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According to a Shark Week show, the sharks off the coast of Florida are coming into contact with huge quantities of cocaine that get dumped in these waters by drug runners. If you thought Cocaine Bear was scary, then these apex predators dusted to the eyeballs should terrify you.

Huge packages of cocaine, smuggled from South and Central America, have been washing up on Florida beaches for decades. These hauls are often dumped at sea, both to distribute to smugglers and to avoid detection by law enforcement, and currents and tides sometimes push them onto land.

In June of this year alone, the United States Coast Guard confiscated nearly 6,400 kilograms of cocaine in the Caribbean and Atlantic Oceans, with an estimated worth of $186 million (R3.4 billion).

It would seem large-scale drug smuggling is a sloppy business, and besides the odd brick of boom-boom powder that washes up on some lucky town’s beaches, a large amount of this is believed to sink in the drink.

Broadcaster and wildlife expert, Tom “The Blowfish” Hird has now teamed up with University of Florida environmental scientist Tracy Fanara to carry out a series of experiments to find out if the marine life around these waters is being affected.

“The deeper story here is the way that chemicals, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs are entering our waterways — entering our oceans — and what effect that they then could go on to have on these delicate ocean ecosystems,” Hird told Live Science.

Hird and Fanara set their sights on the Florida Keys, where fishermen tell stories of sharks ingesting narcotics carried in by ocean currents.

In the show, they dive with sharks to look for odd behaviours, and they begin to notice sharks responding in surprising ways. One great hammerhead, a generally cautious species, swims directly at the crew and appears to be swimming in a ‘weird’ way.

On another occasion, a sandbar shark also appears to be ‘obsessed’ with something and swims in tight circles even though there is nothing in sight.

Not wanting to base their findings on ‘weird swimming’, Hird and Fanara also decided to conduct a series of experiments to see if the sharks were indeed being roofied.

The pair made packages similar in size and appearance to real cocaine bales and then set these fake bales next to dummy swans to see what the sharks would do. To their surprise, the sharks went straight for the bales, taking huge bites from them. One shark even grabs a bale and swims off with it for a solo bender.

The team also dropped fake cocaine bales from an aeroplane to simulate a real-life drug drop — and immediately multiple shark species, including tiger sharks, moved in.

Hird says that their ‘experiments’ doesn’t necessarily mean sharks off the coast of Florida are getting shneefed on large quantities of cocaine.

“We have no idea what [cocaine] could do to the shark,” Hird told Live Science, adding that limited research shows different fish appearing to react in different ways to the same chemical.”

“So we can’t even say well this is a baseline and go from here,” he said.

Hird and his team will now study tissue and blood samples to find evidence of cocaine in the sharks’ blood. “The other thing we might find is this long flow, [this] drip of pharmaceuticals: caffeine, lidocaine, cocaine, amphetamine, antidepressants, birth control — this long slow drift of them from cities into the [ocean] is… starting to hit these animals.”

You can catch their show, “Cocaine Sharks“, on the Discovery Channel.

 

Shame man, poor sharks.

[source:livescience]