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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
"How young Donald Trump was slapped and punched until he made his bed"
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/donald-trump-fellow-cadet-article-1.3401110
My last conversation with Donald Trump was at the New York Military Academy, where we were both cadets. It was 1964, the year he graduated. We were walking together near the baseball field where, he reminded me, he'd played exceptionally well. He demanded that I tell him the story of one of his greatest games.
"The bases were loaded," I told him. "We were losing by three. You hit the ball just over the third baseman's head. Neither the third baseman nor the left fielder could get to the ball in time. All four of our runs came in; we won the game."
"No," he said. "That's not the way it happened. I want you to remember this: I hit the ball out of the ballpark! Remember that. I hit it out of the ballpark!"
Ballpark? I thought. We were talking about a high school practice field. There was no park to hit a ball out of. And anyway, his hit was a blooper the fielders misplayed.
But I wasn't going to argue with Donald. What was the harm in a little embellishment, if it helped him survive New York Military Academy?
NYMA, the private boarding school where Trump's parents sent him and where mine sent me, could be a brutal place where grown men who were veterans of the real military ruled with threats and force.
Trump's first year, under the command of Major Theodore Dobias, was hellish. Dobias slapped and punched him until he learned to make his bed and polish his shoes — things that Donald, an aggressive little wiseguy, had at first refused to do.
At some point Dobias assumed that he had broken Trump and eased up. More probably, Trump had figured out Dobias' weak points and had begun to exploit them. He flattered the major and became one of his "winners" who was favored with privileges and praised.
As the Academy's unofficial PR man, Dobias even contributed to the Trump myth, eventually telling Rolling Stone that pro scouts vied to sign Trump. As with many things Dobias asserted about Trump, this story may or may not be true.
Besides sports, most of Donald's years at the Academy were unremarkable. In his junior year, he was a supply sergeant in charge of the World War II M1s rifles we all lugged around at parade. But even in this laid-back position he was brash and assertive.
A member of the school band recallsTrump throwing shoes at him and yelling at him to shut up when this young man stood too close to the barracks trumpeting Reveille. Rumor had it that he got away with stuff like this because his father donated large sums to the school.
In his senior year, Donald was promoted to captain of A Company. Unlike other cadet captains who took an interest in the lives of the adolescents in their charge, Trump commanded at a remove. Aside from a determination that cadets in his care would always polish their brass belt buckles and keep the spit-shine on their boots, come evening he'd retreat to his room.
My friend Peter Ticktin, who was an A Company platoon sergeant, emailed me recently to say he saw Trump as someone who kept his thoughts to himself and delegated his responsibilities. "DT put his trust in me," Ticktin wrote . "(Although trust) may be too strong (a word), as I was not a confidant as to his personal thoughts. No one was. He was much to himself. A good guy, but no one's real buddy."
Trump couldn't remain aloof after one of his minions allegedly hazed a younger cadet. Ignoring the unwritten barracks rule that no report to the adult authorities be made, this cadet finked to his parents, who demanded a meeting with the superintendent. It resulted in Donald's removal as captain.
Any other cadet caught in such a scandal would have been busted to a lower rank and exiled to a different barracks. But Donald was transferred, with no loss of rank, to what was probably intended as a desk job. (He called it a promotion.)
While Donald had not succeeded as a manager of young men
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?