Please be careful when cutting corals. Palytoxin in the eye

[chandigz]

Ya I've had my run ins with paly toxin.

The first time: While waiting for a buddy to come help move my tank I decided to finally rid some rock of the ugly brown palys that were taking over. I put on my gloves and glasses and proceeded to rip the little bastards off. I had a great idea. I would run the rock under really hot water to kill every last bit of tissue that was left. Little did I know that the palytoxin was becoming aerosolized and I was breathing it in. Within minutes I was developing a bad cough. We quickly moved the tank and my buddy left to go to work. By this time (1 hour later) my lungs were on fire and I was feeling really bad. I sat down on the couch and the next thing I new it was 12 hours later. I was sicker then I've ever been and completely delirious. I managed to crawl on my hands and knees, stopping and laying on the floor a few times to make it 12 feet over to my buckets of fish and tubs of coral and dump them into the tank. I then lost conciousness again and struggled in and out of conciousness, completely delirious, barely able to breath, with the most intense cold sweats, nausia, shakes, till the next day. When I finally was able to function I knew by the smell of dead coral that I didn't want to look at my tank. Complete wipe out!!!

After doing some research and talking to a Doctor I realized that it was a near death experience as I had most of the symptoms for a fatal poisoning. I initialy thought it entered thru a cut but I recently read a FDA report where two people in seperate incidents were hospitalized and almost died using boiling water and clued into how I got poisoned.

Do not use realy hot or boiling water to kill palys!!!!!! It may kill you instead!!!!

The second time: I was cutting frags at the LFS and forgot my safety glasses at home. My eye went completely red but didn't bother me at all. I didn't even realize how red it was until someone at work pointed it out and told me to go to the Doctor. The doctor gave me some antibiotic and anti inflamitory drops and wished me luck and told me to come back if it got worse. The pictures were when the redness was already going down. At one point there was no white left, completely red.




Wear saftey goggles!!!!

[gregzz4]

Holee crap
Thanks for the input guys

[fishytime]

thanks for sharing your experiences guys....Im gonna post a link to this thread in the "marine aquarium cautions" thread.....

[Leah]

I was chatting with a friend from Hawaii (native of Hawaii) and he is actually shocked that people keep these in an aquarium at all. Glad now that mine were all eaten.

[FishyFishy!]

Oh man thats some gnarly stuff!! I don't want to touch any of my Paly's ever again...lol

[FishyFishy!]

Interesting article about Palytoxin here:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/no...tore-near-you/


And this quote underneath got me thinking about having Dino's lol

"I should add *naturally occurring* poison. But the number one is maitotoxin, produced by a marine dinoflagellate (type of plankton) called Gambierdiscus toxicus. It has an LD50 of 50ng/kg, making it six times more potent than palytoxin."

[daniella3d]

If anyone interested, I will take them all of your hands, especially those rare and colorfull ones. For the ugly brown and green button polyp...it's garbage for sure.