Mixing medicines: uncovering impacts of pharmaceutical pollutant mixtures on wildlife

Release of novel synthetic chemicals into the environment is amongst the fastest-growing agents of global change.

This includes biologically active pharmaceuticals (e.g. antibiotics, antidepressants, contraceptives), which have now become widespread in aquatic habitats.

Alarmingly, however, very little is known about potential interactive effects of these drugs, despite the fact that animals inhabiting contaminated systems are seldom (if ever) exposed to single pharmaceuticals in isolation.

Here, I propose a series of collaborative experiments investigating how exposure to environmentally realistic mixtures of pharmaceuticals might impact fundamental fitness-related traits and behaviours in wildlife.

I will carry out four interrelated work packages to reveal: the capacity of pharmaceuticals to be taken up into wildlife tissues (WP 1), the potential for these drugs to disrupt key behavioural (WP 2) and physiological (WP 3) processes, and the validity of laboratory-based assays in predicting impacts of pharmaceuticals in complex and dynamic natural systems (WP 4).

This project will focus on the most prevalent pharmaceutical contaminants, and will harness cutting-edge technologies to reveal their true environmental impacts (e.g. slow-release drug implants and three-dimensional animal tracking).

This combination of experimental approaches is entirely unique and promises to reveal a range of hitherto unknown impacts of pharmaceutical pollution.