ABOVE: A brown trout—the species used in the new study—being held by a researcher
PAVEL HORKÝ
According to a July 6 paper in Journal of Experimental Biology, brown trout (Salmo trutta) can get hooked on ecologically plausible amounts of meth. After prolonged exposure to concentrations seen in nature, the fish chose meth-laced water over water without the drug, a shift that could have ecological consequences if contamination with the drug similarly shifts habitat preference in the wild.
Pavel Horký, a behavioral ecologist at Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and the first author on the paper, and his colleagues chose to look at methamphetamine specifically because its use is on the rise globally, he writes in an email to The Scientist, “and where methamphetamine users are, there is also methamphetamine pollution of freshwaters.”
“Drug reward cravings by fish, as was documented in our results, could overshadow natural rewards like foraging or ...
