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Psychoactive pollution suppresses individual differences in fish behaviour

Version 2 2024-05-30, 14:18
Version 1 2022-02-16, 16:17
journal contribution
posted on 2024-05-30, 14:18 authored by G Polverino, JM Martin, MG Bertram, VR Soman, H Tan, JA Brand, Rachel Therese MasonRachel Therese Mason, BBM Wong
Environmental contamination by pharmaceuticals is global, substantially altering crucial behaviours in animals and impacting on their reproduction and survival. A key question is whether the consequences of these pollutants extend beyond mean behavioural changes, restraining differences in behaviour between individuals. In a controlled, two-year, multigenerational experiment with independent mesocosm populations, we exposed guppies (Poecilia reticulata) to environmentally realistic levels of the ubiquitous pollutant fluoxetine (Prozac). Fish (unexposed: n = 59, low fluoxetine: n = 57, high fluoxetine: n = 58) were repeatedly assayed on four separate occasions for activity and risk-taking behaviour. Fluoxetine homogenized individuals' activity, with individual variation in populations exposed to even low concentrations falling to less than half that in unexposed populations. To understand the proximate mechanism underlying these changes, we tested the relative contribution of variation within and between individuals to the overall decline in individual variation. We found strong evidence that fluoxetine erodes variation in activity between but not within individuals, revealing the hidden consequences of a ubiquitous contaminant on phenotypic variation in fish—likely to impair adaptive potential to environmental change.

History

Journal

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Volume

288

Article number

ARTN 20202294

Pagination

1-9

Location

London, England

ISSN

0962-8452

eISSN

1471-2954

Language

English

Publication classification

C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

1944

Publisher

The Royal Society Publishing