Give That Fish A Valium!

The headline sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? Fish don’t need drugs, especially the mood-altering kind. What life is more chill and cool than that of a fish? All they do all day is swim around with their buddies, snagging little bugs off the surface and making baby fish. Sure, the little fish have to avoid the bigger fish, but that’s life for all of us. Why do fish need drugs?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t. The problem is that they’re getting them even though they shouldn’t. Scientists have detected more than 900 drug ingredients in natural waterways around the world, from antibiotics to antidepressants. Many of these drugs, especially ones that act on the mind, target parts of the brain shared by many different species. Uh-oh, that means…

Yeah, fish are getting all the psychotropic drugs as well as the leftover pain relievers you flushed down the toilet two months ago. In many streams and rivers, fish are swimming in a veritable soup of drugs. Components of that soup may be disrupting their behavior, according to a new study.

Salmon seem to be the ones that are showing the most difference. You remember how salmon are unique, don’t you? They’re the ones that swim upstream to spawn. There are a handful of specific spots in the world where this happens every year. Fishermen love it because it allows them to schedule when they go fishing.

Over the past decade or so, lab experiments have shown that naturally occurring concentrations of such drugs can alter fish behavior. In the lab, drugged fish are often more antisocial, less fearful, and more prone to taking risks and finding themselves in risky situations. It’s that ‘prone to taking risks’ part that got our minds to creatively thinking in overdrive. What is a risky situation for a fish?

Our favorite concept is of a fish caught on a fisherman’s line, standing up on a rock and pulling on the line so that the fisherman falls into the water. The fish then attaches the lure to the fisherman and sends him downstream. With apologies to any fishermen, that scenario makes us laugh.

This obviously raises the question of what drugs cause this ‘risky’ behavior. Clobazam seemed to boost the migratory success of the young salmon. More clobazam-exposed fish reached the Baltic than non-exposed fish, the researchers found. Clobazam is used with other medication(s) to control seizures in adults and children 2 years of age and older who have Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (a disorder that causes seizures and often causes developmental delays).

But, as with any drug, there are side effects. Clobazam (which is kind of fun to say) can cause paranoid or suicidal ideation and impair memory, judgment, and coordination. Boom! There goes any risk aversion a fish might have. They may mistakenly think that they can take on that hungry grizzly and live. We know plenty of humans crazy enough to try it even without the drug.

Scientists were shocked! Shocked, I tell you! “We sort of expected decreased survival in the wild,” said Jack Brand, a biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. “We suspect that these fish exposed to clobazam are more risk prone, more solitary, and therefore just sort of bee-lining it through the dams rather than waiting around for their salmon friends.”

“We have no idea what those anti-anxiety medications plus the analgesics, plus the antibiotics, you know, plus the anti-epileptic plus the chemotherapy, etc., etc., collectively are doing to fish and other aquatic species,” said Karen Kidd, an ecotoxicologist at McMaster University.  “It’s a global concern.”

Oh, one of the other things they don’t know: how the drugs might affect the people who ultimately eat the affected fish. Obviously, not every fish is going to get the same cocktail of drugs, just based on water flows. Some fish could come through with worrisome levels of the drugs, while others from the same school show virtually no effect at all.

This got our imaginations running again. Let’s say you’re out to dinner with your favorite person. You’re having steak, they’re having the poached salmon. Unbeknownst to anyone, the salmon was high as a church steeple on Clobazam. The effects start small at first. They try balancing their fork on their tongue or turning their napkin into a swan with a broken neck. Then, they want to dance to the background music that no one else in the restaurant can hear. Next thing you know, they’ve stripped down to their skivies and want to go surfing in the lake; the only problem of which is, it’s Lake Mead. In winter.

So, yeah, this is a world problem that we didn’t know we had. If you go fishing on a regular basis, you might want to stay alert. We don’t have any way to tell which fish are high and which are on steroids. The opposite can be true as well. Anxiety meds in a fish could, potentially, make one feel depressed.

This just creates all kinds of possible scenarios in which fishing is suddenly not the most boring sport in the universe.

Maybe we need to get a fishing license this year… for “research” purposes, you know.