Canreef Aquatics Bulletin Board - Zoos are very toxic!!

Canreef Aquatics Bulletin Board (http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/index.php)

- Reef (http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=8)

- - Zoos are very toxic!! (http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=12968)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tarolisol

How can some fish eats them if there so toxic?

Organisms have a variety of adaptations for dealing with potentially toxic foodstuffs. Just because it's harmful to one species, genus, family, order, etc. doesn't mean it will be harmful to others, and of course the opposite is often the case as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tarolisol

What about if you have a cut on your finger or somthing and get squirted.

yes, head to the hospital.

Remember if you do have a problem and go to a hospital everyone should also have a piece of paper with the name of this toxin on it to tell the staff. it will make it much easier for them to properly treat it and the out come will be better for you the faster it is treated.

the general toxin name is ichthyotoxin of which there are a few variations. from yellow sun polyps you get palytoxin and a close relative of the giant sum polyp was used by Hawaiian worriers to tip there Spears in for mortal combat. there is a good section on this toxin in Eric Bornman's coral book.

Steve

I can vouch for this story... the day of Bev's party I bought some zoos when I got home I put them in the tank then went out for the evening. I went to bed around 11:30, I awoke about 1:30 with uncontrollable shaking and bad nausea. After a shower didn't help me the wife took me to the emergency room, after gravol, four bags of IV and numerous test and x-rays their best guess was a slight case of pneumonia. After getting out at 6:00 am I slept till noon and I was perfectly fine :confused: So to this day we are not really sure what is was we think it was the zoos. It wasn't until a few days after the fact that I found out zoos are toxic so now I do everything with gloves on :biggrin:

i have noticed that they are very toxic to other corals as well. The othe day I noticed one of my green cany canes fell over on to a zoo colony. When I picked up the candt coral it was half dead. They couldn't have been touching each other for only a couple of hours but it was enough that the candy coral's skeleton was exposed.

Just something from a website

Quote:

Palytoxin
The crude ethanol extracts of the Palythoa toxica proved to be so toxic that an accurate LD50 was difficult to determine. More recently, the toxicity has been determined to be 50-100 ng/kg i.p. in mice. The compound is an intense vasoconstrictor; in dogs, it causes death within 5 min at 60 ng/kg. By extrapolation, a toxic dose in a human would be about 4 micrograms. It is the most toxic organic substance known!
Shimizu [27] and Moore [28] published the chemical structure of palytoxin and it was prepared synthetically in 1989 [29,30]. Palytoxin is a fabulously interesting compound, with a bizarre structure and many extraordinary signs (Fig. 6). Palytoxin is a large, very complex molecule with lipophilic and hydrophilic areas. The palytoxin molecule has the longest continuous chain of carbon atoms known to exist in a natural product. In the molecule of palytoxin, C129H223N3O54, 115 of the 129 carbons are in a continuous chain.. There are 54 atoms of oxygen, but only 3 atoms of nitrogen. Another unusual structure of palytoxin is that it contains 64 stereogenic centers, which means that palytoxin can have 264 stereoisomers! Added to this, the double bonds can exhibit cis/***** isomerism, which means that palytoxin can have more than 1021 (one sextilion) stereoisomers! This staggering molecular complexity should indicate the difficult nature of designing a stereocontrolled synthetic strategy that will produce just the one correct (natural) stereocenter out of >1021 possible stereoisomers.
Palytoxin induces powerful membrane depolarization and ionic channeling [31,32]. Palytoxin is a potent hemolysin, histamine releaser, inhibitor of Na/K ATPase, and a cation ionophore [33]. It is also a non-TPA-type tumor promoter [34,35].

:eek: Yep I remember that thread, shortly after I removed all Zoo's in my reef and even my GSP too :exclaim:

It's a good thing when these articles get recycled though, gotta keep the newbies informed too :biggrin: