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August 6, 2021 – To reach these conclusions, the team led by Horký, in coordination with colleagues from the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, designed an experiment that measured the level of addiction among the fish. The scientists divided 120 brown trout in two tanks filled with 350 liters of water for eight weeks. One of the tanks contained hundreds of nanograms of amphetamine per liter, the same concentration of the drug encountered in the Czech Republic’s rivers.
At the end of the eight weeks, the researchers removed the amphetamine from the experimental tank and randomly analyzed the behavior of the fish over the course of 10 days to detect signs of addiction and abstinence. To do so, they designed a tank with two grates that simulated the flow of a river. On one side, the fish were given the opportunity to swim in water contaminated with the same level of amphetamine they had been exposed to previously. On the other side, the water was unadulterated.
