A fish walks into a pharmacy ... well, not exactly. Fish aren't being prescribed anti-anxiety drugs. But they are experiencing the effects. Researchers have found more than 900 different pharmaceutical ingredients in rivers and streams around the world, though they're not yet sure how this could change the behavior of fish and other aquatic animals in the wild."We can't, you know, dump a bunch of pharmaceuticals into the river," says Jack Brand, biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Instead, Jack's team did the next best thing – with some surprising results.This episode was reported by NPR science correspondent Jon Lambert. Check out more of his reporting.Want to hear more stories about animal behavior? Email us and let us know at [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Chapter 2: How are salmon getting anti-anxiety drugs?
Chapter 3: What effects do anxiety medications have on fish behavior?
How are salmon getting a hold of, not that they have hands, but how are they getting a hold of anti-anxiety pills?
Basically through us. So when humans take medication, like for anxiety or bacterial infections, our bodies don't use all of it, and we end up peeing out some of the chemicals. That can end up in wastewater, which can get into rivers and streams, and runoff from pharmaceutical factories gets into waterways, too. Hmm.
All told, researchers have found more than 900 different pharmaceutical ingredients in waterways around the world.
900 different ingredients. That's a lot.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What did the researchers find about salmon migration?
Well, how does this then affect the fish and other aquatic creatures?
We're not entirely sure. Scientists have been trying to figure out what all this pollution could be doing to fish, and most of that has been done in the lab. Those experiments have shown that giving fish anxiety meds, for instance, kind of messes with their behavior.
How so? Like when researchers give fish medicine on purpose, what happens?
Yeah, so if researchers give fish, say, a benzodiazepine like Xanax or an SSRI like Sertraline in the lab, these fish become more antisocial and more prone to take risks. But it's hard to say how these drugs affect their behavior out in the wild.
We can't, you know, dump a bunch of pharmaceuticals into the river.
That's Jack Brand. He's a biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. And he worked on a study that kind of did the next best thing from a scientific perspective. The study was published in the journal Science this past month.
The team implanted pharmaceuticals in Atlantic salmon in Sweden and monitored how two drugs, an anxiety med and a pain med, influenced their migration behavior.
I'm so curious, what happened?
Something kind of unexpected. The anxiety medication actually improved the migration success of the salmon.
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Chapter 5: How do pharmaceutical drugs affect aquatic ecosystems?
In this narrow sense, yeah, they did seem to help. But that's not the whole story.
Okay, so today on the show, how scientists managed to drug salmon in the wild. What pharmaceutical pollution could be doing to aquatic animals worldwide.
and what we can do about it.
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Chapter 6: What methods did researchers use to study drug effects in wild salmon?
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Okay, John, so let's back up a second because pharmaceutical drugs are designed to work on human brains and bodies, right? So how do they end up affecting the brains and bodies of fish?
Yeah, so it turns out a lot of drugs that act on our minds target parts of the brain that have a deep evolutionary history. And so they're shared by lots of different animals.
Okay.
So they can work on salmon in similar ways that work on humans. Now, it's not like fish are literally popping pills like we would. What's happening is the pills are getting super diluted in rivers and entering their bodies through their gills.
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Chapter 7: Why were Clobazam and Tramadol chosen for the study?
Oh, huh.
Yeah. But even with super low concentrations, like what a fish would encounter in the wild, these drugs are still altering their behavior in the lab.
This all makes sense. It sounds like a big problem. So there have been a lot of experiments to understand the problem on a deeper level, but way fewer field experiments. So how are researchers studying the effects of drug exposure in the wild?
So researchers put these like slow-release capsules into the bodies of over 250 juvenile hatchery-raised Atlantic salmon. The capsules released two drugs, a benzodiazepine called Clobazam, used to treat anxiety, and an opioid used for pain management called Tramadol.
So why these two drugs, Clobazam and Tramadol in particular?
In humans, these drugs can cause harmful interactions, and so the researchers wanted to see if combining them had, like, extra bad effects.
Yikes, okay.
They're also found in lots of rivers around the world, but not in the river where these particular salmon live.
Okay, so this sounds like a very good river in which to conduct this study.
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