Science Friday - Marijuana And Medicine, Cephalopod Week, Environmental Antidepressants. June 18, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

How To Talk About Medical Marijuana With Your Doctor Over the last decade, cannabis has had a moment. Thirty-six states and Washington D.C. have legalized it for medical use. (Fifteen states, plus D.C., have also legalized weed recreationally.) Altogether, about 5.5 million people in the U.S. now have medical marijuana cards. One of the primary arguments for expanding marijuana laws is the drug’s potential usefulness for medical treatments. While each state has its own rules for which conditions are eligible, issues like chronic pain are nearly universally accepted as a reason for using medical marijuana. But there’s still a large divide between the traditional medical establishment and the cannabis industry. Cannabis is still illegal federally, and a recent study showed that many clinicians feel they don’t know enough about medical marijuana to make a recommendation to patients. This in turn impacts how patients feel about talking to their doctor about using cannabis to treat medical conditions. Joining Ira to talk about the ins and outs of connecting cannabis to the larger medical establishment are Dr. Ziva Cooper, research director for UCLA’s Cannabis Research Initiative in San Francisco, California, and Dr. Donald Abrams, integrative oncologist and professor emeritus at University of California San Francisco’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.     What Can Crayfish Tell Us About Drugs In Our Waterways? Wastewater is a grab bag of chemicals. There’s industrial run-off, bits of animal and viral DNA, and then there are compounds that trickle out from our households. The medicines we’re flushing down the toilet or releasing through urine are making their way into countless bodies of water. Antidepressants are one of the drugs that frequently end up in the environment. A team of scientists wanted to study the effects of these antidepressants on streams wending their way through ecosystems. So they looked to none other than the crayfish. They found that crayfish exposed to these drugs were a bit bolder. Their results were published this week in the journal Ecosphere. Freshwater ecologist Lindsey Reisinger and freshwater biogeochemist A.J. Reisinger, who are both authors on that study, talk about how these drugs affect crayfish and potential downstream effects on waterways and the ecosystem.     We Aren’t Squidding Around—It’s Cephalopod Week 2021! The wait is over—Cephalopod Week 2021 is finally here. It’s Science Friday’s annual ceph-lo-bration of all things mostly-tentacled, and this year’s lineup of events is going to be ceph-tacular. Visit behind-the-scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, play deep sea trivia, watch mini documentaries, chat with real scientists working with cephalopods every day, and a whole lot more. Diana Montano, SciFri’s outreach manager and emcee of the deep sea, joins Ira and Science Diction host Johanna Mayer to kick things off, with some trivia about the origins of squiddy words.     Kids Are Benefiting From Adult Vaccinations, Too Something interesting is happening in some communities where most adults are vaccinated against COVID-19: infection rates in kids are going way down, too. Right now, Americans 12 and older are eligible for the vaccine, leaving the country’s youngest still exposed. So this is a promising sign, considering about two-thirds of U.S. adults have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. But some experts are saying we still need to be cautious about throwing kids together again before they’re vaccinated. Joining Ira to chat about this story is Maggie Koerth, senior science writer at FiveThirtyEight in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They also talk about other top science stories of the week, including news that cicada broods might emerge more often with climate change.         Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This week, House Democrats unveiled their first ever bill that would decriminalize drug possession for small amounts of all substances. The bill would also expunge the records for people with drug-related offenses and resentenced some people currently in jail. U.S. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman from New Jersey is one of the sponsors for this bill. Thursday indeed marks the 50th anniversary of President Nixon's declaration of the so-called war on drugs. And in reality, it never was a war on addiction or the debilitating health impacts drugs have on some people. It was a war on people. Later in the hour, we'll talk about one substance whose rules and regulations vary drastically by state, medical cannabis. We'll discuss how federal regulations make it hard to study what marijuana does to the body. leading many doctors to feel uncomfortable recommending it to patients. But first, in some communities where most adults are vaccinated against COVID-19,

infection rates in kids are going way down. Data has only been collected in a few places. But it is a promising sign, considering about two-thirds of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a vaccine. So what does this mean for our kids? And is this the elusive herd immunity we've been waiting for? Here to discuss this and other news is Maggie Kerth, senior science writer for 538 based in Minneapolis. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me.

Nice to have you. So Maggie, even though kids younger than 12 can't get vaccinated, infections and kids are still going down. Sounds cool. What's going on here? Yeah, this is really got some good COVID news. It's so nice to be able to say that. In several places around the world, cases of COVID among kids who are too young to be vaccinated have fallen in tandem at almost the same rates in some spots with the post-vaccination drop in cases among adults. Deani Lewis has a story over at nature about how you're getting this data from Israel, the United States, Brazil, and it's all offered evidence that vaccination is producing some level, at least, of herd immunity, that the vaccinated people are interrupting the spread of disease enough to

protect the unvaccinated as well. Now, this effect could also have something to do with the evidence that suggests kids spread COVID less efficiently than adults. You know, if most cases in kids come from adults, then vaccinating the adults protects the kids, right? But these results aren't consistent everywhere. The UK, for instance, has seen cases among children fall, but also their data shows kids still spreading the virus to each other. This is really good news. It still needs to be sort of figured out, but figuring it out matters because it helps us understand something about how likely these unvaccinated kids are to be incubating new variants. That adds then into this ongoing international discussion about whether we're better off vaccinated.

younger kids in places like the U.S. and the U.K. Or reserving those doses for adults and countries that haven't had nearly as much vaccine access. You seem to be a little bit hesitant in saying this might be true herd immunity. Right. I mean, there's still, because it's not consistently happening everywhere, and because it is, you know, there's different, there's different aspects of timing with when vaccinations got rolled out in different places. and whether it coincided with kids being in school or not, the researchers are not super solid on saying that it is hurt immunity,

but it could be in that direction potentially. It's good news. We just don't know exactly how good yet. Absolutely. Let's move on to some climate change news that's very topical for some parts of the U.S. right now. Right. And I'm talking about these cicada broods. There's news that they might come out more often

with warmer weather? Tell us what's going on there. Yeah, so it's a big deal year for cicadas. The massive brood 10 has emerged from the earth to yell at each other and us and really everything at absolutely peak volume. And those cicadas are one of 12 broods that emerge every 17 years in the U.S. But there are three other broods that emerge on a 13-year cycle instead. And researchers have found that the cicadas that are on that 13-year cycle, they're actually evidence that cicadas can change the length of their life cycles. So there's this really great video about this on science by Megan Cantwell. And the theory is that those 13-year cicadas are offshoots of 17-year cicadas that adapted for a warming period in the climate that happened some 200,000 years ago. The researchers who

study cicadas think the bugs with that 17-year itch can emerge. four years early or four years late in response to environmental shifts. And if that gets selected for in enough generations, it can become a genetic trait, not just a necessary short-term response. So in 2017, some of the brood ten cicadas that were in the Washington, D.C. area, actually emerged early. And there is some evidence that warming from climate change might affect this and make those early emergencies more likely. Wow. So we could get earlier, recipes for cicada tacos. We could, in fact, that was actually another thing that I found.

I went looking to see, like, you know, were there early European colonist reports of brood ten cicadas? I wanted to see what those were like. And I found a couple of blog posts that were talking about some of these. And they were talking about the recipes, too. Yeah, yeah, it's quite interesting. Got to eat them. Absolutely.

Let's talk about speaking. of intriguing stories. Let's talk about one about plants, specifically plant organs. A new plant organ has been discovered? Yes, this is found in Arabidopsis Thaliana, which is a really heavily studied plant. It's used in a lot of laboratory biology experiments. Sort of related to mustard. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And part of what makes this such a big surprise to find is because it is something that, you know, scientists have spent years just like staring at. but never saw this entirely new organ that this plant can grow when it wants to. And this organ is called the cantile, and it's kind of like a bent elbow of stem growing off the side of this little white flower.

And it seems to form when the plant is under the right light conditions. Like it's not getting enough light to have this long day reaction of growing flowers. it's also not still getting short days where it's saving up its energy. When the light is somewhere in between, the can't till grows. So the reason we never notice this, though, is because in the laboratory, scientists give it lots of light because they want the plants to flower. Part of doing the research is making this plant, you know, giving this plant the perfect conditions for flowering. And what I love about this is that it is such a perfect example of that when we study a thing, we change it. And what happens in the wild and what happens in the laboratory are not always the same thing.

You know, this is something that we just did not notice because of the circumstances of how we were studying this plant. It's like the quote from Jurassic Park, life finds a way, right? Indeed. Our next story is about ancient discovery. It looks like Antarctica, one of my favorite places, was found about a thousand years before we thought it was. Tell us about that story. Yeah. So Europeans first spotted Antarctica in 1820, but this new study of oral history traditions has found evidence that Polynesian people were actually visiting the southernmost continent far earlier, as far back as the early 600s. This evidence comes from 1,300-year-old oral traditions that were handed down among different groups of Maori people.

And these stories describe a great hero, a guy named Hui Tehrana Aura, who traveled south with his crew, ended up encountering these Antarctic features that we still see today. You know, things like fields of bull kelp in the southern ocean, which the stories describe in the tales as the hairs of women. And physical descriptions of this place that sounds like the barren mountain, and snow and ice-swept wastes of Antarctica. It's really cool to see these sort of geographic descriptions that really match up with what we still see in Antarctica today. Yeah, so that's interesting.

So they learned about it by paying attention to oral histories. Yeah. Wow. I mean, do we know if Antarctica back then was like the Antarctica we know now? I mean, yeah, it's the things that are being described. It wasn't that long ago, geologically speaking. It was not that long ago geologically. No.

Our last story is about how sound impacts the hunting habits of birds and bats. Tell us about this experiment. Yeah, this is a really hilarious experiment to me because basically these researchers hauled three and a half metric tons of speakers and solar plant panels and all this equipment into a remote part of Idaho's Pioneer Mountains. And basically just so they could mess with some wild, You know, they went to this place where they were calm, peaceful springs, and they started playing the thunderous sounds of massive river rapids.

So they could see how the bats and birds dealt with it. And the bats and birds dealt with all that extra noise, basically by piecing out. You know, it was 12 decibels. And you saw bird abundance decreased by about 7%. Bat activity decreased by about 8%. And that's probably not surprising given that both animals. are pretty reliant on their sense of hearing. You know, bats use it for echolocation.

Birds use hearing for communication among each other. And the birds also got less effective at foraging for caterpillars, though, which, you know, that's the thing they do with their eyes. So the researchers think that the sound was actually distracting, like, you know, trying to do a math problem in a really loud classroom. Yeah, I mean, can't you hear them saying, God, this is just annoying? This is all this noise here. Yeah.

Someone got a grant to go annoy wildlife is basically what this boils down to. Where was this done? Do we know what part the country? Yeah, this was in Idaho, in the Pioneer Mountains in Idaho. Yes, a very peaceful place. All of a sudden these big sounds come about. You know, when we talk about all these things changing, we also bring up climate change all the time. Could this be a lesson for climate change somehow? Well, I don't know if it's a lesson for climate change, but it's

definitely a lesson about paying attention to human noise pollution. You know, we, we make loud noises everywhere, and we are finding increasingly that changes in noise, changes in how loud an area is, can really affect the animals that live there. And if even natural sounds can do that, you know, imagine what a backhoe would do. Yeah, thank you, Maggie. Yes, thank you so much. Always great to have you. Maggie Kerth, senior science writer for 538 based in Minneapolis. When we come back, why physicians are hesitant to talk about medical marijuana with their patients and what research they'd like to see. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. How many of you use medical marijuana? Perhaps to cope with nausea from illness

so you can eat or to help you sleep because you don't want to take prescription meds with those long lists of side effects. And when you seek advice from your doctor for your aches, pains, and insomnia, do you ever ask what they know about using cannabis for treatments? I've asked my doctors many times, and the usual answer is, I don't know much about them. I should learn more. And it's tough hearing that same answer year after year, especially since 36 states and D.C. have legalized cannabis for medical use, and about five and a half million people in the U.S. have medical marijuana cards. We asked our listeners to use our Sci-Fi Voxpup app to tell us their experiences with using cannabis for medical purposes, and if they talk to their doctor about it.

I mean, I think I could use it, but I don't talk to my doctor about it because my doctor's a VA doctor. If I don't think there's any shame in it, it's pretty common these days to rely on marijuana for a number of medical issues. So, yeah, I'm not really worried. In 2003, I was diagnosed with HIV and I began medication immediately. In the first three months, I lost a pound a week. So I switched over to real marijuana and began growing my own. But I was surprised that my doctor was reluctant to sign off on all the paperwork because he was afraid that he would get in trouble.

I want to thank our listeners, Tim from Portland, Margarita from Pittsburgh, Craig from Oakland for sharing their experiences, perhaps you have had the same experiences. Well, that's what we're going to be talking about. Cannabis and the medical establishment, are they on the same page yet? Let me introduce my guests, Dr. Ziva Cooper, director of UCLA's Cannabis Research Initiative in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Donald Abrams, Integrative Oncologist and Professor Emeritus,

University of California, San Francisco's OSHA Center for Integrative Medicine. Welcome to Science Friday. Good to be here. Great to be here. Nice to have you both. Let's get right into this. Let me ask you first. You heard our listeners, Dr. Cooper, does it sound familiar to you?

You know, absolutely. Having moved to Los Angeles fairly recently, what I hear a lot from patients, not my own patients, I'm not a physician, but patients of physicians that I know is that, you know, they're frustrated. They're seeking guidance from their physicians, and yet their physicians can't really give them good information. with respect to how to use cannabis and cannabis products for particular medical indications. And same with who, Dr. Abrams. Yeah, you know, as an oncologist, I think the most insightful study was from Ilana Braun at Harvard. She sent out a questionnaire to 400 oncologists across the country.

80% say that they discuss cannabis with their cancer patients. 78% of the time, the patient initiates the conversation. Less than 50% of the oncologist said that, they recommend cannabis, but only 30% said that they felt comfortable knowing anything about how to use it. Is that because they're never trained in medical school or they just don't keep up with the literature about what's happening? Well, you know, we live in the post-refer madness, post-just-say-no era. And when I lecture about cannabis and the system in our body that contains the cannabinoid receptors and our own endogenous cannabinoids that we make, the endoc cannabinoids, I often would ask the

audience, how many of you learned about this in medical school? And one of the advantages of Zoom lectures is I can now poll. The CB1 receptor is the most densely populated receptor in the human brain. And in two different audiences of 40 and 70 physicians, 5% and 10% reported learning about it in medical school. So it shows you how much reefer madness is still with us. Let's get into this, Dr. Cooper. Can you give us a quick overview for listeners who might be unfamiliar with this topic? What cannabis does in the body that helps people with certain conditions like nausea, chronic pain, or whatever? So this is a great question, Ira, that, you know, we're still learning about and dovetailing on Dr. Abrams' response that, you know,

very few medical schools are offering the information, related to how cannabis interacts with the body or the body's own cannabinoid system. There's only about nine or ten medical universities that offer a coursework with respect to understanding this. And in part, it's because part of the science is in its infancy. And another aspect is that there are very limited FDA-approved medical uses of these constituents in the cannabis plant. So how the cannabis constituents interact with the body to potentially have therapeutic effects,

this differs across what type of cannabis constituent we're talking about and what the endpoint is. So these cannabis constituents can have an array of effects in the brain and the body that can potentially have therapeutic effects, but may also have some adverse effects. And there are also strains, different strains of cannabis, the ingredients in the plant itself. There's CBD, THHC, there's indica for sedative sleep, there's sativa. It's not just a lump that people put together that they think of, oh, you're going to take cannabis, you're going to get high, right? Exactly.

And you raise an important point, Ira, in that, you know, when we talk about cannabis, we're not talking about one thing. We're talking about hundreds, if not millions of different things, because it's, the cannabis plant, there is hundreds of chemicals that we think interact with the body. But the cannabis plant expresses these chemicals in different concentrations and people use cannabis in many different ways. And each delivery mode of use is going to have a different effect, as is the different types of chemicals in the product that they're using. So Dr. Raybrams, I know you've been a physician for decades, and you were an early adopter of recommending marijuana to patients,

even back during the AIDS crisis, well, 40 years ago. Why do you know this and why do you recommend and can you recommend it when other doctors don't? Well, I did go to college in the 60s, and I did inhale. So I have a little bit of a sense of what cannabis is and what cannabis isn't. And I know that, you know, it really does not require a package insert, usually for patients to understand how to benefit from using this thousand-year-old botanical that people have been using for millennia. In fact, today I just saw a 37-year-old woman with triple negative breast cancer. And going through her medication list in her electronic medical record, I finished. And I said, wait a minute, didn't you tell me that you were using cannabis? because it's not on the list, even though we have on the drop-down menu, medical cannabis can be added.

She said, absolutely add it because it's the only thing that helps me with my nausea. And it also allows me to sleep without, as I think one of the patients there said, the side effects of the sedatives that they wanted to prescribe. So I believe that patients really are quite capable of figuring out, you know, how to use cannabis therapeutically themselves. You know, I know people who work in medical dispensaries, cannabis dispensaries, who are very knowledgeable in this from having worked there for years and knowing what mixture of this kind and that kind and how it works,

who seem to know much more than the doctors do, Ziva. So this is interesting because I think that when Dr. Abrams, you know, talks about how people can use these products and they can glean information from their own experience, I think that we have to remember that what is available in dispensaries now, you know, the industry is booming. And so when you go into a dispensary, we're not talking about one simple plant type anymore. We're talking about many different products that a patient who hasn't used, you know, cannabis or cannabis products before, they go into the dispensary.

And it can be quite overwhelming with respect to CBD and THC and all the, other cannabinoids and the turpenes and the different chemicals that are being put into these products. And the truth is, is that the strength of a lot of these products with respect to how much THC, how much of the intoxicating component are in these products, they are, you know, there are increasing in strength over time. And so some people can actually have some pretty negative experiences if they are not experienced cannabis users and if they don't know what to take. And I think that there is a conundrum here because while the budtenders can provide their expertise based off of, you know, what they've seen and their experience and some patients can feel

things out for themselves over time, when we look at the scientific academic literature, there isn't enough science to have caught up with the products. Why is that? That's a Good point, and I want to delve right into that. Why is there not enough science after all these years, decades, eons? So I will say from the get-go that doing clinical trials is difficult to begin with. So that's, you know, you're already dealing with that major obstacle. And then when you're dealing with this plant that is federally illegal, that adds other regulatory obstacles and burdens that the research,

or the clinician has to navigate. On top of that, you have products that are available to patients that aren't necessarily meeting the standards for the medications that we can give in a clinical trial. So we actually don't have very many products that we can actually give patients in a rigorous trial where, let's say we're comparing that product, that THC or the CBD, to a placebo to a sugar pill. And lastly, one really important point is that all of this work requires funding. And so we as researchers work really hard to try and get funding to help support this research. So all of this is happening behind, you know, the doors of the university where the industry is ramping

up very quickly and people's perceptions of how these products can be helpful is increasing at a very fast rate. And so as scientists, we are really trying to scramble and keep up with the current trends so that we can be able to answer the most relevant questions from a public health perspective. Donald, chime in, please. Well, I don't know where to start. So with regards to the question of why don't the physicians tell the patients what to take, well, I don't know what's available in my local dispensary. So it is a conundrum because I say go and go. And ask the bud tender, what would work best for somebody with your condition. A few years ago, I was approached by two doctor of pharmacy graduates from UCSF who asked me what I would think if

they opened a dispensary. I said, well, that would be a great idea. Well, they came back a year later and said, it costs a million dollars down to open a dispensary in California. Instead, we're going to do a concierge cannabis platform where we're going to discuss with patients what it is they're trying to treat, what meds they take. and will recommend to them an appropriate tincture. So that is something that I found very useful, particularly for my older cancer patients who are not very interested in visiting a dispensary.

With regards to the issue of why there's no data, I think Dr. Cooper summarized it quite well. It is a Schedule I substance, which the federal government thinks it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. And so you have to have many different regulations and procedures to jump through to be able to study cannabis. And the only legal source for cannabis to research has always been the National Institute

on Drug Abuse, whose products are not entirely up to the speed with what patients can get in the dispensaries. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with Dr. Donald Abrams and Dr. Ziva Cooper about cannabis and its use by doctors. Do you think then that the only way we would get enough research, the funding and the correct way of testing for the benefits or uses of cannabis would be if it's legalized nationally? So I'll jump in here from my own personal experience in dealing with this issue where having the federal Schedule I status is definitely a hindrance. But again, I will say it's not the only hindrance.

For example, we have CBD now cannabodial. It's a cannabis chemical. It's a chemical in the cannabis plant. One out of seven U.S. adults is using this chemical for some indication. And yet it is no longer Schedule 1, but it is very hard to study simply because there are very few sources that I can. get CBD from. So again, I'm pointing to the importance of having a medication that really meets the FDA standards. So you need a medication that is free of metals, mold, pesticides. It has to be carefully produced so that it can be given to people in a clinical trial that the FDA oversees

to some capacity. So for me, the federal one status has definitely been a hindrance, but it's not the only hindrance. We are just lacking the supply of these drugs that people are using right now to be able to study in people. Donald, do you think that doctors are going to catch up? I mean, cannabis laws state by state have changed so drastically over the past decade or so. Have you seen the perspectives of the medical establishment change over that time also? Well, I think if you look at surveys of physicians, physicians are highly supportive of medical cannabis. Over two-thirds, in every study that's been conducted, and for oncologists, it's 82% in a study from about eight years ago are in favor of medical cannabis. The issue is that they feel that they don't know

enough to discuss it with their patients. And this whole issue, Dr. Cooper was talking about the FDA and approval, the pharmaceuticalization of marijuana, I think, is incorrect. I think it's a therapeutic botanical that's been around for millennia. should be able to access it like saw palmetto or echinacea and it should be regulated like tobacco and alcohol it's so much safer than alcohol as a physician over 40 years of my clinical experience i have admitted one person to the hospital with a complication of cannabis that was dusted with PCP back in the 1970s the number of people that i've admitted to the hospital with complications of alcohol, which is legal as a recreational substance, 100,000 people die in the

United States every year from alcohol. But the reason many physicians are also fearful is because it is a Schedule I substance, and especially people who have federal grants will not talk to their patients about cannabis for fear of having their federal grants retracted. I say, I have federal grants to study cannabis, so that's crazy. But we now have. an administration where they're asking young people who have used cannabis to get other jobs. So although people had high hopes, I fear that it's not medicine. It's the politics that needs to change. And we know how long that will take. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thanks.

This is great. Thank you so much for having us. Dr. Ziva Cooper, director for UCLA's Cannabis Research Initiative in Los Angeles, Dr. Donald Abrams, Integrative Oncologist and Professor Emeritus at UC San Francisco's Oshur Center for Integrative Medicine. We have to take a break, and when we come back, a look at how medicines like antidepressants can leak into our wastewater and the effects on stream ecosystems and crayfish. It's a surprising result. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. There's an old expression, you are what you eat. But sometimes other creatures become what you eat, especially if what you consume are drugs. How do we know? Check the wastewater. And you'll find it contains a grab bag of chemicals.

There's industrial runoff, bits of animal and viral DNA, and then there are compounds that trickle out from our households. The medicines we're flushing down the toilet or releasing through urine are making their way into countless bodies of water. Because antidepressants frequently end up in the environment, a team of scientists wanted to study the effects of these antidepressants on streams, wanting their way through ecosystems. So they looked to none other than the crayfish. They found that crayfish exposed to these drugs were a bit bolder. The results were published this week in the journal, Ecosphere.

Joining me now to fill in this story are two authors on that study? Lindsay Reisinger is an assistant professor in the fisheries and aquatic sciences program at the University of Florida in Gainesville. A.J. Reisinger is an assistant professor in the soil and water sciences department, also at the University of Florida. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Now, before I ask, what does Boulder mean in a crayfish? I have to apologize to folks who call them crawfish, right? Depends on where you live. AJ, please tell us what happens when you take an antidepressant. Let's begin right there. How much of the drug ends up in wastewater or streams? Yeah, so we're prescribed a certain dose by our doctor. That dose is to ensure that we get enough of the medication into our bodies to have the proper effect. But human bodies aren't 100% efficient at metabolizing drugs. And so different bodies can break down the medications that they take in at different rates. And so anybody might use 70%, 90% of whatever medication they take in.

I'm not sure of the exact percentages. And it'll vary by compound and by individual. But some portion of what you take into your body as medication, your body won't break down. And so therefore it will be excreted directly into your wastewater when you go to the backroom. And Lindsay, so why is crayfish a good candidate to look at? Yeah. So there were several reasons why we chose crayfish. So one reason is that they just tend to be really abundant and they're large.

So they make up a large biomass in freshwater ecosystems. So they can have major impacts. Another reason is that some species that are tolerant of polluted conditions. So we might find them in a lot of streams or lakes that are receiving some wastewater. And then the third reason is that crayfish are actually a major. or model system to look at behavior. And so we know a lot about chemicals like serotonin and its effects on crayfish and how that can translate into behavior. What we didn't know is whether trace amounts of chemicals in the water could affect crayfish behavior. And you looked at one

antidepressant in particular called Cytalopram, the brand name Calexa. You conducted this in a lab, an experimental stream. Lindsay, what did you find? So we tested them in an aquarium where we first were looking at how quickly they came out of a shelter into a novel environment. And the ones that had been exposed to the drug came out almost twice as fast as the ones that were not exposed. We were pumping in water into this aquarium. Some of the water was from a bucket with a food source. So that water smelled like food. And then the other water had another crayfish in it.

So it smelled like a crayfish. And we looked at how much time the crayfish spent going after one of these two scented waters. And if the crayfish had been exposed to the drug, they spent almost three times more going after the food water compared to the crayfish water. Whereas the other crayfish spent an equal amount of time in both sections. Is that a bad thing for a crayfish to do? Well, it's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly the fact that the crayfish came out of the shelter. more quickly and our boulder suggests that they might be more vulnerable to predators. And if they are spending more time going after food, they could have different impacts on the

ecosystem. And AJ, you also looked at possible downstream effects talking as we are about the ecosystem. How could the ecosystem be affected by having these antidepressants in the crayfish and the water? Within the stream ecosystems themselves, these artificial stream ecosystem, We found that the crayfish increased the amount of algae in the water column, and they also increased the amount of organic matter at the bottom of the stream. But we found that it didn't matter if the crayfish had been exposed to the antidepressant or not.

The antidepressant had a major effect on the crayfish behavior that Lindsay talked about earlier, but that change in behavior didn't seem to change their impact in our artificial stream ecosystem. However, we think that might be because our study was fairly short. It was only a two-week study. And so the crayfish, it takes a while for that crayfish behavioral response to show up. This is all hypothetical because we didn't run the experiment for longer, but a bolder crayfish that's spending more time foraging for food might be moving around where the nutrients are

available and might be changing the bacteria, microbes, and bugs that are in the system. And so therefore, reducing the overall cycling rates in the streams themselves. Lindsay, any idea what might happen to the animals that eat the crayfish that have eaten the chemicals? Yeah, that's a really great question. So one interesting thing that our collaborators have looked into in another study is that some of these compounds and the antidepressants can accumulate in animals. So specifically they were looking at aquatic insects. And so it might be that the concentration of the antidepressant in the crayfish and in these other aquatic organisms is much higher than it would be in the background streamwater. If a predator is eating a bunch of crayfish or a bunch of these aquatic insects that do accumulate the antidepressant, you could get a higher dose.

And so we don't know exactly what that dose would be, but this is something to think about for sure. You know, I'm thinking of a study a few years ago, I think it's probably a famous study by now, about birth control and wastewater and the feminizing of fish, AJ. Are you familiar with that one? This sounds a little bit in the same ballpark. Yeah, absolutely. That term is called an endocrine disrupting compound, so it changes the endocrine system of these organisms. And these endocrine disrupting compounds, they don't kill the fish, but they change their behavior.

They changed their reproduction. They changed their life history. In a previous study that I was a co-author on, we actually argue that pharmaceuticals have a similar effect on the ecosystem. We coined the term ecologically disrupting compounds for pharmaceuticals because typically these pharmaceuticals are not at high enough concentrations to kill organisms to kill animals in the environment. But a large, large breadth of studies are now showing that they do have sublethal effects, changing things. like crayfish behavior, fish feeding rates, or algal photosynthetic rates, that sort of thing. So despite not having a toxic effect, not killing any animals, they are changing the overall interactions among various parts of aquatic ecosystems.

Now, last question is, so is there anything we can do to limit the amount of drugs that get into the water, AJ? The first thing that I tell people when they ask me that question is, first off, I'm not telling you, I'm not asking people to stop taking their medications. So do not stop taking any medications because you want to protect the water quality. However, there are proper ways to dispose of your medications. Often, local pharmacies or drug stores will have medication takeback locations. So drop boxes, cabinets, or daily one-day events where they will take any unwanted medications, no questions asked. Local police departments and sheriff's offices often have unwanted

medication drop boxes as well. But first and foremost, I'd say make sure that you don't ever flush any medications down the drain. If that's your last option, it's much better to put your medications in the solid waste in your trash can, mix it with some type of unedible trash as well, something like coffee grounds so that you don't get unintentional ingestion by another animal, and then have it be taken out with the solid trash because that will allow more opportunity for the compounds to break down in the environment. Great suggestions. I'm sorry that's about all the time we have. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. It was great to be on.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Ira. Lindsay Reisinger, assistant professor in the fisheries and aquatic sciences program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and AJ Reisinger, assistant professor in the soil and water science department, also at the University of Florida. The waiting is over, folks. Science Friday Cephalopod Week is. finally here. It's, of course, our annual Cephalobration of all things mostly tentacled. And if you're as big a squid head as I am, you have tons to look forward to. Here to tell us all about it is Science Friday Seer of Cephalopod Week. Diana, Montana. Welcome, Diana.

Thanks, Ira. Are you excited for Cephalopod Week? Oh, boy, am I. It's the most wonderful time of the year. It certainly is. Well, this year we have a bunch of things. going on. We'll get to visit behind the scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, play deep-sea trivia, watch many documentaries, chat with real scientists, working with cephalopods every day, and a whole lot more. I am so incredibly excited for this year's celebration. Me too. So, Dan, and not only are you the Sefwick Maestro, but you're also the Science Friday Trivia Master. So to kick things off, you're going to quiz me on my cephalopod know-how? Now, I know my cuddlefish from my Nautilus, but just in case, I've called in some backup.

Playing with me today is our resident Word Nerd and host of our podcast Science Diction, Johanna Mayer. Welcome, Johanna. Hey, Ira, it's good to be here. Thank goodness you are here. Okay, Diana, I think we're finally ready for you. Amazing. All right, so these are multiple choice questions,

which all have to do with Cephalopod word origins. First, I'll read a little description, and then I'll ask you a question. Then I'll read your multiple choice options. You two confer with each other on which answer you want to go for. If you get it right, you'll hear this sound. And if you get it wrong, I don't think it'll happen, but you'll hear this sound. Wow. Jumping in to say, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Okay, Diana, back to you. All right, so here's question one. What do you call a tiny octopus with big eyes, flappy little ear like fins, and that's cute as a button. In 2015, Stephanie Bush and her team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute were tasked to classify and name this newly caught and previously undescribed deep sea cephalopod. It's from the genus Osteopithesis, and I need to know what named they end up naming the species. So remember, this is a story from 2015, and it's either, A, California, for where it's collected and described, B, Lascina, after the Latin word for flap, C, Adorabilis, because it's just so dang cute, or D. Stefania, after Dr. Bush herself,

who helped collect it. I actually know this one. Yeah, this was so cute, we could not not know. I know. I'm actually going to demand that we see a photo of this next time. It's C. Adorabilis, right, Ira? Absolutely, Adorabilis C, final answer. What? No. The correct answer is A, Californiana. No, it's not. That's not, it can't be. Here, let me tell you the full story. All right. So we're not exactly sure why they didn't end up going with Adora Billis, but if you've seen the Science Friday video, this is what they thought they were going to call it.

But I guess not everyone in the scientific community thinks this creature is as lovable as the rest of us. I feel so cheated. Yeah, don't you feel cheated on that? I thought we had a luck on that. I'm going to continue to call it adorable. Yeah, me too. You should. You should.

Well, so you two probably know some of this, but there's a whole branch of scientific study called taxonomy. and we have Carl Linnaeus to thank for our binomial or two-word naming system, where we basically just say the genus and species to refer to a specific animal plant or other living thing. These days, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is used by biologists to name species. And so there are 18 chapters to this code. There are 90 articles.

So there's a lot of rules. And apparently picking the cutest name, it's not one of those rules. Find me the rule for the rule for the. appeals process on this. Yeah, I will sign the petition. We are not off to a great start with this, Ira. No, we'll do better. All right. Are you guys ready for question two? Question two, go for it. Redeem ourselves. Yeah. The origins of the word ink go way back. Originally, the word was ENCA. It was a shortening from the Latin encaust. And so special inks have special names, like sacrum and costume, which was a purple-red ink used by the Roman emperors to sign their

important decrees. And it's actually made from shellfish. But they're not the only invertebrates that were used for inks. What color is named after the pigment collected from the ink sack of a common cuttlefish? Is it A, sepia, B, aquamarine, C, fuchsia, or D, umber? Gee, I don't know this at all. What color is umber again? It's kind of like a yellowy brown. Yeah. Yeah.

A, C. Well, what do you think, Johanna? As usual, I'm sort of at a loss, but I kind of have a hunch that it's sepia. Okay. I'll go with you on sepia. Winehop. We have no better guess. Yeah.

Okay, final answer, A, Cepia. Oh, hey. Thank goodness. That is the correct answer. Congratulations. Yeah, just like on my SATs. This is how I did it. Just guessed?

One on, one off. So, Cepia, Inc. was pretty commonly used for writing, drawing, and any other of your penned needs in Greco-Ruman civilization. Eventually, it was used in the 19th century to help warm up black and white photographs, and help preserve the image longer. So that's why we use a sepia filter on Instagram. But you can also thank cephalopods for those old but still recognizable photographs of your great, great ancestors.

Huh. Oh. And if you liked this teaser, we're going to have some more trivia for you over on the Science Diction podcast feed next week. So subscribe here for an extra dose of cephalopod wordplay. Thanks, Diana and Johanna. Great game. Thanks, Ira.

Thanks, Ira. Diana Montana is Science Friday Outreach Manager, and Johanna Mayer is host of Science Friday's podcast, Science Diction. Find it and sign up wherever you get your podcasts. That's about all the time we have for this week. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Our senior producer is Alexa Lim. Our intern is Emily Zhang. John Dan Koski is our contributing editor. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music. Of course, if you missed any part of this, we'll miss any part of this, program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Have a great weekend.