every day.

Tracking medicines’ impact in the wild is difficult, but toxicologists
believe their influences on fauna can occur at low concentrations—and may
be distinct from their effects on humans. Already a variety of symptoms has
been observed in lab studies. Amphetamines change the timing of aquatic
insect development. Antidepressants impede cuttlefish’s learning and
memory, and cause marine and freshwater snails to peel off rocks. Drugs
that affect serotonin levels in humans cause shore crabs to exhibit “risky
behavior,” and female starlings to become less attractive to males (who in
turn sing less). Dosed with Prozac, shrimp are more likely to swim toward a
light source—a dangerous tendency, given that many predators hunt in sunlit
zones.

And Atlantic salmon smolts exposed to benzodiazepines—medications, such as
Valium and Xanax, that are frequently used to treat anxiety—migrate nearly
twice as quickly as their unmedicated counterparts. Recklessly so, for the
juvenile fish are likely to arrive at the sea in an underdeveloped state
and before seasonal conditions are favorable. The smolts do not usually
exhibit such gusto: In fact, they are frequently observed traveling
tail-first, as if reluctant. It would seem, then, that they have a
cognitive and perhaps emotional switch that, when flipped, prompts them to
strike out for sea. This complicates the common understanding of migration,
which holds that animals are puppetted by seasonal cues and physical
readiness (here, the adaptation of scales and gills to briny water).
Pharmaceutical pollution reveals that a psychobiological release may also
be required—to set off, the smolts must first surmount their own feelings
of stress.

We are by now accustomed to the idea that humans affect the mental health
of captive animals
<https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/brian-the-mentally-ill-bonobo-and-how-he-healed/372596/>.
That we may also, inadvertently, be changing the mental health of wildlife
is an unhappy realization, even if it expands what is understood of
animals’ emotional worlds
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/>.
As salmon pervade their environment, sustaining forests, so their
environment enters into them, bringing with it evidence of our own distant
inner lives.
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