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Antidepressants In the Water Are Making Shrimp Suicidal
Antidepressants may help a lot of people get up in the morning but new research shows they are making shrimp swim into that big bowl of cocktail sauce in the sky. Alex Ford, a marine biologist at the University of Portsmouth, found that shrimp exposed to the antidepressant fluoxetine are 5 times more likely to swim towards light instead of away from it. Shrimp usually swim away from light as it is associated with birds or fishermen.
By hiding the light with a nice thick layer of oil?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I don't think it's that they want to die.
They probably just don't fear the light anymore.
Since you can't really put a shrimp on a shrink-couch and ask it about its feelings, it is very hard to say whether the shrimp are "suicidal" or whether their fear responses are being blunted.
More than a few antidepressants also have some anti-anxiety properties, which are often quite useful in a theraputic context; but for an organism that is tiny and made of meat, "anti-anxiety" and "pro-suicide" might be uncomfortably close...
with a some ground up anti-depressants and a flashlight. hope to catch some happy shrimp.
At least the shrimp have an easier time of committing suicide, because the ocean sound near Seattle is turning acidic ...
Mind you, most of the crustaceans here are clams, but we do have giant sea creatures.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Many times, antidepressants will give people motivation before relieving the anxiety or depression. Thus, if someone is going to become suicidal, it's usually within 2 weeks of starting an antidepressant. Not that this factoid has anything to do with shrimp... just sayin'.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Why exactly is light being associated with birds; are they carrying flashlights when hunting for shrimp now? Okay, maybe surface light in general, but I'm not so sure that qualifies the shrimp as being suicidal.
Thats a great name for a Rock Band.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
This is really depressing.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Shrimp with fluoxetine (Prozac) go towards the light and get caught easier by fisherman? Prozac makes me feel good... so.. eating shrimp with Prozac is like eating... chocolate.. makes me feel good... Yumm... bumper crop of chocolate shrimp... I bet the sea birds eating the shrimp have high levels of Prozac too... humm.. chocolate seagulls....
Yep, all those birds carrying flashlights are just feasting on shrimp now!
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Swim? I thought they sort of scuttled about on the bottom. Why would they start 'swimming' towards the surface?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
They don't fear the Reaper
If the shrimp choose to swim towards my frying pan then so be it...who am I to argue with drug induced suicidal tendencies?
Whereas some people see disturbing potential side effects of our best attempts to regulate brain chemistry, I see a business opportunity and a way to meet heavily-tattooed hot short girls.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
When I saw the headline, I wondered just how a shrimp becomes "suicidal".
Suicide is one intentionally taking their own life, not making behavioral or life-style choices that may increase the chance of an early demise. Unless their intent is to swim toward the light so that they can be killed, "suicidal" is quite sensationalist.
Otherwise, we could start describing all kinds of poor decision making and unhealthy lifestyle choices of humans as "suicidal."
Maybe they wouldn't be so suicidal if they had some anti-depressants. Oh, wait...
Lots of shrimp are already being affected by this. People take the antidepressants which then get into the wastewater which gets into the ocean. That makes it a real environmental concern (albeit a minor one; other ones are justifiably topping the list at the moment) and not a joke.
IMO it just goes to show that the law of unintended consequences is damn near universally applicable.
Your brain is not a computer.
Argh! Must not cope with the sad article through medication! Must tough it out!
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
It's just an experiment with a single antidepressant, fluoxetine (aka Prozac). Who knows what reaction they will have with the copious other AD's on the market.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
If they were hiding in the darness that sounds like they were already depressed. They took an AD and it is working so it only seems reasonable that they might want to go play in the sun a little.
My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
Above the Arctic Circle? Try above the Mason-Dixon line...
Okay, after reading the summery of the study. Parasites in shrimp can cause them to travel toward light and swim against gravity. The parasites act as a serotonin modulator. One particular antidepressant Fluoxetine does the same thing. This action can be bad for the shrimp. The level of Fluoxetine was 100 ng/L. How many liters in the gulf? About 2.43400 × 10^18 liters. So we need to dump a littler over 24 million metric tons of Fluoxetine into the gulf to see this concentration? Actually I am asking, I could be wrong on my math.
Oh I get it, waste drugs should not be put into the ecosystem. They can affect animals just as much as humans. But the story this links to is just FUD and the study is behind a paywall.
There's depressed shrimp, bipolar shrimp, schizophrenic shrimp, manic depressive shrimp, pyromaniac shrimp (particularly dangerous at the moment), dementia shrimp, autistic shrimp, megalomanic shirmp, obsessive-compulsive shrimp, sleep walking shrimp, voyeuristic shrimp, shrimp gumbo, shrimp cocktail, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich... That's, that's about it.
Or whatever you call baby shrimp.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Thus hath the candle singed the moth.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Randy Newman should write a song about this.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp are the wingnuts of the sea. There's suicidal shrimp, paranoid shrimp, depressed shrimp, manic shrimp, psychotic shrimp, neurotic shrimp, borderline personality shrimp, obsessive compulsive shrimp, narcissistic shrimp, agoraphobic shrimp, social anxiety disordered shrimp, schizophrenic shrimp, munchausen's by proxy shrimp, cyclothymic shrimp, anorexic shrimp, catatonic shrimp, tourette's shrimp, PTSD shrimp, Asperger's shrimp, that's... that's about it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I suspect this is normal... considering they are being called "shrimp" all the time. Or is it shrimps. Or shrimpi.
I was on Fluoxetine for a while until deciding that I no longer wanted my brain to be fed this stuff. Being concerned about its effects on the environment and the millions of people on this stuff helped me to make the decision to come of it and deal with the depression myself using alternative methods.
Am now taking a St John's wort tablet each morning with breakfast and a 5-HTP tablet before bedtime. Have felt great, if not better, than when I was on Fluoxetine. And I'm pretty sure that St John's wort is not going to harm Shrimps.
Many human lifestyle choices may be "suicidal". Smoking tobacco causes heart attack, strokes, and many cancers. This is slow suicide, but it's still suicide.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suicide
The usage that pertains to this discussion is:
"the act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind"
Smoking, watching too much TV, drinking and texting (while driving), having an unhealthy diet, and being an Alaskan Fisherman might all be choices that may considerably increase your chances of meeting an early demise.
However, calling these things suicide, when they lack the actual intent to kill one's self, but calling any of those things suicide is just dumbing down the meaning of the word.
Even deliberate acts that lead to one being killed are not suicide, unless it was with the intent of ending one's life. For example, driving with your headlights off at midnight while high on drugs on a dare is not suicide, even if such a stupid act kills them.
Suicide requires:
1) An act or an instance.
2) A voluntary intent to kill one's self.
As for the original article, unless the antidepressants also gave them sentience so that they would realize, "Holy Bejeesus! I'm a freaking shrimp! Why didn't anyone tell me!?", then I doubt they have intent.
However, calling these things suicide, when they lack the actual intent to kill one's self, but calling any of those things suicide is just dumbing down the meaning of the word.
Damnit, I saw the redundant phrasing 1 second after I hit submit. I might as well point it out myself before some grammar Nazi jumps in on it...
Elvis Presley sang a song about it in the sixties.
Antidepressants may help a lot of people get up in the morning
That’s not like taking Ecstasy and Cocaine to “get up in the morning”. It IS taking Ecstasy and Cocaine to “get up in the morning”.
Please tell me he was only joking. I’m serious. I’m very confused right now. This can’t be real, can it? He GOT to be kidding, and I just majority wooshed myself, right? ^^
Although, no offense my fellow Americans, but I hope you’re not surprised that I can actually imagine it being true. :/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Increased suicide rates have been a known side effect of antidepressants for years. Because of this, amongst other things, one should avoid Diazepam/Valium when having severe depression.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
...pretty
Given that Scientology hates antidepressants in particular and psychiatry in general, I wonder how long it will take them to use this study to argue against using antidepressants.
They're shrimp-onauts, going boldly where no shrimp has dared go before. ^___^
Emotions! In your brain!
Though on the other hand, colloquially "suicidal behavior" often refers to actions taken that aren't necessarily intended to result in death but for which it is a nearly inevitable outcome.
You may not say the guy who drives around at night with the headlights off while wasted is "committing suicide", but you might say he's engaged in "suicidal behavior". Same with the rat infected with toxoplasma who is attracted to the smell of cat urine; the fungus is making the rat behave suicidally even if the rat isn't consciously trying to die. Same with the shrimp.
I agree that the headline seems to imply an emotional state of "suicidal" which is obviously nonsense. But I think you could say that it makes them engage in suicidal behavior.
The enemies of Democracy are
A shrimp does not associate.
G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate.
prawn again! Swim to the light my child and we will accept you. On a serious note. People can be sooooo depressed that they CBA to kill them self, so they start taking AD's and then 3-4 weeks later kill them self when they have motivation. :(
It's curious what sort of science makes it to the national news.
There are some odd aspects to the reported data. The effect seems to go away at higher doses. This is not unheard-of, and could be real, but it does raise a red flag. In one experiment, they saw an trend toward an effect on phototaxis in week 3, but not weeks one and 2, and the variability was so high it wasn't significant. So they repeated the experiment. On the second try, they saw an effect in all 3 weeks and this time it was significant. There are similar anomalies with respect to geotaxis. Repeating an experiment until you get the result you want is a bit shaky statistically (although it is often done) and will tend to exaggerate statistical significance. Reporting the two experiments separately is a bit odd, also; most people would tend to average multiple experiments together rather than reporting them separately. I would never publish an experiment that was done only twice and produced significant results in only a single trial.
So the result might be right, but there are enough oddities that I won't take it very seriously until it has been repeated. If the effect is real, but only occurs in a very narrow dose range as the data appears to show, it may not be particularly meaningful even if it is real--how often will shrimp in the wild be exposed to that narrow concentration range that appears to cause a problem?
that my "deliciousirony" tag wasn't accepted.
If only the shrimp had the courtesy to jump into a pan with a little bit of butter and lightly fry themselves first.