Red Lionfish and Ciguatoxin Menace Spreading Through Western Hemisphere by LEE CEARNAL Special Contributor to Annals News & Perspective B eautiful it may be, but the lion- fish is one nasty piece of work. If the only problem were the bad sting from its dorsal fins, the fish would be no more than an attractive nuisance. But in fact it’s becoming an environmen- tal disaster; a predator that has few nat- ural predators, it is voraciously gobbling up reef fish and arthropods from the North Carolina coast to the southern Ca- ribbean. Now, it appears its flesh might harbor a far more serious toxin than the annoy- ing one in its stingers: ciguatera toxin. The southernmost finding of a lionfish was made last year off St. Vincent’s in the Windward Islands, largely through the ef- forts of James Welsh and Jenny Young, his student at Trinity School of Medicine. Welsh, a radiology oncologist and profes- sor at Northern Illinois Univer- sity’s Neutron Radiation Ther- apy Facility at Fermilab, was teaching hematology at Trinity in the summer of 2010, focus- ing one day on envenomations, mostly snakebites. “I figured as long as I was talking about snakebite, I might as well talk about other types of envenomations, and we got involved in marine envenomations,” Welsh said. When he mentioned lionfish, Young said, “’Oh yeah, I saw one of those recently when I was skin diving,’ and I was just astounded to hear this.” The furthest con- firmed sighting at that point had been much further north, in the Virgin Islands. “So we asked some of the professional divers and fishermen to be on the lookout and let us know if any such fish had ever been identified,” he said. “A year later, I happened to come back to teach the course again, and while I was there coin- cidentally the fishermen caught one and brought it in. It was pretty obvious it was a red lionfish.” Lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific where they have many natural predators, were imported to the United States for public and private aquariums. It’s easy to see why: resplendent colors, variegated stripes, a gossamer tail fin, long feathery pectoral fins, and 7 or so sinister spikes along its spine. “The problem is that they are beau- tiful,” Welsh said, “and people have kept them as pets, and there’s this ten- dency people have to play, ’Oh, watch me feed the lionfish,’ and they throw a goldfish in there, and he gulps it down. So it’s a novelty and kind of sensation- alistic. But after a few years, people grew tired of that lionfish and dumped him in [the ocean] and never thought what the long-term consequence would be.” The first report of lionfish in US wa- ters seems to have been in 1985 by Na- tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin- istration ecologist James Morris Jr, off the coast of south Florida. Since then it has flourished like a bad weed. RAVENOUS A lionfish will eat anything that fits in its maw, vacuuming up shrimp and reef fish voraciously while fearing basically nothing. In its native waters, groupers and other predators keep lionfish in check. But the Carib- bean grouper has been overfished, and barracuda and sharks have shown no appetite for it. That leaves the apex predator, man. Throughout the lionfish’s range, divers and fishermen hold rodeos, roundups, and derbies, dragging them in by the hundreds. After the spines are carefully cut off along the top, lionfish can be filleted like any other fish. Its sting is painful, but in a few hours it will fade, like a very bad bee sting. Treat it by soaking the affected area in hot water and waiting it out. Divers and fishermen would gladly assume such minimal risk if there were a nice mar- ket for the meat. That held promise until late 2010, when a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chemist found ciguatera toxin in 4 of 7 as- sayed lionfish. Though rarely fatal, ciguatera poisoning can take months to recover from, with symptoms that run the diagnostic gamut: diarrhea, nausea, numbness, joint and muscle pain, headache, ver- tigo, and much more. And un- like a sting, the patient might not have any idea about what is making him sick. (One symptom might be a clue: a reversal in the feelings of hot and cold.) TOXIC SHOCK D inoflagellates that produce the toxin are eaten by herbivorous fish, which are then eaten by predators, passing it up the food chain. It gradually accumu- lates in the flesh of the top predators to levels that can cause violent illness. And cooking doesn’t help: ciguatoxin is heat resistant. Photo credit: Florida Museum of Natural History. Volume , . : July Annals of Emergency Medicine 21A
Welcome message from author
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Related Documents
