The Puffer Forum

so do puffer have so immunity against it as they do ingest it ? i always thought that it was a by product of them digesting specific foods. Thats really interesting.

I'm pretty sure puffers are immune, the GSP's they get at petco are wild colleted, and thus show up with poison, and I have seen others taking bites of one after it died.

Now that article was talking about a blower fish that its poison was so deadly a mere trace could paralyze you. Now i own a GSP and wondering if it had died in the tank and i were to siphon the water out of the tank during a water change if that would cause some harm.

No, puffers do not release toxin when they die, so just don't suck on him or make him into fugu. I think certain boxfish can, but not puffers as far as I know.

the poison block the sodium channels in the cell membrane, stopping electrical impulses from being sent (which leads to paralysis and death). puffers themselves have a mutation in this sodium channel, so the poison don't affect them. otherwise, they would have been extinct millions of years ago.

Am I correct in thinking that they are not born with this poison but it is a build up of bacteria that they pick up from the food they eat? I remember reading it somewhere but I can't remember if that goes for all puffers or just certain species?

Manutius you are correct. Puffers are not born poisonous. They must ingest a certain bacteria that creates the toxin. Puffers born and raised in captivity and are not housed with wild caught specimens do not develop this toxin. .

JET

Yep I have non poisonous puffers!

If captive puffers are fed with food from the wild such as mussel flesh, which may be a source of saxitoxin or tetradotoxin bacteria, I'd assume they could develop some poison.

If the bacteria needed for the poison is found in algae that live on shell fish then there must be different types of bacteria. One that is capable of living in FW and the other in SW.
If the mussels are salt water and fed to FW puffers then what do you think could happen, assuming that the source has the algae containing bacteria?

To be more exact the FW poison is produced by dinoflagellates (kind of primitive algae), several types of these dinoflagellates can produce the toxin. Some marine dinoflagellates are the same that make the 'red tide' at some coasts, which makes shellfish poisonous (PSP), because they filter the algae from the water. PSP toxin is the same poison as in our fw puffers. So, I assume feeding marine inverts to FW puffers can make them poisonous to some degree.

The marine puffer toxin is produced by 'real' bacteria.

Dr. Ebert says "Bacteria (e.g. Pseudomonas are necessary for the synthesis of the toxin... toxicity is seasonal and locally variable, and puffers are themselves resistant to the poison."

Boxermom wrote:Dr. Ebert says "Bacteria (e.g. Pseudomonas are necessary for the synthesis of the toxin... toxicity is seasonal and locally variable, and puffers are themselves resistant to the poison."

Pseudomonas are the ones for the marine puffers only (tetrodotoxin). try searching for saxitoxin in books/inet. This is the one of the fw puffers.

"In this case the poison is Saxitoxin, a substance whose effects parallel those of Tetradotoxin and which is likewise synthesized via bacteria, found in the algae growing on shellfish and ingested by virtue of the puffer's feeding habits."

Boxermom wrote:"In this case the poison is Saxitoxin, a substance whose effects parallel those of Tetradotoxin and which is likewise synthesized via bacteria, found in the algae growing on shellfish and ingested by virtue of the puffer's feeding habits."

That's interesting. The German version of the book differs: No word about "growing on shellfish" but "which gets via algae into the shellfish". That is more precise. But: Dinoflagellates only have one cell with a nucleus, they are algae and no bacteria. Their relatives are the algae in many corals.

Saxitoxin is produced by dinoflagellates in fw as well as in sw. It is filtered by shellfish and they are consumed by puffers. If we eat shellfish with lots of saxitoxin we get sick, which is called: Paralytic shellfish poisoning or PSP. Puffers are immune to that but store the toxin and become poisonous themselves.