99 Ethical Seafood? Rethinking Aquatic Welfare

so-called unfair advantage isn't just about nets and electricity.

It's about the very water fish breathe.

Wasin realized that fish are the ultimate bio-indicators.

They are literally swimming in the chemical footprint of our society.

From hormone disruptors to the drug residues of a city's weekend party, the impact on fish physiology is a hidden crisis that traditional ecology often overlooks.

especially uh fresh water inland waters because it's not there's only so much like place they can go you know most lakes and ponds and rivers and not not that big um so and of course you know when the water levels go down there's you know they're stuck with climate change there's all kind of issues so anthropogenic impacts on the environment affect them you know like i'm sure you heard stories of uh you know the cocaine levels in the rivers after a weekend because of the sewage you know about these kind of things no

no i haven't heard about this but it makes so much sense i've heard like other substances in the water um like estrogen and stuff yeah but like

same idea same concept yeah same idea

but like i've never thought of like other examples but this is a great one

It is because the study that I'm talking about showed that after weekends, because it's all treated water, even after, exactly, exactly, after a weekend where everyone is going out and partying and I guess there's a lot of recreational drug usage, they see spikes on Monday and Tuesday in the residues in the water, treated waters.

Even after treating, there's still some residues in them.

that go into the environment, like rivers and lakes and stuff.

And there are studies that show that it ends up in fish and other animals.

And it only ends up in them? Or what kind of effect does it also have on fish? On

humans consuming them.

differently or i don't know something else with the metabolism changes besides the humans then eating the fish again and they have an issues but like i'm concerned now about the animals like the non-human yeah yeah

and of course and so there's all kind of studies i can't remember about the cocaine one exactly but there's other ones that show harmful effects like carcinogenic um compounds and stuff that do cause or like the hormones that you said that alter the rhythms of fish there are studies like that for sure 100%

but we don't know even like half of what these things

like there's so much science that needs to be done to understand the effects of these things like we just know that it's likely to be We've observed some changes and we know that it's likely to be much, much more.

So the example I'm thinking of, Masha, is microplastics, you know, because I worry a lot about it.

Some studies have shown some links and stuff, but we've only really scratched the surface of some of these things like PFAS and microplastics and like contaminants that are in our bodies.

All of us have them inside of us, all of us.

In every part of the world, even Eskimo populations have been found to have a proportion of these contaminants in them.

It's not clear always what it does, and we will find out, I guess, in the future some things, but it's kind of scary when you think about it.

Yeah, for sure.