Perch.BENT CHRISTENSENAn anti-anxiety medication that has found its way from water treatment plants into ponds and streams of Europe may alter the behavior of perch even at low concentrations, according to a study published today (February 14) in Science. Fish exposed to the drug, called oxazepam, tended to eat more quickly and were more active and less social than they had been prior to drug exposure and compared with their unexposed peers.
“It’s definitely an interesting study,” said David Skelly, an ecologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research. “It’s joining a group of exposure studies that are showing very clearly that the individual chemicals that are showing up as environmental contaminants are ecologically relevant.”
Previously researchers have raised concerns about all manner of pharmaceuticals in the water, from estrogens suggested to cause reproductive abnormalities in frogs to psychoactive drugs linked to autism in fish. Oxazepam is a type of benzodiazepine, drugs that work by binding to GABA receptors and are used to treat anxiety. Since many animals have these receptors, it stands to reason that benzodiazepines might influence animal behavior, Brodin said, but they “weren’t being studied [in animals] in environmentally relevant quantities.”
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