How our sewage affects sex life of birds

It’s been well documented that a decreased sex drive can be a side effect from antidepressants such as Prozac. But the amount of these kind of drugs that end up in sewage plants may also hinder the mating habits of wild birds, a new study from the University of York shows.

Researchers found that female starlings who had been exposed to small doses of fluoxetine, the generic name for Prozac, became less attractive to male starlings, who sung to them less often and treated them more aggressively.

Kathryn Arnold, one of the study’s authors and a lecturer in ecology at the university, described it as “the first evidence that low concentrations of an antidepressant can disrupt the courtship of songbirds.”

That’s problematic because birds that are slow to find a mate may not get the chance to breed, she wrote.

“We’re definitely not saying that it’s bad to take antidepressants, but certainly there is a greater need for new technologies to clean out sewage,” Ar- nold told The Washington Post.

Birds like to graze at sewage treatment plants because they’re teeming with worms, flies and maggots, she said. But since antidepressants often make their way through the human body and into sewage plants without fully breaking down, those insects are frequently laced with drugs.

To figure out the effect these pharmaceuticals have on birds, researchers dosed worms with a low concentration of Prozac. The Prozac-treated worms were fed to starlings living in outdoor aviaries. The following spring, during breeding season, male starlings were set up on essentially blind dates.

The results were striking. When paired with female starlings that had been eating the Prozaclaced worms, males only sang half as often and for half as long as they did when paired with a female that hadn’t been exposed to the drug.