Swimming in a sea of drugs: Psychiatric drugs in the aquatic environment could have severe adverse effects on wildlife and ecosystems.

Abstract

Tomas Brodin, a behavioral ecologist at Umea University, Sweden, was driving home from work 1 day in 2011 and listening to the radio. A chemist was being interviewed, talking about how he had discovered 20 different pharmaceuticals in the tissue of rainbow trout near a wastewater plant. Brodin, whose research focuses on animal personality, was immediately intrigued: Since pharmaceuticals change the personality of humans, could this affect wildlife too? “We had been joking about this possibility in the lab”, Brodin said. But now this joke seemed more real than he had expected. Brodin contacted the chemist from the radio show, Jerker Fick, who turned out to be working in the same building. Together with Jonatan Klaminder and Micael Jonsson, they began to collaborate on investigating the effect of psychiatric drugs in the environment on fish behavior. > … drugs that make people less fearful or less depressed could similarly act on neural circuits that process emotion and behavior in fish. A growing world population along with better medical care have drastically increased the consumption of pharmaceuticals during the past few decades. There are about 4,000 active pharmaceutical ingredients in use. In 2012, about 60% of US Americans took at least one prescription drug; 15% were taking more than 5. One in six adults in the USA reported taking a psychiatric drug in 2013. Many pharmaceuticals are not fully metabolized or broken down in the human body, but are excreted as active substances, which are only partially removed by most wastewater treatment plants. Various drugs therefore enter freshwater aquatic ecosystems where they may persist in their active form for decades [1]. Their concentrations may be low, but fish and other aquatic organisms are exposed to them persistently. ### Effects of psychiatric drugs on fish behavior There have been increasing concerns that residues of antibiotics could generate antibiotic resistance …