Saving Seafood

A Sign Your Fish Might Be on Drugs: Risky Behavior

April 11, 2025 — It has to be stressful: an obstacle course of giant dams, rushing rapids and hungry predators.

That’s what juvenile salmon can face when they migrate out to the salty sea from the freshwater rivers and streams where they hatched. But it turns out that a very specific kind of pollution might be giving some fish an edge, at least on part of the journey.

According to a new study published on Thursday in the journal Science, young salmon exposed to anti-anxiety drugs in the water made it past dams faster. But ecologists are doubtful that it means a survival advantage.

Pharmaceutical pollution is rampant. Nearly 1,000 drugs and their byproducts have been detected in the world’s waterways, including in surprising places like Antarctica. They enter the environment as direct pollution from drug producers, from people flushing unused medications, and from human and animal waste.

Scientists have been studying the effects of these drugs on wildlife for years, but there is still much to learn about how animals respond to the “cocktail of different pharmaceuticals” they’re exposed to, said Michael G. Bertram, a behavioral ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and a leader of the new study.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Plastic is suffocating coral reefs — and it’s not just bottles and bags

July 13, 2023 — Finding new species of fish was the goal when marine biologist Hudson Pinheiro was diving in the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines. And he found them. But while he was down there, he found something else that was deeply troubling: plastic — loads of it smothering the coral reef where the fish were living.

“It’s sad,” Pinheiro, currently a researcher with the University of São Paulo, told NPR. “It’s super, super sad.”

Pinheiro expanded his research focus beyond fish to the plastics they live with. Of particular interest to him: The kinds of plastics covering the reefs and how they were impacting the health of the corals and their fish communities.

Researchers have previously found that plastic can not only “suffocate and kill the corals, sponges and other invertebrates,” says Pinheiro, but also increase the likelihood of a coral getting a disease by 20 times, according to a 2018 study published in Science.

Over the next several years, Pinheiro and 18 other researchers examined trash from 84 reefs across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans — often spending 5 to 6 hours per dive. In harder to reach locations, the team used video recorders mounted on underwater vehicles.

Read the full article at NPR

Plastic pollution is filtering up into the fish that we eat

March 9, 2023 — As an agrarian civilization, almost all of what humans eat is farmed — with the notable exception of seafood. Aside from some farmed fish, most seafood we consume is still caught in the wild. Yet while it might seem that there is something more pure and traditional about consuming “wild” food as opposed to farmed food, the seafood that we eat soaks in a sea contaminated by plastic — and it turns out that a lot of that pollution may be making its way into our bodies via seafood.

Indeed, when it comes to plastics, consumers of seafood may be eating so much of the pernicious pollution that they are regularly chowing down on the equivalents of soda bottles and credit cards. Yet you will never hear a literal “crunch,” and the reason for this is simple, unsettling and disgusting: The plastic in your seafood is “microplastic,” a term for any plastic particle that is less than 5 mm in length.

Though you can neither feel or taste it (usually), the odds are high that it is in your seafood. The most recent example of this came from a 2022 study in the scientific journal Marine Pollution Bulletin. It found that three out of four commercial fish species from Australia and New Zealand contained microplastics in their edible flesh. On average there were 2.5 microplastic particles for each fish.

“The presence of microplastics in commercial seafood is well-documented on a global scale for finfish as well as shellfish like mussels, clams, oysters, and shrimp,” Dr. Britta Baechler, Associate Director of Ocean Plastics Research at Ocean Conservancy, told Salon by email. Baechler cited a recent review study that found that 60% of fish examined globally contained microplastics; it also found that carnivorous fish tend to contain more microplastics than omnivores. “This is particularly notable considering that many commercially important fish species are carnivorous,” Baechler added.

Read the full article at salon

The Serious Health Risks of a Polluted Ocean

February 8, 2021 — Ocean pollution is widespread, worsening, and poses a clear and present danger to human health and wellbeing. But the extent of this danger has not been widely comprehended – until now. Our recent study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the impacts of ocean pollution on human health.

Ocean pollution is a complex mixture of toxic metals, plastics, manufactured chemicals, petroleum, urban and industrial wastes, pesticides, fertilisers, pharmaceutical chemicals, agricultural runoff, and sewage. More than 80 percent arises from land-based sources and it reaches the oceans through rivers, runoff, deposition from the atmosphere – where airborne pollutants are washed into the ocean by rain and snow – and direct dumping, such as pollution from waste water treatment plants and discarded waste. Ocean pollution is heaviest near the coasts and most highly concentrated along the coastlines of low-income and middle-income countries.

Ocean pollution can also be found far beyond national jurisdictions in the open oceans, the deepest oceanic trenches, and on the shores of remote islands. Ocean pollution knows no borders.

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive