"Cocaine Sharks" May Be Prowling The Florida Coast!

Cocaine Sharks?Photo byGetty Images

Move over, Cocaine Bear. Here come cocaine sharks.

Scientists think crazed and hungry sharks could be feasting on bales of hallucinatory drugs dumped off the Florida coast.

While sharks on cocaine sounds like a clumsy Jaws-Scarface crossover, some researchers say the idea may not be as wacky as it sounds. In Florida, sharks in a diverse assemblage swim along a major drug-smuggling throughway, which potentially exposes the toothy predators to floating bundles of narcotics. “This is the only place in the world where a shark could come into contact with such massive doses of cocaine,” says Tom Hird, a marine biologist and broadcaster based in England.

Florida’s beaches have made headlines in the past thanks to the huge volume of cocaine that frequently washes up.

These instances are the result of drug traffickers from Central and South America who attempt to smuggle cocaine and other narcotics into the United States.

Many of these traffickers will travel via boat or aircraft, dropping bales of cocaine into the water to evade detection by law enforcement or pass the drugs along to fellow traffickers.

These drop-offs often happen in the Atlantic Ocean or in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida, so strong storms and currents push these packages ashore, where they are then discovered by passersby or law enforcement.

But while many of these packages may be stopped before they do any damage, there are still risks of environmental concerns — namely, “cocaine sharks” (which is also the name of the investigative show produced for the Discovery Channel).

“It’s a catchy headline to shed light on a real problem, that everything we use, everything we manufacture, everything we put into our bodies, ends up in our wastewater streams and natural water bodies, and these aquatic life we depend on to survive are then exposed to that,” said Dr Tracy Fanara, a Florida-based environmental engineer and lead member of the research team.

We’ve all been hearing about how shark activity is up and there is a hypothesis that sharks may act erratically or more aggressively (i.e. attack humans more frequently) when they ingest cocaine.

During Discovery’s Shark Week, researchers took to the coastline of Florida to determine whether these bales of cocaine could be having an adverse effect on sharks in the area.

To test the hypothesis, Hird teamed up with Fanara, an environmental scientist at the University of Florida. “Living in Florida for the past 20 years, I’ve heard so many stories about these cocaine bales washing ashore,” Fanara says. “For that reason, I went from laughing at the idea to being fully onboard” with investigating whether sharks were consuming such drugs.

In their research, conducted during six days at sea in the Florida Keys, Fanara and Hird observed sharks exhibiting peculiar behaviors.

A hammerhead, a species that would usually swim away from humans, came directly towards the divers, moving erratically. They also observed a sandbar shark swimming in circles as it apparently focused on an imaginary object.

They also conducted experiments, including dropping dummy bales in the water, which many of the sharks took bites out of, and loading balls of bait with highly concentrated fish powder to simulate cocaine.

The effect, the researchers said, was akin to catnip on felines. “It’s the next best thing [and] set their brains aflame. It was crazy,” Hird said.

“While we were in the Keys filming, cocaine bales were washing ashore, like twice in one week, so it’s really a prevalent issue,” Fanara said.

How much cocaine the sharks were actually ingesting, she said, was impossible to determine based on experiments that were only precursory. In the coming months, Fanara plans to partner with other Florida marine scientists to take blood samples from some of the sharks to evaluate cocaine levels.

Brazilian scientists recently tested 13 sharks when their corpses washed ashore and, when examined, each shark tested positive for cocaine.

“Because the cocaine is in the water as well, it’s safe to assume this species of shark — that really stays close to the coast and spends their life cycle near the coast — may be exposed to cocaine continuously,” Fanara explained. “But in the (Florida) Keys, where we were for our investigation, I don’t think that’s going to be the case.”

While the researchers think these tests suggest a shark would be tempted to take an exploratory nip out of a cocaine bale, not all shark researchers are taking the bait. Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida, agrees it is plausible for a swimming shark to bump into floating narcotics around Florida. He thinks sharks are much more likely to treat these bales like driftwood or other inedible detritus than a tasty meal, however. “These are predators,” says Naylor, who was not involved in the television program. “Unless the bale was laced with freshly killed fish, it’s unlikely they're going to want to eat anything that is not living.”

Floating Contraband.Photo byDiscovery Channel