There are as many as
120 species of puffer fish that live mostly in tropical seas, although a few occur in fresh or brackish waters. The teeth of their upper and lower jaws are separately fused with a vertical gap in front. Like the Parrot fish, the puffer fish uses its beak-like teeth for feeding on corals or hard-shelled animals. Puffers come in different size from the tiny Valentine
Puffer fish to larger Star Puffer fish. Also called blowfish and globefish, they are named after their habit of inflating themselves with water or air when threatened, making it difficult for a predator to swallow them.
Another way to repel
predators is to advertise by wearing bright colors and markings that that they
have, mostly concentrated in their liver, testes, ovaries, and eggs a powerful
and complex non-protein toxin called: tetrodotoxin
(TTX).
The Japanese consider the most poisonous puffer fish as a delicacy for its
unique flavor accompanied by perioral and lingual paresthesias. The chefs have to hold a special
license to prepare the dish and the 100 or so annual poisoning through TTX occur
from ingestion by fisherman or through unlicensed chefs.
Symptoms of
tetrodoxin (TTX) poisoning can occur within fifteen minutes to several hours
after ingestion and start with paresthesias, floating feelings, nausea,
vomiting, epigastric pain, and hypotension. Death can occur in 4-6 hours through
respiratory depression as a result of paralysis of the respiratory nerves and
musculature.
There
is a company in Vancouver, Canada that is entering into phase 2 clinical
trials with a drug called Tetrodin. Tetrodin is manufactured from Tetrodotoxin,
the
toxin from the puffer fish. This drug has been under development in Asia for
the last 15 years and was originally developed to help heroin addicts
withdrawal. It was discovered that Tetrodin actually killed the pain of the
withdrawal and is a very potent pain killer. Studies have shown that Tetrodin
is 3000 times more powerful than morphine as a pain killer. A clinical
trial
conducted in Asia on 11 cancer patients showed that after 2 injections a day
for 3 days these patients were pain free after the first 5 minutes and
remained pain free for 20 days after the last injection.
This
new drug is still under research development but it show once again
how much there are still to learn from the marine environment and emphasize
the need to protect these fragile ecosystems.
