Portland Area Fish Behaving Nervously
by John Laumer, Philadelphia 
on 05. 9.07
Fair trade coffee won't help the poor nervous salmon settle down unless customers decide henceforth to join the pee-bucket brigade. 'Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey found Grande amounts of caffeine all over the bottom sediments of the Willamette and Tualatin rivers, Fanno Creek, and other Portland-area waterways. They also found pharmaceuticals galore, ranging from Prozac to Tagamet, as well as perfumes and cosmetics.' From the Portland Oregonian, via SOEJ.
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Dumb question from the not-an-organic-chemist over here.
I can understand how they can identify the unnaturally occurring substances in the mix and trace them back to human sources. How (if at all) were they able to link the caffeine found back to human consumption?
I'm curious because tea can contain a pretty high caffeine content (higher than coffee in some cases) and it's just boiled leaves. Were they able to exclude caffeine sourced from decomposing plant matter because there simply aren't enough caffeine-containing plants (varieties and volume) to account for the traces found?
Andrew.
==== author's response follows ===
You're almost there. Plants from all over the world have evolved to have toxins in their fruit which repel feeding insects, worms, grazing mammal, etc.. Some, like the American black walnut, have double duty: competitive exclusion. (The astringent black liquid that comes out of the walnut husk happens to prevent other tree seeds from germinating.) Hence, there are similarities in function between the various nicotinoids, alkaloids, humic acids, etc. It just happens that caffeine is from tropical plants primarily.
In order to partition into measurable quantities in river sediment or be biomagnified into sediment dwellers, you'd need a steady source: more like a sewerage plant than the rare native plant that produces some only for a brief period of the year (in fruiting bodies).
Cool! Thanks for the extra detail!
Andrew.
Prozac and other anti-depressants are also suppressing fish fertility. I first saw press accounts of this in the '90s.