blue ring octo venom

Reptiboy;89002 said:
okk i have done plenty of research and my report is almost done, almost done. i still need to know the other name of the toxin aside from TTX, its the one for killing prey

um, Jean and I mentioned a few other names (maculotoxin and tetrodotoxin, which is what TTX is short for)-- it's often called "venom" rather than "toxin" or "poison," at least by the pedantic, because "venom" is something that's made by the animal (or in this case, the symbiotic bacteria) to be actively injected by stinging or biting.

As Roy and Jean mentioned, there is other stuff besides TTX in blue ring venom, but most of it doesn't do much to humans. Most other cephs have a venom that's harmless to human but very effective on crabs called cephalotoxin (see here: Cephalotoxin: the Crab-paralysing Agent of the Posterior Salivary Glands of Cephalopods - Nature for example) and I just noticed from searching on that that there's apparently another variant in the Eledone genus called eledosin or eledoisin -- I'm not sure which is the correct spelling. I don't know if blue rings lack cephalotoxin completely; it wasn't in Jean's list, but sometimes the names of these sorts of things aren't consistent.
 
Neogonodactylus;88730 said:
First of all, there are several species of blue-ring and we aren't even sure that they all have TTX.

......

Roy

Natures fun trick of "Well that species is insanely poisonous, so if I look just like it I don't have to bother with being poisonous myself" eh?
 
91lxstang;89738 said:
i know all about tetradotoxin.... Chuck Norris pours it on his wheaties for breakfast

I remember using it in neurophysiology. When I think about how we used to wander about the lab with syringes filled with the stuff held at about waist height I think that maybe we were being just a trifle overly casual with it :hmm:

What we used was diluted of course but since it was strong enough to frag anything we put it on I don't think that would have helped in case of an accident.
 
WHUT THE?

Reptiboy;88677 said:
im sure uve all gone over this enough but i was hoping u guys could fill me in on it since im doin a project on em for school

WHUT IS THAT THING?
IT LOOK SCAREY I WOULD NEVER GO NEAR SOMETHING THAT LOOKS LIKE A SNAKE BE CAREFUL:biggrin2:
 
Cairnos;90412 said:
Question, would TTX affect an octopus? Specifically are blu ringed octopuses immune?

I'm going by memory here, but somewhere (maybe from Roy?) I'm pretty sure I read that blue rings have modified sodium channels that are immune to TTX. Other cephalpods, as far as I know, are not. I am absolutely positive from the Hodgkin-Huxley work on squid giant axons that TTX blocks sodium channels in the animal they worked on, which I think was loligo pleii, since they used TTX blockers to characterize what the axon does with and without sodium channels.
 
monty;90415 said:
I'm going by memory here, but somewhere (maybe from Roy?) I'm pretty sure I read that blue rings have modified sodium channels that are immune to TTX.

Darn I was rather hoping they could be a possible source of a TTX antidote. But rewiring your entire nervous system is a tad drastic, not to mention difficult
 
Plus, the modified neuronal sodium channels that confer TTX immunity in Thamnophis sirtalis have also been shown to slow down action potential propagation. My reaction time is slow enough as it is, so I will just avoid eating blue rings, fugu, or rough-skinned newts....
 

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