Can peeing in a lake really kill fish?

There ’s been a story kick back around in the word recently about a scrap in Hamburg , Germany , where recreational swimmer have purportedly killed Pisces the Fishes by peeing in Eichbaum Lake , making fishermen really ( get quick ) make water off . Reading this set off my likely - net - tommyrot alarm bells : short articles , come from a foreign nation , base offone English - lyric report , with a spokesman from the Hamburger Angling Association as the main generator . Is there anything to this ? Can anything as instinctive as peeing in a lake kill the Pisces ?

In a word , yes . Whether pee was the murder arm in this special whodunnit depends on some factors that are n’t cleared from these scant reports , like how many mass are swim there and the chemical science of the lake . But pee certainly can kill fish , though it ’s not actually the urine that does it .

Urine include plenty of nitrogen , potassium , and phosphorus , food that are helpful for plant growth . In fact , those are the three main ingredient in both industrial fertilizer and natural fertilizers like manure . ( The nitrogren in water is n’t N2 , the gas that makes up most of the standard atmosphere — it ’s N3- , the “ fixed ” atomic number 7 that plants need . ) If you let your pee posture around for a farseeing while ( I do n’t commend doing this , for obvious reasons ) , it will precipitate outan odorless fertilizer call struvite .

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So if you add a passel of urine to a lake , you ’re essentially dumping in a cluster of fertilizer , which cases a bloom of youth of algae . After they ’ve used up the fertilizer , the algae continue using oxygen , and when they pass away , their rot consumes still more , drastically lowering the levels of oxygen in the lake , which is what generally kill Pisces the Fishes . The same kind of Pisces die - off happen whenagricultural run - off hand river and lake — the rill - off includes lots of fertilizer , which is basically urine , after all . And Eichbaum ’s fish may be facing an unusual extra danger : Hamburg University scientists have reportedly feel a particular type of alga in the lake that really releases a toxin .

finally , it seems plausible that some apparently harmless piss is actually harming the lake ’s fish . It would n’t be the first time a large body of water faced the same risk : ecologistswarn visitant not to peewhen they gossip the beautiful Great Barrier Reef ( render above ) for fear that algae flower will belt down the coral .

persona : melissaf84 / Shutterstock

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