Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back Ā© Jim Tatum
SOUTHWEST FLORIDA ā A new study from Florida International University has found that prescription drugs are making their way into our waterways, and even fish.
When Fort Myers native and Ph.D. candidate Nick Castillo first started his research on bonefish in the Florida Keys and Biscayne Bay, his goal was to find out what was causing the popular sportfishās decline in numbers.
āSo we sampled 93 bonefish from Biscayne Bay, all the way south through Key West, so the whole Florida Keys,ā Castillo said.
But after testing the fishās blood, what he found shocked even his professor at Florida International University.
āWe tested for 104 different kinds, and we found 58 different pharmaceuticals. Anti-anxiety medications, allergy medications, heart medications, prostate medications, stomach, the list kind of goes on from there. All the kinds of drugs that we take every day,ā Castillo said.
What he found in the blood of those bonefish was definitive proof that prescription drugs arenāt being filtered out by traditional wastewater treatment, which normally treats sewage before that water cycles back into the environment.
āIts extremely concerning,ā said Jennifer Rehage, a coastal fisheries ecologist from Florida International University. āA lot of these pharmaceuticals are not removed by conventional wastewater treatments, so they are in our water today, here in Florida, throughout the US and most of the world actually….
āResearch on other species, fish show that that anti-anxiety meds will make fish less worried about predators, so they are more likely to be eaten, they change their migration patterns, their behavior patternsā¦ā said Aaron Adams, from Bonefish Tarpon Trust.
The study found that each fish that had its blood tested had an average of seven different kinds of drugs ā a cocktail of chemicals that could mean the collapse of some of the worldās most prized sport fisheries.
āIf you took seven different prescriptions to your pharmacist in one day to get filled, your pharmacist would probably freak out because of drug interactions,ā Adams added.
