Fentanyl has now been found in the blubber of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. … [+]
The effects of the opioid epidemic have gone beyond what the eyes can see. And then there is the sea. Fentanyl has now been found in the blubber of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. This is evident from a study recently published in the journal iScience. And unless dolphins somehow prescribe this powerful synthetic opioid drug to each other, you can thank humans for letting the opioid situation get to this point.
For the study, a team from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (Anya Isabelle Ocampos, Makayla A. Guinn, Justin Elliott, Hussain Abdulla and Dara N. Orbach), Precision Toxicological Consultancy (Christiana Wittmaack) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( Carrie Sinclair) took blubber samples from 89 different dolphins (83 alive and six after death) off the coast of Texas and Mississippi. They then used ultra-performance liquid chromatography along with Orbitrap Fusion Tribrid mass spectrometry to look for various pharmaceutical drugs in the tissue samples.
What they found basically had an Rx rating. Examination of 18 of the live dolphin samples and all post-mortem samples revealed fentanyl. Thirty of the 89 samples contained at least one of the following prescription drugs: fentanyl (which is about a hundred times as powerful as morphine), carisoprodol (a skeletal muscle relaxant), or meprobamate, an anti-aging drug. – anxiety medication.
Again, you wouldn’t normally expect such drugs to be found at any level in dolphin tissue, as ‘bottle’ in bottlenose dolphins does not stand for medicine vial. But what’s inside dolphins may be a representation of what’s around them in the ocean. After all, dolphins are apex predators in the ocean, meaning they are at the top of the food chain there. Therefore, what goes into the bodies of dolphins may be a good representation – or in this case, a good poor representation – of what goes into the bodies of other marine animals.
Medicines are likely reaching the oceans because people and companies continue to use various bodies of water, like crazy toilet bowls, for medicines and various chemicals. In 2017 I wrote for Forbes about how antidepressants were found in the Great Lakes and fish. This included discovering antidepressants, the metabolites of antidepressants and antihistamines in not only the brains of fish, but also in their liver, muscles and gonads. I also covered a a study published in the September 2010 issue Aquatic toxicology showed how antidepressants in the water can make some species of shrimp ‘suicidal’ and swim towards the light instead of away from it.
It’s not yet clear how such drugs affect dolphins, because you may not get a straight answer when you ask them how they feel. However, previous studies have shown that fish can exhibit behavioral changes or endocrine disruptions after being exposed to certain anti-anxiety, analgesic or anti-inflammatory drugs.
Such fishing situations can also be very relevant for humans, since many humans, like dolphins, eat fish and shrimp. You have to wonder how much fentanyl, carisoprodol, meprobamate and other drugs are getting into your fish and chips, fish tacos, fried fish, fish cakes, cerviche and fish everything you eat. And who knows what such constant exposure to all these things can do to your body and mind?
This is yet another example of how people and human-run organizations are polluting the Earth and its water bodies with all kinds of things, including a range of different pharmaceutical products. And even if you don’t care about all the wildlife swimming around in the lakes, rivers and oceans, these latest findings with dolphins show how such pollution can easily be funneled back to humans.