![]() Within a minute of eating poisonous meat you’d feel numbness and tingling in your mouth and begin to get nauseous. Many researchers believe that bacteria living in octopuses’ salivary glands produce the toxin.Īnyway, tetrodotoxin is actually named after the family of pufferfish it was first isolated from in the early 1900s. What’s interesting about the greater blue-ringed octopus’s tetrodotoxin is that the octopus isn’t making it itself. ![]() Victims who live through the first 24 hours often make a complete recovery. Unfortunately, there is no antitoxin, so the standard treatment is to hook a victim up to a ventilator and monitor their heart rate until the toxin naturally makes its way out of their system. Maybe the most eerie part of the whole thing is that a victim can be fully aware of their surroundings but unable to breathe or signal that they can’t breathe – because they’re paralyzed. When tetrodotoxin binds to a sodium channel it prevents sodium ions from moving through the channel, which stops nerve cells from sending chemical messages to your brain like “body, move!” and “heart, keep pumping blood!” First this will cause numbness around the bite, then paralysis, then heart failure. Tetrodotoxin works by blocking the activity of sodium channels in your nerve cells. ![]() Its molecule of death is tetrodotoxin, a potent nerve toxin, found in this cute little octopus’s salivary glands, which are connected to its beak.
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