Unlikely, I think? Her citations mention a 1999 study re: Clupeotoxism, so that seems to be the link as far as I can tell, but as I said, this is entirely above my head scientifically. You tell me!
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Very serious! I think I mentioned before how fatal it is: 45 % of death rate. Anything else?
Wow. What does it do and how do the fish get it?
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Let me go again.
Fish in the ocean are always gonna be involved in accumulating substances in their body, some of them being toxic. And if the toxins multiply within the food chain, biomagnification occurs. In most of the Northern Hemisphere, bioaccumulation of mercury, very well known, occurs, as an example. Primary consumers get tiny amounts of mercury and bigger fish like tuna, swordfish or shark will eat them, multiplying the amount of mercury in their bodies.
Some of these toxins can be produced by microscopic beings, like dinoflagellates. Here in the tropics, large, predatory fish accumulate sometimes toxins from organisms in the genus Gambierdiscus, biomagnifying it pretty much the same way tuna do with mercury. Only that fish with too much of these toxins can make people sick. This is called ciguatera, and it its very well known in the tropics. There’s no way to predict if a fish will cause ciguatera poisoning since the toxin is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, but mortality rates are low, although ciguatera poisoning is awful and many people end up in the hospital.
Clupeotoxism, the main subject of this thread, is a similar way of getting poisoned but occurs when eating clupeiform fish in the tropics. That is weird since clupeiform fish feed directly on plankton so toxins should supposedly be in them in teeny tiny quantities. But the thing is, clupeotoxism is highy fatal. And, although studies have identified the toxin as the famous palytoxin, no one knows where do the fish get it. A study in the 90s analyzed sardines that contained the toxin and suggested the toxin might come from benthic organisms because they saw sand in the sardines’ gills. But the last revision says that’s ridiculous since the sand was there very likely because the sardines were dragged by nets. That new revision suggested that the toxin might come from some kind of plankton.
And I still have many questions and that’s why I opened this thread for.
I take it back. I think that CICY paper does have to do with this. See page 19.
edit to add: HER numbered page 19, not using the “jump to page 19” tool.
So it’s similar to shellfish poisoning. Same idea as when a shellfish beach is closed to harvesting because of a red tide.
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@jasonhernandez74 So I was on the right track with this?
In that chromista are the culprits, yes. Although red tides are usually dinoflagellates, which are a different phylum.
Thank you, that makes sense.
(The effect of the sargazo here cannot be overstated.)
I wonder what’s producing the toxin. Is this a relatively recent thing, have there been documented accounts of this before? Could this toxin and whatever’s making spread out of the tropics?
I’m just pulling out the hypotheticals here. An interesting subject for sure though!
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Thanks so much for explaining and being blunt. What fish do I look out for?
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Depending on your particular circumstances.
Like what?
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The place where you live in. Do you live in the tropics?
No, I live in subtropics.
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I live in South Carolina.
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So then, I don’t think you are exposed to ciguatera or clupeotoxism.
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The relative effectiveness of various governments and their agencies aside - this isn’t something even a utopian agency could effectively do at present because (aside perhaps from the known prevalence in farmed salmon) this isn’t something that occurs in manufacturing batches of fish - it occurs in harmful concentrations in individual fish.
So you can’t just monitor a “fish haul”, you have to test every individual fish - and there is no simple, quick, and reliable test for it - even most lab testing still generally consists of feeding a sample to some other animal, then monitoring its corpse for probable signs of poisoning, and there is no test (or clear antidote) for the poisoning in still live humans.
It’s a lot like most disease - you can monitor for its presence in a general way, and you can keep statistics on its prevalence and fatality rates in a population, but all of that is post-facto, none of it really helps you as an individual from becoming part of those statistics.
The only way to entirely avoid it is to not eat at risk fish in at risk locations - and to hope the fish you ate somewhere else wasn’t some imported mis-labelled species. And even that still won’t protect you from the many other varieties of food poisoning which affect people in similar proportions in just about every place on earth.
Eating is dangerous, that’s just the way it is!
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Okay, thanks.
@elpatitojuan2 if the sargazo has anything at all to do with this, there has been much recently about the lixiviados from it, with CICY and other orgs, gob and ACs, putting out warnings to the populace about the dangers from these emissions.
This 2024 CICY study might have info re: toxins and heavy metals that could conceivably lead back to these fish.