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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.
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.
Everyone knows that Eels prefer Crystal Meth to Cocaine.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm guessing they're actually doing the same thing that is usually done in popular science when talking about "cocaine in rivers". They're talking about benzoylecgonine, which is the metabolic end product of cocaine in human metabolism.
So you're saying that the researchers didn't give cocaine to the eels; rather, they snorted all the cocaine, then pissed into an aquarium full of eels?