Another palytoxin incident

[Zaphodent]

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/04/05/man-warns-pet-owners-after-fish-tank-releases-second-deadliest-poison-hospitalizes-10.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fmost-popular+%28Internal+-+Most+Popular+Content%29

 

Pulsing Xenia?

 

 

 

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[BAJAB]

You beat me to it. This is really scary. Many years ago when I first started the hobby, I boiled a bunch of rocks to kill aiptasia (and other corals on the rocks) and ended up with pneumonia. I didn’t know better. It’s no joke!

[Origami]

I was not aware that palytoxin was in Xenia. This journal article from the NIH does not include it in the table of species where it's been found. Xenia slime has caused some people problems with numbness and mucosal membrane swelling (sort of like a true allergic reaction). Not saying that it's not true, but I'm skeptical right now, thinking that they're blaming the wrong thing. Definitely worth following.

[tygger]

Scary, but Xenia?

[gmerek2]

Just from scrubbing?. Usually to get the whole house sick the poison has to get airisolized

[dpassar12]

This is interesting, the Xenia reference in the news story confused me. There are 2 references to Xenia in this article...  Not sure why everyone pours boiling water on rocks in general, but it seems that this should probably never be done to clean rocks.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4771986/

[Origami]

This is interesting, the Xenia reference in the news story confused me. There are 2 references to Xenia in this article...  Not sure why everyone pours boiling water on rocks in general, but it seems that this should probably never be done to clean rocks.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4771986/

Dan, you DO know that the guy that boiled the rocks and made the news that started all this was one of our member, right? Paragraph 2.2.1 and the first entry in Table 1, the 2007 Virginia reference, was one of our old members, Steve Outlaw. 

 

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/05/worlds-2nd-deadliest-poison-in-an-aquarium-store-near-you/

 

http://wamas.org/forums/topic/48670-steve-outlaw-is-not-the-only-one-now/

 

Yeah, we've got a long history of palytoxin exposure here. 

[treesprite]

Based on a bunch of stuff I just read, it seems the news media just accepted what the guy said as factual. A picture of his tank shows palys growing in it, and there same must have been on the rock he was scrubbing.

[dpassar12]

I did not know there was a WAMAS 3 years ago. Well I supposed it is good to be first in something,.  Joking aside, does the article say that Xenia can absorb the toxin? I was not clear on that.,,.. I thought it was only P/Z/s that contained the poison.. 

[Origami]

I did not know there was a WAMAS 3 years ago. Well I supposed it is good to be first in something,.  Joking aside, does the article say that Xenia can absorb the toxin? I was not clear on that.,,.. I thought it was only P/Z/s that contained the poison.. 

Look at the NIH article that I linked to in post #3 for a table listing known species with significant amounts of palytoxin. The article is in no way scientific, so I wouldn't take anything written there as fact. The only places where pulsing xenia are mentioned, it seems, are in quotes from the aquarist. He may have called it out because he had a lot of it that he was scrubbing off. However, if he had certain variants of palythoa in his tank on on the rock he was scrubbing, it was more likely that. It doesn't take much. The symptoms described are consistent with mild exposure to palytoxin, but could be attributed to something else I suppose. Maybe even some chemical in the xenia - I don't know. But palytoxin from Xenia? I've not heard any evidence that says that's a reasonable possibility at his point.

[zygote2k]

this article looks suspiciously like the one that happened in Australia a few years back. Almost looks like media fluff with snippets of a real story and zero fact checking.