The case of the aquarium's disappearing medicine

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/930455

 

  News Release 4-Oct-2021
Hungry microbes found responsible for stealing from Shedd Aquarium’s animals
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Northwestern University

For months, veterinarians put medicine into the animals’ quarantine habitats at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, ensuring that animals entering the building did not bring dangerous pests or pathogens with them. And for months, the medicine consistently kept disappearing. Where was it going? Who was taking it? And what was their motive?

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After conducting microbial and chemical analyses on samples from the saltwater aquarium systems, the team found it was not just one culprit but many: A family of microbes, hungry for nitrogen.

“Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorous are basic necessities that everything needs in order to live,” said Northwestern’s Erica M. Hartmann, who led the study. “In this case, it looks like the microbes were using the medicine as a source of nitrogen. When we examined how the medicine was degraded, we found that the piece of the molecule containing the nitrogen was gone. It would be the equivalent to eating only the pickles out of a cheeseburger and leaving the rest behind.”

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