Fentanyl found inside dolphins in Gulf of Mexico: ‘We think this is a longstanding problem’

Move over cocaine sharks, here come the fentanyl dolphins …

An alarming number of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico were found to have traces of fentanyl in their system, shocking scientists with a horrifying twist to the drug epidemic.

Traces of the powerful synthetic opioid was first found inside a dead dolphin that was floating in the gulf water when it was then examined by researchers from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in Sept. 2020.

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What was supposed to be a routine analysis of blubber turned into years-long research — with more than a third of the dolphins testing positive for drugs.

“It’s not something we were looking for, so of course we were alarmed to find something like fentanyl, especially with the fentanyl crisis happening in the world right now,” doctoral student Makayla Guinn told KRIS.

“These drugs and pharmaceuticals are entering our water and they have cascading effects in our marine life.”

Guinn’s team — with the help of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Texas Parks and Wildlife and Precision Toxicological Consultancy — took a deeper dive to find how much fentanyl had infected dolphins.

The research included sampling 89 dolphins’ blubber, of which over 3,000 different compounds are typically found including several pharmaceutical drugs like sedatives and relaxants, the outlet reported.

Six of the tests were on dead dolphins, while the other 83 were collected through live biopsies.

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Fentanyl was found in 18 dolphin samples — including the blubber of all six dead mammals — making more than 20%, according to the study.

A third of those tested had some form of human-made drugs found inside them, with others positive for the skeletal relaxant carisoprodol and the anxiety disorder drug meprobamate.

Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and a kilogram of the deadly drug is enough to kill 500,000 people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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Researchers have yet to conclude where the drugs are coming from as officials have not ruled out several possibilities.

“One possibility but not the only possibility is that drugs might becoming from our waste water,” marine biologist, Dr. Dara Orbach told the outlet.

“It’s likely they’re getting these pharmaceuticals in their system from eating prey. Those prey being the same fish and shrimp that we’re also eating over here, considering that the Coastal Bend is such an important fishing community, locally.”

The discovery could lead to a breakthrough in discovering the source of the drugs, but because of the expansive time period between the samples, it may be a difficult task.

“Some of these samples we looked at are more than a decade old and those animals also had pharmaceuticals. So we think this is a longstanding problem that no one’s been looking at,” Orbach said.