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Disinhibited fishes (1)
Alicia Pérez-Fuentetaja, biologist, during a meeting with researchers of the Great Lakes Center, Buffalo (NY), mai 2018
When you take an antibiotic, you don’t use 100% of it, you may use 40%, and the other part breaks down and goes out of the body with fecies and urine. So that goes into the aquatic system. Those molecules are active, and they are designed to basically depress levels of cortisol, which is a hormone that organisms use for stress response. When a person is very stressed, they give him antidepressants. But if a fish gets antidepressants, it’s not stressed, which means they will come out in the open, they’ll expose themselves to predators. They are not scared, basically. Because their cortisol is low, because they are in water full of antidepressants.
–They’re less inhibited?
–Yes, without those hormones, you feel like life is good!