It’s no secret that cocaine and other illegal drugs sometimes turn up in Florida waters, but are sharks ingesting the drugs and getting high?
Experts will be exploring this question in the Discovery Channel Shark Week episode “Cocaine Sharks,” which will air on July 26.
Drug smugglers sometimes drop bales of cocaine overboard and out of planes if they think they’re about to be caught, and fishermen have found bales with missing chunks, suggesting that sharks have bitten into them.
Marine biologist Tom “The Blowfish” Hird and University of Florida environmental scientist Tracy Fanara decided to conduct experiments in the Florida Keys to get to the bottom of the question for the “Cocaine Sharks” episode. After they dropped into the water packages that look like cocaine bales but were filled instead with fish powder, a swarm of lemon sharks swam right up to packages and took bites out of them.
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While the footage of the sharks swarming around faux cocaine bales might make for great TV, more importantly it “shed[s] light on a real problem, that everything we use, everything we manufacture, everything we put into our bodies, ends up in our wastewater streams and natural water bodies, and these aquatic life we depend on to survive are then exposed to that,” Fanara said, according to The Guardian.
“We’ve seen studies with pharmaceuticals, cocaine, methamphetamines, ketamine, all of these, where fish are being [affected] by drugs,” she said. “If these cocaine bales are a point source of pollution, it’s very plausible [sharks] can be affected by this chemical. Cocaine is so soluble that any of those packages open just a little, the structural integrity is destroyed and the drug is in the water.”
The researchers also noticed sharks exhibiting peculiar behaviors, including a hammerhead directly approaching divers and moving erratically–hammerheads typically avoid humans. And they observed a sandbar shark swimming in circles as if it were focused on an imaginary object.
Discovery Channel’s Shark Week started on Sunday, July 23, and is hosted this year by “Aquaman” star and Hawaii native Jason Momoa.
“My heart is in the ocean,” Momoa told The Associated Press from Tahiti, moments before taking a trip to swim with some of the apex predators. “Doing ‘Shark Week’ is a no-brainer.”
