Zooanthid Poisoning

Since adding the Zooanthids to my tank, I had read about palytoxin poisoning and was roughly aware that these things could be rather hazardous if not handled properly.  Therefore, I bought myself a pair of shoulder length Coral Life aquarium gloves and wore my glasses when working to move everything over.  At the time, this seemed like a totally sufficient precaution.

One of the first rocks I moved over was the largest Zooanthid colony.  It was probably about 11am at that time.  Because the tanks are next to each other, all I did was simply lift each item out of the old tank, pivot, and place them in the new one.  Moving all of the sessile invertebrates and rock over took less than an hour, then another 40 minutes to catch all of the fish and move them over as well.  By 1:30, I was largely finished with the move and was working on breaking down electronics and other hardware from the old tank.  At this point, I noticed I had a rather nasty bitter metallic taste in my mouth.  I started pounding flavored sparkling water to no avail.  A hour later, I tried brushing my teeth and rinsing with mouthwash.  Nothing helped.  I had never tasted anything like this and had no explanation for what caused it.  By the evening, the taste subsided, but I then began to develop cold-like symptoms (5 to 7pm).  By 8pm, it was closer to flu symptoms.  I knew I had a fever and otherwise was feeling very sore and run down, but it had been a long day and I had been careful, so I badly wanted to believe that I was simply exhausted and maybe was coming down with a cold.

By 8:30, I told my wife that I wanted to go to bed.  I got ready and attempted to get some sleep.  However, by this point, it was clear that something was very wrong.  I couldn’t stop shaking, was freezing cold, my heart was racing, and my whole body ached.  Palytoxin poisoning had been lurking in the back of my mind for the last several hours, but at this point, I grabbed the laptop and starting Googling.  There is a Wikipedia page for palytoxin, and if you suspect you have been poisoned, you will find it terrifying.  I immediately got up and informed my wife that we were going to have to go the emergency room.

We arrived at the emergency room around 9:30pm, on a Sunday night.  The line was awful.  The intake staff suggested we go elsewhere unless we were prepared to wait a very long time.  We figured anywhere else would be just as bad, plus the time lost for commuting further.  We tried to explain what was going on and no one had ever heard of this before.  Thankfully, the triage nurse heard me say aquarium or something and asked if I had been stung by a lionfish.  I explained that, no, it was a toxin from coral.  He seemed to know a little bit about aquariums.  After what appeared to be some Googling by the intake staff and some quiet conversation with the triage nurse, I was asked to step over to get a read on my vitals.  They were not good.  Needless to say, while I was happy to jump to the front of the line, I figured I was in deep trouble.  You typically don’t want to hear the triage nurse say “stay calm, but I need you to move quickly.”

If you ever suspect you have palytoxin poisoning, I strongly recommend bringing any info you can to the ER with you.  No one there is going to have a clue what this is.  My ER doctor called poison control, who, at this time on a Sunday night, was not much help either.  They apparently woke up a specialist and finally got some guidance.  However, it appears there wasn’t much to do but try to flush it out of my system with saline in IV bags and monitor to make sure I didn’t crash.

I was admitted for the night around 2:30am, did not sleep, and stayed hooked up to a portable ECG and IV for the majority of my stay.  I was significantly better by the morning and released in the afternoon.  The biggest lasting effect was that I was surprisingly weak afterwards.  The doctors told me that my blood work indicated that I had sustained some muscle damage and that was evident when I hit my first flight of subway stairs the next day.  The final diagnosis was ‘coral toxicity.’  I was quite popular with the medical staff as this whole thing was rather novel to them.  From what we can tell, when I removed the rock from the tank, the Zooanthids must have been excreting the toxin and I merely breathed the air in their vicinity, which was enough to poison me.

All in all, this was a miserable learning experience that scared the crap out of me and caused my wife and family much distress.  On top of that, I now must deal with the fact that this stuff is still in my house.  I have kept Zooanthids off and on over the last 20 years and have never had an issue before, but given that this is the first time I took precautions that I would not have even considered before and still ended up in the ER, I definitely want these two colonies out of the house.  I’m still strategizing the safest way to remove them.  The bottom line is that, to me, Zooanthids aren’t worth the risk.  They are incredibly popular, easy to keep, and reasonably priced, but after this experience, I have to say that I am done with them.

I will move on to less depressing topics with future posts, but wanted to get this first one out there to share my remarkably lousy experience with this coral.