Bottlenose dolphins are swimming in drugs including fentanyl, according to a team of researchers who recently examined 89 blubber samples from these iconic cetaceans.
The team study—ready to publish In iScience— reveals how pharmaceutical contaminants have spread into U.S. waterways and are affecting one of the most popular marine mammal species.
The team found fentanyl, as well as the drugs carisoprodol and meprobamate, both used in pharmacies for pain relief, in 30 of the 89 dolphins studied, recovered from sites in Texas and Mississippi.
Although simply touching or being near fentanyl is not fatal, despite persistent mythwhich is sometimes taken up by law enforcement: fentanyl is responsible for hundreds of thousands fatal drug overdoses in the United States. In case it needs to be made clear: fentanyl is not a good thing for dolphins in their system.
This opioid is 100 times more potent than morphine and can be fatal if not used in a controlled environment. The Gulf of Mexico is not a controlled environment and dolphins are “effective bioindicators of ecosystem health in contaminant research,” according to the document. In other words, there is a good chance that fentanyl will also affect other organisms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fentanyl was found in “significantly more” fat samples than carisoprodol and meprobamate, which the team noted “is expected because fentanyl distributes readily into fat.” 63% of tissue samples were from male dolphins and the remaining 37% were from female dolphins; Twelve of the samples were collected in the Mississippi Sound in 2013, showing that the problem persists along the Gulf Coast and dates back at least a decade.
“As 40% of all pharmaceuticals detected were in historical samples, pharmaceutical pollution may be a long-standing problem that has been largely overlooked,” the study authors write. “Evaluating historical water and tissue samples of marine taxa for pharmaceutical detection will provide insight into the duration of the problem. »
Surprisingly, dolphins are not the first sea creature to make headlines this year because of drugs used in their bodies for humans. During the summer, sharks off the coast of Rio de Janeiro tested positive for cocainean indicator that trace amounts of human drugs consumed affect all kinds of creatures who never signed up to take them.
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