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Some Rivers Are So Drug-Polluted, Their Eels Get High on Cocaine (nationalgeographic.com)
Joshua Rapp Learn, reporting for National Geographic: Critically endangered eels hyped up on cocaine could have trouble making a 3,700-mile trip to mate and reproduce -- new research warns. And while societies have long grappled with ways to cope with the use of illicit drugs, less understood are the downstream effects these drugs might have on other species after they enter the aquatic environment through wastewater. So, in the name of research, scientists pushed cocaine on European eels in labs for 50 days in a row, in an effort to monitor the effects of the experience on the fish.
European eels have complex life patterns, spending 15 to 20 years in fresh or brackish water in European waterways before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to spawn in the Sargasso Sea just east of the Caribbean and the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. While the eels are also farmed for food, the wild population is considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature due to dams and other waterway changes that block their migrations, overfishing, and different types of water pollution. The eels are vulnerable to trace concentrations of cocaine, particularly in their early lives, according to the researchers of a study published in Science of the Total Environment.
European eels have complex life patterns, spending 15 to 20 years in fresh or brackish water in European waterways before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to spawn in the Sargasso Sea just east of the Caribbean and the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. While the eels are also farmed for food, the wild population is considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature due to dams and other waterway changes that block their migrations, overfishing, and different types of water pollution. The eels are vulnerable to trace concentrations of cocaine, particularly in their early lives, according to the researchers of a study published in Science of the Total Environment.
And the eels were all heard singing...
If you want to hang out, you've gotta take her out, cocaine
If you want to get down, get down on the ground, cocaine
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie,
Cocaine
If you got that lose, you want to kick them blues, cocaine
When your day is done, and you want to ride on cocaine
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie,
Cocaine
If your day is gone, and you want to ride on, cocaine
Don't forget this fact, you can't get it back, cocaine
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie,
Cocaine
She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie,
Cocaine
Look, Mick Jagger is fine, so are other eels.
>scientists pushed cocaine on European eels in labs for 50 days in a row
Okay... they tested cocaine on eels in a lab setting... how does that concentration compare to cocaine in rivers? Article doesn't have any numbers for comparison.
Are we really suggesting that the random list of substances we've banned are going to have some sort of magical property vs all the other substances we pass on in our wastewater? This particular species may be in some way impacted by this particular substance but given that there are dozens of commonly prescribed medications that are objectively more dangerous to living things than the list we've banned because they cause "euphoria" I fail to see the point of this particular research.
"Guguguguguguh-yeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!! I'm Dr. Rockso! The rock 'n roll clown! I do COCAINE!!!"
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Everyone knows that Eels prefer Crystal Meth to Cocaine.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This is a real problem: localized pollution. While people scream and cry about "climate change", their water and air are being polluted by local sources. This has an immediate effect on the entire ecosystems. In addition - when you destroy and drain marshlands you will immediately have flooding in surrounding areas. You don't need to wait for climate change for this to happen. People talk about Manhattan getting flooded regularly because of sea level rise caused by climate change. This always amuses me, because the reason Manhattan gets flooded is because you destroyed all the wetlands that used to surround the area. You can't carbon tax local pollution though, so there is no incentive to fix this.
I think not.. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming....
If it's a problem, stop letting dealers and users flush their stash during arrest proceedings by always breaching though the bathroom walls.
(sarc: off)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
High on Cocaine...
HT: Jerry Garcia
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yeah, that's totally a sensical thing to do -- definitely no research assistants cut into the stash at all. Nope.
Let's see, I'm going to design a creature that lives in the inland waters of one continent, then swims a quarter way around the bloody world to bonk. This is WTF even by WTF Evolution standards.
Go home evolution, you're drunk. [ But hey, want some of this lab grade cocaine? ]
hopefully, now that society is accepting medical and recreational marijuana, cocaine is next.
Just like marijuana ("marihuana") was demonized for it's association with Mexicans, cocaine was demonized for it's association with blacks. (Specifically, the fear that black men would snort a line of cocaine and then rape your wife or daughter).
Meanwhile, bored housewives, business executives, etc had been using low doses of cocaine for years without problems. To this day, many slashdot readers, tech workers, doctors, business men, etc self-medicate with a line or two of coke. The biggest danger isn't the cocaine, it's whatever shit it's been cut with.
So, stop pretending cocaine makes black people rape white women. It's time to legalize recreational cocaine.
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Let The Good Times Roll......Eel Guitar Solo.........
Cocaine Fueled Eels ON A PLANE
Starring Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson.
It'd be much easier in the long term to deal with those substances if we hadn't declared them illegal, so we could instead regulate their production (and distribution, sales, etc.) and demand the producers don't dump their waste on the eels. That magical property vs. all the other substances is precisely and accurately that we've declared them illegal and as a result the wastes of their production don't get passed through wastewater treatment or otherwise get handled with care for the wildlife, like these eels.
But it's much easier in the short term to jump around, point fingers, and shout, than to do anything so quaint as sensible and effective.
polluted waters... Fertilizer & pesticide run off @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1nCBv9S
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
I thought our daily catch looked a bit too upbeat.
Table-ized A.I.
Tell me that giving cocaine to a bunch swimming fangs doesn't sound like a B monster movie.
You'll note that the legal status of cocaine will have little to do with it ending up in wastewater and hence eels. This research just demonstrates the unforeseen consequences of human behavior, and one more reason to NOT do drugs.
We already knew that 'eels got high on cocaine...
I was wondering why my hovercraft was full of eels
* Illegal cocaine is expensive. We couldn't afford to pollute a major river with it if we wanted to.
Unless eels are sensitive to extremely small trace amounts that nobody else would notice. But that brings us to another problem:
* Cocaine comes from the coca plant. It occurs naturally, and die off along the Amazon. If the small amounts of illegal cocaine actually pollutes the Thames, then the Amazon must be saturated in cocaine. Or don't they have eels in south America?
Reads like a classic click bait title.
There plenty of pharmaceuticals used by dentists and doctors which are based on the same active ingredient as the street drug cocaine. Any town with a hospital and poor sewage processing is likely contributing to this problem as much as illicit use. It simply makes for more sensational headlines when you blame illicit users as the sole source of the problem.
Is the Sargasso full of cocaine? If not, why the concern about young eels coming into contact with it? Plus, that's a chunk of ocean, not a river, so I'm further confused about how these young eels could be encountering cocaine infused river water.
Sargassum and ghost pirates that aren't really ghosts and aren't even very good pirates. Everyone knows that.
should we be harvesting the eels to take our damned cocaine back?