Pharmaceutical contaminants have spread in natural environments across the globe, endangering biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and public health. Research on the environmental impacts of pharmaceuticals is growing rapidly, although a majority of studies are still conducted under controlled laboratory conditions. As such, there is an urgent need to understand the impacts of pharmaceutical exposures on wildlife in complex, real-world scenarios. Here, we validate the performance of slow-release pharmaceutical implants-a recently developed tool in field-based ecotoxicology that allows for the controlled chemical dosing of free-roaming aquatic species-in terms of the accumulation and distribution of pharmaceuticals of interest in tissues. Across two years, we directly exposed 256 Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) smolts to one of four pharmaceutical treatments: clobazam (50 μg g-1 of implant), tramadol (50 μg g-1), clobazam and tramadol (50 μg g-1 of each), and control (0 μg g-1). Fish dosed with slow-release implants containing clobazam or tramadol, or their mixture, accumulated these pharmaceuticals in all of the sampled tissues: brain, liver, and muscle. Concentrations of both pharmaceuticals peaked in all tissues at 1 day post-implantation, before reaching relatively stable, slowly declining concentrations for the remainder of the 30-day sampling period. Generally, the highest concentrations of clobazam and tramadol were detected in the liver, followed by the brain and then muscle, with observed concentrations of each pharmaceutical being higher in the single-exposure treatments relative to the mixture exposure. Taken together, our findings underscore the utility of slow-release implants as a tool in field-based ecotoxicology, which is an urgent research priority given the current lack of knowledge on the real-world impacts of pharmaceuticals on wildlife.

• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH

Pharmaceutical pollution poses an increasing threat to global wildlife populations. Psychoactive pharmaceutical pollutants (e.g. antidepressants, anxiolytics) are a distinctive concern owing to their ability to act on neural pathways that mediate fitness-related behavioural traits. However, despite increasing research efforts, very little is known about how these drugs might influence the behaviour and survival of species in the wild. Here, we capitalize on the development of novel slow-release pharmaceutical implants and acoustic telemetry tracking tools to reveal that exposure to environmentally relevant concentrations of the benzodiazepine pollutant temazepam alters movement dynamics and decreases the migration success of brown trout (Salmo trutta) smolts in a natural lake system. This effect was potentially owing to temazepam-exposed fish suffering increased predation compared with unexposed conspecifics, particularly at the river-lake confluence. These findings underscore the ability of pharmaceutical pollution to alter key fitness-related behavioural traits under natural conditions, with likely negative impacts on the health and persistence of wildlife populations.

• Klíčová slova
• behaviour, chemical, ecology, global change, survival, telemetry,
• MeSH
• chemické látky znečišťující vodu * toxicita   MeSH
• jezera * MeSH
• migrace zvířat * MeSH
• pstruh * fyziologie   MeSH
• psychotropní léky farmakologie   MeSH
• zvířata MeSH
• Check Tag
• zvířata MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• Názvy látek
• chemické látky znečišťující vodu * MeSH
• psychotropní léky MeSH