Andrada Fiscutean
speaker
206 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 18 Sep
Andrada Fiscutean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Is it easy to give cocaine to a fish?
Well, the experiment happened in Lake Vättern, the second largest in the country.
It was carried out by a team led by Jack Brand and Michael Bertram at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
And they used young Atlantic salmon in the experiment.
They implanted the fish with tiny devices that slowly released chemical over time.
Then they split the salmon into three groups.
One group received cocaine.
Another received benzoylecgonine.
That's the main substance cocaine breaks down into inside a human body.
A third group received drug-free implants and served as the control group.
Then the scientists tracked the salmon for eight weeks, monitoring how they moved through the lake.
Well, Marnie, the biggest surprise was that the strongest effects did not come from cocaine itself, but its metabolite, benzoylecgonine.
By the end of the study, some of the fish exposed to cocaine's metabolite were swimming almost twice as far each week as those in the control group.
And they also spread much farther through the lake.
And to answer your question, salmon exposed to cocaine showed hints of a similar pattern, but the facts were weaker and scientists were less certain about them.
It is a big problem.
And one global study found small but measurable amounts of cocaine and its byproduct in rivers and lakes around the world, as well as in wastewater.
In some parts, however, including Antwerp in Belgium, the concentrations were surprisingly high.
Yes, that's why it's important to study how fish react to cocaine and other substances, because even small changes in behavior can have much bigger effects.
If fish move differently or respond to danger in unusual ways, that can change how species interact and eventually affect the entire ecosystem.
Showing 121–140 of 206 · page 7 of 11
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