by Fiona Quinn
Dr. Jones went to the back of his door and hung up his lab coat, switching it out for a rubber apron. He slid rubber gloves all the way up his arms and over his shoulders like sleeves. He pulled an elastic strap over his head that held a full-face visor in place. Reaching into the tank next to Deep and Lacey, he pulled one of the flower-covered pillows out of the water. “Now this is Zoranthus, but I still use protective precautions. Zoranthus is similar to Palythoa and can secrete a little bit of the palytoxin, but not nearly as much as a Palythoa.” He moved with the specimen to a stainless-steel lab table.
“It can stay alive outside of the water?” Deep asked.
“Oh yes, but you don’t want to leave them out for long. You take them out, you do your thing, and put them back in. Certainly, you need to work within a fifteen-minute time frame. Okay, you two, you need to stand back at least three feet. This guy is tiny, but it can squirt water pretty darned far.”
Deep pulled Lacey by the hips well back from the table.
Dr. Jones turned the Zoanthus over. “You see, I’ve attached the colony to a plug with some epoxy, then the plugs are inserted into the prepared holes in the live rock. It allows the hobbyists to rearrange their tank for the visual balance of color and texture. Typically, aquarists have other things in their tanks for variety and to make them attractive. Of course, sometimes an aquarist needs to move the animals around because the specimen don’t all get along. Then it’s better to move them away from each other. Sort of like when siblings fight, you have to move them to opposite sides of the sofa to keep the peace.” Dr. Jones chuckled as if he’d cracked a good joke.
Lacey smiled politely and nodded her head.
“This is a coral scalpel,” Dr. Jones said. “I simply remove the fragments that I wish to move or propagate, like so. Now that I’ve removed the fragment from the mother colony, I’m going to put the plug right back into the water. See?” Dr. Jones walked back to the tank and maneuvered the plug back into a hole in the live rock. Dr. Jones stood back and looked, then reached in again, and with his hand dangling in the tank he said, “Get right down where you can see what I’m doing.”
Lacey and Deep squatted down to eye level with his hands.
“I’m sticking it back in a hole. Safe and sound.” He stepped back to look at the tank. “I think it goes better there. Now,” Dr. Jones turned back to the work table, “with this little frag, I’m going to affix it to this plug with a dab of epoxy, give it time to set, and then I’ll put it on this shelf I have set up in the corner of the tank so I can keep it isolated. Not really necessary, but it’s a step I like to take.”
“Why are you wearing a face shield?” Deep asked.
“Well, I am fragging Zoranthus, not Palythoa, but it always pays to be cautious. Zoranthus can still have enough palytoxin in it to cause a great deal of agony.” Dr. Jones washed his gloved hands in the sink, then pulled the gloves off, hanging them to dry, then he washed his hands. He put his safety wear back in its place and donned his lab coat again. "I want you to see this.”
Dr. Jones covered the room in a few long strides. He turned his computer around and played with the keys, then turned it so Deep and Lacey could see the screen. “The guy in this photo was fragging Zoranthus and a miniscule amount of water squirted him in the eye, and this was the result.”
“Jezzis,” Deep breathed out.
Lacey stared at the picture of an eye that looked inhuman. The tissues of the upper and lower lids were so inflamed that it looked like long blisters on either side of the eyeball. The eyeball itself was bloodshot, and the pupil had taken over the iris. Lacey’s body responded by pulling in tighter and bracing. All that from a squirt of water off a tiny frag?
“This is not an uncommon experience.” Dr. Jones flipped through other like photographs. “It’s important to always take precautions.”
“Understood, sir, but that’s what can happen to you if you come into dermal contact with the substance. What happens if you were to ingest it?” Deep asked.
“You die.” Dr. Jones got a funny little look on his face that basically said, Are you crazy? “Well, if it’s a small enough quantity, you’ll wish you would die. There are some stories of people falling ill from eating crab with palytoxicity, and they’ve become very ill. but survived. But I can’t imagine a circumstance in which you’d actually ingest the toxin other than through an unfortunate instance with sea foods.”
“What would happen, for example, if you were to boil a piece of the live rock that had held Palythoa plugs?”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head emphatically, then stood with his hands on his hips like a mother scolding a child. “You never, ever, ever want to boil a rock that had had Polythoa or Zoranthus on them. Never. Don’t even pressure wash them.”
“And why is that, sir?” Deep asked. “Well, first, let me ask you—are there good reasons to want to clean the rock either through pressure washing or boiling them? Legitimate mistakes that people would make in handling them?”
Dr. Jones reached up his sleeve and scratched his elbow. “Often times, you’ll see a hobbyist begin with freshwater and advance to become a marine hobbyist. Freshwater hobbyists will boil their rocks to sanitize them. If you’re moving from one kind of system to another, one might carry forward the habits from the last system. And as to the reason why one should never pressure wash or boil live rock – imagine, if you will, that the toxin is aerosolized. It’s in the atmosphere, floating around in combination with the air. How could you render yourself safe? It’s on your skin. It’s in your airways. Your lungs oxygenate your blood, so now the blood circulating in your body is poisoned. Awful. I mean awful. Highly toxic. Deadly. There was a guy I talked to once who was boiling his rocks, and he almost took out his whole family, including his German shepherds.”
Lacey reached for Deep’s hand and twisted her fingers with his. “The toxins would kill animals? Like birds? The birds would be like canaries in a coal mine?”
“Absolutely—birds have relatively fragile systems. If there were birds in the environment, they would succumb to the toxins very quickly.” Dr. Jones moved toward his desk at the back of the room and planted his hips on the edge.
“And what would happen, if, say, a person walked into a kitchen, and she put her head right over a stew pot with five or so rocks boiling in it?” As Lacey trembled, Deep moved to rest his hands on her shoulders.
Dr. Jones shifted his gaze to the ceiling, rubbing a hand over his chin while he contemplated the question. “Hard to say.” He focused back on her. “It would depend on several things. For example, what was the toxicity level on the rocks? And how long had they been boiling? If they had been boiling for hours and hours, it could be that most of the toxicity had already entered the environment and dissipated, reducing the concentration over the pot. But if the toxicity levels were there, it would feel a bit like being very frightened. Like a panic attack. Breathing would become difficult; the heart would be straining. And here’s an interesting little caveat. One of the problems with being poisoned with palytoxins is that the person understands that something very bad is happening, but they don’t act like they do. There’s a kind of euphoria that happens. So they might think, ‘I need help, something’s very wrong.’ But they don’t act on it. Or they act counter to their best interests—they do the thing that they know might endanger them more.”
Lacey tilted her head. “Like stand up and walk out the front door in plain sight?”
“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Jones asked.
“Oh, sorry, I was thinking out loud.”
“You cannot imagine how potent this poison is and how little it would take to make you very sick. It even happened to me. Not boiling it, mind you. Let me tell you a story so you can fully understand how potent and dangerous this toxin is.”
Dr. Jones eased farther back until he was sitting on his desk. His long legs bent at the knee and crossed at the ankle, making him look like a frog in mid-jump.
Deep pulled Lacey�
��s hand and had her sit on a wooden desk chair close to the professor. He pulled a lab stool over for himself, sitting beside her.
“So one day I was looking at my tanks. That one there.” He pointed at an aquarium.
Lacey twisted in her seat to see the one he’d indicated, and then swiveled back.
“I saw a little piece of rock with a small Palythoa colony in there. I remember putting it in there as sort of a place to put it down, and frankly, I had forgotten about it. So I’m walking it over to another tank one where I kept my Palythoa collection along with other specimens, and as I walk it over—and this isn’t broken off, I wasn’t fragging, I just had a piece about the size of a silver dollar in my hand—I notice that there’s a little slime on it.” He rubbed his fingertips with his thumb. “It’s like clear mucus that runs out of your nose when you’ve got a cold coming on, a little thicker maybe. Same thing. Only not.”
Dr. Jones continued his tale with a faraway look in his eye. “I didn’t think anything of it. I’d touched Palythoa with my bare hands quite a lot ever since I was a teen. At this point in time, I was doing what I do. I move things from tank to tank all the time.
“Now, I go home, and I have a terrible night. I felt like I’d been in a car accident. I ached. And I mean ached. It was far worse than the flu. It was as if someone beat me all over my body with a bat. My wife was sleeping next to me, and I was trying not to moan and wake her. I knew she would freak out if I told her I thought I was dying. I remember very clearly that I thought I might. Just. Die. And, at the same time, I didn’t feel like I wanted to do anything about it. Remember that for a minute.”
Lacey nodded and leaned onto her crossed knee.
“So the next morning, I feel better. Tired, but better. I no longer thought I was going to die, and I was really pleased that I was able to shake off whatever bug was going around. I decided I felt well enough to go in to the office.” Dr. Jones hung his head and shook it slowly back and forth. “The first thing that hits me when I open the door? The smell. Oh my gosh, that smell, awful. I walk over to my tank and see it’s cloudy. Cloudy plus smell means disaster. Disaster.” He shook his hands like the heavens themselves were opening.
Lacey wondered if this guy spent a lot of time on a stage—his gestures seemed perfect for the theater but overwhelming in the laboratory space. Lacey wasn’t used to loud. And she certainly wasn’t used to exuberance. She sunk back against Deep’s chest, and he dropped a kiss into her hair.
“The whole tank was dead. Everything was so healthy and magnificent the night before. Every last organism in the aquarium was dead. Fish. Everything.” Dr. Jones shook his head in disbelief. “It was devastating.”
“It was the Palythoa you moved into the tank that caused the problem?” Lacey reached out a hand and put it on the professor’s knee like she was sympathizing with a death in his family.
“It was. And that’s when I remembered the slime on the piece as I moved it. And I thought back, and yes, my symptoms were exactly that of palytoxin poisoning. Thank God I didn’t actually die – I just wanted to. And that informed my future research. It turns out that palytoxins are transdermal. That’s something we didn’t know before. We assumed that the toxin entered the human system through an opening. But since it can pass through a dermal barrier, the poison doesn’t need to enter into a cut or what have you. You can get some on your skin, and it can enter your blood system. Also, we had assumed that the toxicity came from the flesh of the animal. But no. It’s the secretion. That was a new finding, too. Amazing and so, so dangerous.”
“I’m sorry that you experienced this,” Lacey said. “So that leads me to think, if I were writing a book or making up a plot for a killer in the movies, could they do something like add the palytoxin secretions to someone’s personal hygiene products—put it in their hand lotion, for example—and kill people?”
Dr. Jones sent her a strange glance. “Why did you say you were here?”
Deep said, “We were over at the Smithsonian talking to Ben, Paul, and Augustine, and they were trying to remember the story you were telling at a Christmas party about almost dying and boiling live rock. They must have confused the two stories. We were there showing a piece of live rock to Augustine.”
“Yes, the boiling, it should never be done. And yes, I guess you could poison someone by placing the mucus from a Palythoa with a high toxicity level into someone’s body lotion. You’d have to know they would use the lotion. You’d be risking killing someone by accident, someone else picking up the bottle, using the lotion, and being poisoned. That would be very risky.” Dr. Jones stared at the ceiling, thinking this idea through. “Well I suppose this is fiction, so the author could do as they wished with the outcome.”
Lacey tucked her hair behind her ears. “I’m wondering from what you’ve said what would have happened if you had woken your wife. If she had called an ambulance, are there anti-palytoxins available like they have for snake bites? An anti-venom, if you will?”
“Yes. Yes. That’s what I wanted to tell you when you brought up Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. When I was poisoned I was sure that I was going to die. And I could have. But I didn’t want to do anything about it. A very interesting effect of the toxin. Remember how Dorothy was being poisoned and she simply wanted to lie down and take a nap? She wasn’t worried about it. She didn’t try to fight it.”
Lacey nodded.
“Let me begin with the first part of that question about waking my wife up. I was feeling toxic euphoria, so it would have been a hard fight to get me into the emergency department. I probably wouldn’t have given my consent to go in the ambulance. If I got there, I would have presented as a man having a heart attack.”
“The tests would prove that true?” Deep asked.
“Absolutely. I have a colleague who is no longer able to work, he had such a bad case of palytoxin poisoning. He actually had a heart attack, and they believe a stroke. It affected his brain so badly that he had to learn to speak again after the incident. Do the doctors have something to counter it? The plain answer is no. And what’s worse, if they used the normal drugs and protocol for someone who was having a heart attack or coding, the victim would not respond to their efforts. As a matter of fact, the CDC this very week came out with new guidelines for palytoxin poisoning, which say watch, and wait, and hope for the best. That’s pretty bad when the CDC doesn’t know what to do.”
“You’d go to the hospital, then what?” Lacey asked.
“There is no bloodwork that would show up under normal scrutiny. No toxicity screening for palytoxins at all. So there’s no way they’d find it. I’d say that 99.999% of doctors have never heard of it. None. And even if the person is conscious, and they know exactly what happened, the doctor has no way to fix it. They can try giving a respiratory treatment like they would for an asthma attack, but that’s kind of like throwing a life preserver with no rope attached out toward a drowning person in a stormy sea and hoping for the best. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that can be done to stop that poison from following its trajectory. In a healthy person, they’ve got a shot at survival as long as their exposure was really limited, like mine. I touched the plug for maybe ten, maybe fifteen seconds. But if there’s any kind of underlying health condition, heart, lungs, age-related fragility, low muscle density, low body weight, fatigue, alcohol, recent illness, anything that increases the efficacy of the toxins, then there’s nothing that can keep that person from dying.”
Lacey sat there in complete silence, processing the information.
Finally, Deep cleared his throat. “I had a question about all of the organisms that died in your tank. Was that an effect of this particular colony being highly toxic, and that you placed it into an environment that was not acclimated?”
“Well, yes. Probably. Hard to tell.” He stuck his finger in his ear and scratched. “Palytoxin is believed to be an anti-predation defense. Normally, though, it doesn’t affect the neighboring colonies. Why this one did
has not been proven, but I would hypothesize that it was the sudden introduction to the level of toxicity in this particular colony. Not all Palythoa are toxic. Various studies have shown they actually have a wide spectrum of toxicity levels. For example, Palythoa mutuki was non-toxic; the Palythoa heliodiscus was—” Dr. Jones stopped and whistled— “off-the-charts toxic. Hugely dangerous.”
“And the silver dollar-sized piece you were moving?” Lacey asked.
“Was Palythoa heliodiscus, unfortunately,” the professor replied.
Deep rubbed his thumb back and forth over his lower lip. “Someone with colonies of any of these Palythoa, including the Palythoa heliodiscus, could frag the colonies and almost farm them?”
“Not almost—they do. That’s a whole industry, fragging and growing colonies for reef shops and marine aquarists.”
“Huh,” Deep said. “Dr. Jones, if I were to show you a sample of live rock that’s been outside in the weather since last September, is it possible that you could tell if there had been any Palythoa colonies attached?” Deep lifted the paper bag from where it sat by his foot, and pulled out the piece of live rock from Radovan’s garden.
“Should be. Once a colony is growing it’s pretty hard to get rid of the traces. They populate the tiny crags and get into the open areas. Let’s see here.” Dr. Jones picked up a pair of regular-length rubber gloves and pulled them on before accepting the rock from Deep.
“Rubber gloves even after it’s been out in the rain for months?” Lacey asked.
“I was scared straight by that near miss. I take precautions now whenever anyone mentions Palythoa. I do not play with palytoxins. How about you go wash your hands over there?” Dr. Jones lifted his chin toward a sink in the corner that housed a wall medical kit above it and a high tech eye-wash station.
