Cocaine Shrimp

The question, ‘What makes a story stick?’ is what keeps the pollen project growing. We try to bring compelling stories to the surface in order to save and share them. In the process we have been grappling with why certain stories elicit deeper and more lingering responses. This Spring, a casual conversation with a filmmaker and citizen scientist brought some unexpected clarity. Our chat opened a door to articulate the pollen-take on the real powers of storytelling in an entangled world.

People keep saying ‘we need new stories’, myself included, but it’s not that often that a tale is told that strums precisely the right chord. We all have different desires and needs from stories. So we’re not looking for one to hold the bloated weight of the world. That’s not possible, or necessarily productive. We need an army of charming, haunting tales that adjust the lens through which we view life and stay with people in ways that can't be measured. No small order. 

Remarkably, the story that Peter Clitheroe told me a few months ago, at a river conference in Sheffield, felt just like that. Over lunch, we discussed his ongoing river sampling work, as part of a team of citizen scientists, down at the River Deben. He mentioned that the freshwater shrimp inhabiting the river have been found to harbor notable amounts of cocaine. I noticed something of a quiver or a glimmer in my mind - ‘There’s cocaine in the shrimp?’ 

Kindly, Peter agreed to a call to talk more about the shrimp. I wondered about his first forays in sampling and the other people involved. He told me that “it started in a very small and haphazard way about two and a half or three years ago. It’s become progressively more structured and, as a result, more valuable.” The team now includes two retired chemists who developed a transformative data handling system, allowing the storage and comparison of results from upwards of 50 locations along the Deben's course.

 Through a collaboration with fellow samplers on the River Wye, the field data recorded by Peter and the team is entered into the Epicollect app and goes directly into a database which allows clear site-to-site and contaminant comparisons. Every month, the teams carefully conduct water quality tests, using dipped samples and using electronic checkers to examine the water’s pH, electrical conductivity, temperature, and total dissolved solids. The samples collected by these groups also undergo frequent lab testing for phosphates and e.coli. Over time, the analysis of samples becomes a process of decoding nature’s signals in order to understand the river’s health and pressure points in real time.

Understanding the complexity of the situation is only possible through webs of mutual support between citizen samplers, universities, and relevant organisations. Through their combined efforts, research from a range of angles can be triangulated to consider the impacts of seasonal, climate, and policy change in the immediate and the long term. The open publication of new data is a vital piece of the puzzle. Peter learnt that there is cocaine in the shrimp as a result of a study published by King’s College University, in collaboration with the University of Sussex in 2019. 

The paper is called, “Biomonitoring of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs in a freshwater invertebrate to estimate toxic or effect pressure”. In the investigative process, scientists tested Gammarus pulex (aka freshwater shrimp) in 15 locations across 5 river catchments (including the Deben) around Suffolk.

Amongst the highlights of the paper is that “Cocaine was the most frequently determined compound found in 100% of samples.” My conversation with Peter brought the contents of the paper to life. Reflecting on his ongoing work since the publication of the paper, he says: “We’re finding pesticides, pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs. They’re all in the water, and in the organisms, not just the shrimp but in all the invertebrates that we regularly go and check.”

Concern has also been raised about contraceptive pharmaceuticals, which enter the water through the sewage system, affecting invertebrate breeding rates. When present in excessive concentrations, estrogen in the water suppresses the capacity for various species to reproduce. In Peter's words, “it’s like everybody’s taking the pill”. There’s something shocking about that, and, at the same time, an easily traceable logic that the substances we consume go through human bodies, get flushed down toilets, and when raw sewage is discharged into the rivers they find their way into other bodies.

It’s all twisted together. The same goes for pesticides sprayed onto crops, leached into the soil, and transferred to rivers through runoff or seepage into groundwater. Following these chains, and noticing the stories lodged in each link is a way into conversations that are hard to unhear. We need more of those. 

The thing I found fascinating when Peter told me, ‘there’s cocaine in the shrimp’, and when I explained that to others, is the far more engaged conversation that followed versus discussions that start with the (equally true) statements that the seas are rising, or that storms are already worsening. It seems we are in an era of alarm fatigue, and people are responding with a real hunger for stories told from novel perspectives that can unlock honest conversations about systemic interconnectedness. 

Linking the contaminated shrimp of the Deben to the use of combined sewage overflows (CSOs) and wider climate breakdown, Peter says, “these really are the canaries in the coal mine.” He asks, “What are we contributing to the variable health of these species in the water? Not just in terms of what we’re putting into the water, but also in terms of climate change. We’ve just had this ridiculously dry spring. The stream that flows through my village isn't flowing, and it hasn't flowed for 2 or 3 months. There’s been no water in it. We do have a sewage works, downstream of the village, and there is flow below that. It’s a very small flow and it’s entirely dependent on what’s coming out of the sewage works. So what we’ve got [in the river] is the water that’s been through the sewage process.” This depiction captures, succinctly, a few of the layers at play: without enough rain, our rivers run dry except for water released from sewage works. This water is often teeming with potentially harmful contaminants - from antibiotics, other over the counter pharmaceuticals, and banned drugs.

Peter went on by saying, “We’re fortunate that just last autumn, the sewage company installed a phosphate stripper into the sewage works which has reduced what were horrendous levels of phosphate right down to almost nil - which is brilliant - that’s really helpful, but it means that the concentration of everything else that’s going down [into the river], the nitrates, the ammonium, the e coli, is so great because there's no water to dilute that into.” Peter starts by saying how odd that is, then interrupts himself to say it’s more than odd. We said it’s disconcerting at best, infuriating if you actually let it sink in.

We spoke about river sampling as akin to reading an environment, attempting to decode the signals radiating out from river life, and river death. The problems are all there whether we notice them or not. Hence, there is an immense power in sampling to piece together the myriad pressures piled onto water ways.

More resources are needed to make complete sense of the cocaine in shrimp of the Deben, and beyond, and broaden the scope of who can afford to engage. In the sense, the shrimp story is yet to fully unfurl.

The point of this article is that we can’t sum up life today in any one object, material, or polluted body - no matter how compelling the shrimp story is. What we can do is use these stories as a gateway to proper discussion, trying to tease more complex emotional responses out of people.

When a story brings an unexpected entanglement of species, substances, or processes up to the surface, it has the potential to really linger. Talking about the “waste” of the world and how it just can’t go away, or the contaminants that slip our radars, hits the stomach before the brain. The shrimp story screams that nothing happens in isolation.

Thankfully, the shrimp are not alone in the peculiar potency of their story. To give an example, I recently read a paper about birds who build their nests from discarded plastic. This will be the next story published by pollen, forming part of a series of tales of urban-nature entwinement - united in a refusal to turn away from industrialised landscapes, scars, and infrastructure, exploring the messiness, the toxicity, and the quiet, creeping, absurdity of life today.

Unexpectedly engaging stories are an antidote, on multiple levels, to experiences of burnout, hope lost, and rightfully pissed off people who feel like they’re only ever asked to give something up. Decades of ecocide, corporate and state recklessness, and pressure placed on marginalised communities has diluted the activating power of warnings, headlines about environmental crises or the insidious health impacts of pollution. In a useful way, the shrimp story has an unlocking effect. It seems less inclined to overwhelm the listener than the clarion calls of melting ice caps or flaming forests, and somehow, are harder to scroll past or brush aside.

This article isn’t here to ask why mounting warnings of climate change and nature loss haven’t sparked real action - that warrants many detailed investigations in itself. What I can say with confidence is that I’ve had wildly better conversations with friends, family, and strangers, by telling them the shrimp story than I have ever had by trying to start with fires, floods, or drought. 

Now, there's nothing make-believe about cocaine in the shrimp. Nor, as you’ll see in our next article, is there anything made-up about bird nests built from bottles. But these stories can do the heavy lifting of introducing complex systems in the form of a few captivating words, ready to be unravelled at a moment's notice.

So, let this article stand as a reminder that the tales we need are playing out within and between us. The whole world is storied, full of memories, and lessons for the future. These stories are crucially real, shared, and worthy of conversations between friends in pubs, on long journeys, and by teachers in assemblies. They snag in our minds, they reverberate around and remind us that our world is alive, dying, decaying and growing all the time, all at once. Luckily, we’re each one small and moving part of that.

We need not look far to find canaries in coal mines, indicating that breakdown is a predictable outcome of the system we’ve been calling ‘usual’. These are the cracks we’re yet to pry open and in there lie tiny little bits of truth that we’ll need to stitch together in the coming years. From a pollen perspective, that feels like a decent use of our time together.

By Lucy Gavaghan

With special thanks to Peter for telling the story, agreeing to call, and sending the photos featured in the article.

References 

KCL, 2019 - King's College London (2019). New study finds river wildlife contain cocaine, pharmaceuticals and pesticides. [online] www.kcl.ac.uk. Available at: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-study-finds-river-wildlife-contain-cocaine-pharmaceuticals-and-pesticides.

Miller et al, 2019 - Miller, T.H., Ng, K.T., Bury, S.T., Bury, S.E., Bury, N.R. and Barron, L.P. (2019). Biomonitoring of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs in a freshwater invertebrate to estimate toxic or effect pressure. Environment International, 129, pp.595–606. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2019.04.038.