Cocaine sharks! Won’t lie — both sharks and coked up people terrify me on their own so the idea of these two things combined makes me near-shit myself.
So scientists reckon sharks might be getting high off nose candy that’s being dumped off Florida’s East Coast, thanks to drug smugglers who are trying to get the narcotics into the United States. Heavens.
Bales of Charlie from South and Central America are often dumped in the ocean to be picked up by drug smugglers on boats. The coke sometimes ends up on the shore of Florida beaches, so it’s not a huge surprise that the drug trafficking system is affecting our waterways and the marine life within it.
Marine biologist Tom Hird told Tampa Bay’s Fox 13 that numerous fishermen claimed to have witnessed sharks eating bales of charlie in Florida, and when he went to investigate as part of a Shark Week documentary, he found sharks behaving a bit fucking weird.
Alongside University of Florida’s environmental scientist Tracy Fanara, Hird found a hammerhead in Florida moving erratically towards divers, even though it’s a species that usually swims away from humans.
I’m not saying this means that the hammerhead was off its tit on coke but it sure does sound like some people I know on the rack versus… not.
You know what else they saw? A Sandbar shark swimming in circles as it seemingly focussed on an imaginary object. Feels less coke-y but still odd, for sure.
One experiment included Fanara creating copycat cocaine bales to see what would happen. They saw sharks heading straight for these packages — which had no coke in them for this experiment, to be clear — and taking a chomp out of them.
In another, they put together high concentrated fish power to trigger a dopamine rush not dissimilar to a hit of coke and the sharks lost their shit, so to speak.
“I think we have got a potential scenario of what it may look like if you gave sharks cocaine,” Hird said in the doco.
“We gave them what I think is the next best thing. [It] set [their] brains aflame. It was crazy.”
The experiments don’t actually mean that the sharks have gotten fucked up off cocaine like a lil’ human nostril to powder. More experiments would need to be done, but they can see the effect of dopamine rushes on sharks, and that sharks have gone for packages that look like cocaine bales.
The real intention is that people will see the bigger issue here, which I promise I too am seeing, I just love a good cocaine joke. But don’t be mistaken — dumping anything in our waterways that doesn’t belong there is not cool.
As reported by The Guardian, Fanara said that marine life will be exposed to anything that finds its way into the ocean.
“It’s a catchy headline to shed 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.
Didn’t think I’d be writing sharks and cocaine in the same headline today but here we are.
Image: Getty.
Chantelle Schmidt is a freelance writer. You can follow her on Instagram or TikTok.
