Are Sharks in the Florida Keys Feasting on Bales of Cocaine?
A marine biologist and an environmental scientist teamed up to find out
First there was cocaine bear. Then there was cocaine cat. Now there may be cocaine sharks. That’s the premise of one of this week’s Shark Week episodes, filmed in the Florida Keys, where lots of sharks live, and where smugglers regularly dump bundles of cocaine from Central and South America into the waters to evade law enforcement.
In the episode, marine biologist and broadcaster Tom “the Blowfish” Hird and University of Florida environmental scientist Tracy Fanara team up to test the premise. To do so, they don their scuba gear and hop into the ocean—with a camera team—to observe shark behavior up close and personal. Along the way, they conduct a series of experiments—including simulating a real-life drug drop and triggering apex predator dopamine rushes by feeding sharks bait balls made of highly concentrated fish powder—to find out if the beasts are ingesting the dumped narcotics, and, if so, what effect the illicit drugs might have on their behavior.
Spoiler alert: They don’t come up with any scientific conclusions. But the issue is a real one that other scientists have weighed in on in more rigorous experimental studies. In a paper published two years ago in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the authors concluded that methamphetamine in contaminated rivers could cause opioid-seeking behaviors and addiction in wild brown trout. The researchers also wrote that the addictive behaviors could potentially disrupt fish migratory patterns and undermine the trouts’ capacity to forage for food and find mates.
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In Florida, where last month the U.S. Coast Guard offloaded over 14,100 pounds of cocaine, valued at $186 million, sharks and other ocean-dwellers may be the ones getting addicted. “The deeper story here is the way that chemicals, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs are entering our waterways—entering our oceans—and what effect that they then could go on to have on these delicate ocean ecosystems,” Hird told Live Science.
While the show’s experiments are more for dramatic effect designed to intrigue viewers, Hird hopes the episode will encourage more research into how drugs are making their way from human populations to fish populations and how that flow of chemicals might affect both.