I’m a prairie kid who loves research. I have a Master’s in economics with a focus on public programs, labour and education. Long before that, I did my undergrad in physics & English with a math minor.

Besides my resume, you’ll find this page full of sewing projects, the odd published poem, and stories about Canadian science.

A note about the blog title: in math and physics, the prefix eigen means one's own. It comes from the german, but mostly I always liked thinking about a particle's eigenvalues, and thought I might apply the same thought to my excursions.

The drug craze that’s sweeping the oceans: teen dolphins getting high on pufferfish

The drug craze that’s sweeping the oceans: teen dolphins getting high on pufferfish

dolphin.jpg

Teenagers like to get high — it’s an inter-species thing. That is, it’s not just teenage humans who are fond of experimenting with neurotoxins to experience the world differently. Dolphins do too.

Young dolphins carefully manipulate aptly-named pufferfish to release its toxins. They pass it on like a joint and fall into a trance. It’s deliberate behaviour, and seems to carry some of the same hallmarks as human drug use.

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The BBC documentary crew that caught the behaviour on film used a series of spy cameras disguised like sea creatures and managed to get closer than ever before to the marine mammals. As you can see in the video up top, they even documented a superpod of three thousand dolphins hanging out together in the ocean. THREE THOUSANDS DOLPHINS!

As for the drug use, the pufferfish has to be the right kind, kind of like how some salvia is just run-of-the-mill sage and some is a powerful hallucinogen. And similarly to many human drugs of choice, too much of a good thing can be lethal.

PufferFish Wallpaper

Of course, dolphins are just the newest creatures we’ve discovered to enjoy getting tipsy. Another species, that, like dolphins and humans, are famed for their intelligence, elephants, have long been known to enjoy a drink. Elephants are smart enough to get their liquor from villages they pillage. And they party hard.

Horses are into dangerous locoweed. Bighorn sheep use lichen off rocks. Wallabies use poppies for opium, just like us. Birds sometimes eat rotten berries. It’s a wild world out there.

You can check out the BBC’s clips of dolphins getting high for yourself on the second episode of Dolphins: Spy in the Pod which airs on Thursday, Jan. 2.

This article first appeared on

The Albatross

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