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More than a dozen dolphins, stranded on the beaches of Florida and Massachusetts, were found with brains filled with amyloid plaques, features of Alzheimer's disease.
The scientists who made this discovery think that this could be a warning to all of us: next to the plaques resembling Alzheimer's disease, the team also discovered the BMAA environmental toxin.
Produced by the proliferation of blue-green algae, this neurotoxin is easily captured by the oceanic food web. It has long been suspected that chronic dietary exposure is a cause of neurological disease, including Alzheimers diseases, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The presence of both BMAA and Amyloid plaques in 13-stranded dolphins add even more weight to this hypothesis.
"Dolphins are an excellent sentinel species for toxic exposures in the marine environment," said neurologist Deborah Mash of the University of Miami.
"With the increasing frequency and duration of cyanobacterial blooms in coastal waters, dolphins could provide an early warning of toxic exposures that could affect human health."
They could also be a good animal model to explain how AMDA could trigger Alzheimer's disease. In 2017, it was discovered that dolphins are the only wild animal known to show signs of this common human disease.
Meanwhile, dolphins that inhabit the coastal waters of Florida are also commonly exposed to the proliferation of recurrent harmful algae. This is perhaps only a coincidence, but experiments have shown that chronic dietary exposure to BMAA can trigger neurodegenerative changes in humans and non-human primates.
"Acute and chronic exposures to such toxins can be harmful to humans and animals, resulting in respiratory diseases, severe dermatitis, mucosal damage, cancer, organ failure and death. ", write the authors.
As the world warms up rapidly, these HABs become more and more common, and the authors fear that dolphins will accumulate even more ABMA, "both by exposure to HABs and by the ingestion of prey. already exposed to cyanotoxin ". .
As such, these creatures might well be our first indication of poor environmental conditions, and even though it's still unclear whether these blooms directly lead to Alzheimer's disease in dolphins or dolphins. in humans, researchers say that it is a risk that we should not be willing to take. .
"The $ 64,000 question is whether these marine mammals have experienced cognitive deficits and disorientation that have led to their stranding," says co-author Paul Alan Cox, ethnobotanist at Jackson Hole's Brain Chemistry Labs.
"Until new research clarifies this issue, people should take simple steps to avoid exposure to cyanobacteria."
This study was published in PLOS ONE.
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