Going Cray-Cray

 

Come with me, gentle reader, to the online pages of Medium.Com, although I am clearly an extra large. They recently posted an article by Simon Spichak, with the intriguing headline Antidepressants in Rivers and Streams Are Making Crayfish Bolder and I think it bears some looking into.

First of all, don't be worried that Crayfish are willfully buying drugs to get over their drab, dull lives. For all we know, they are perfectly happy, just crayfishing it up all day long. But they get drugs in their system two ways:

1 - We take drugs and enjoy their many benefits - euphoria, fearlessness, lowered levels of depression and anxiety - and then, as people will, we void our waste, solid and liquid, if you catch my drift. Poorly managed municipal waste, and recreational fishermen too lazy to walk back to a proper toilet, contaminate crayfish habitats, and put the poor crawdaddy in contact with second-hand selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, what your friendly neighborhood pharmacist calls "just the thing" for treatment of anxiety and depression. Drug companies look for snappy, memorable brand names for their patent medicines, so they call them "Not2Worry" or some such.

And don't forget that bottle of Mother's Little Helper that the doctor prescribed for Aunt Deliria that time when things seemed so bleak, and then, she didn't take the pills so they sat in the medicine cabinet next to the Midol, Pepto-Bismol, and Serutan® ("Nature's spelled backwards). Comes the day someone decides to deep-six all that old junk, so they flush it down the Stanley, and the drugs find their way to marine life.

The journal called "Ecosphere" is out with a study showing that added levels of  antidepressant makes crayfish behave bolder.  And a bold crayfish takes chances and finds his life shortened by being on someone's lunch plate down South.

One common antidepressant, citalopram, effects the human brain by adjusting the levels of serotonin. That's the hormone that stabilizes our mood, and tries to keep us feeling happy and well. The study just conducted shows that citalopram in the water will have an impact on the brain pathways of the crayfish, too.   

Studies showed that crayfish so exposed spent more time darting in and out of their underwater shelters, looking for food more than they used to, and socializing with friends and neighbors much less than before.

Now, this is not going to change the course of our world in the same way as the 47th "Fast And Furious" movie will, but one of the authors of the study, Lindsey Reisinger said:

“Crayfish eat algae, dead plants and really anything else at the bottom of streams and ponds. They play an important role in these aquatic environments. If they are getting eaten more often, that can have a ripple effect in those ecosystems.”

And all because we keep flushing our old pills, so please don't. For Baltimore County residents, there is a drop box by the entrance to each police precinct where pills can be tossed without negative environmental impact.

Save the Crayfish!