Biological Warfare In The Aquarium

[CFC]

Over the weekend i witnessed one of the strangest and saddest (and a bit worrying) things i have ever seen.

Trying to get some interest back into my brackish tank i decided to completely remodel the decor to give it a more marine look, i then decided to add a small green spotted puffer ive had growing out in the fishroom for 18 months as it looked large enough to add now. Sadly it wasnt and a coule of hours later the toad fish swallowed it

Thinking it probably wasnt a good thing for fish to eat a puffer i netted the toad fish and attempted to aggravate it into coughing the puffer up before it started to digest and release any toxin the puffer has, the toad fish however was having none of it and refused to give back his meal and seemed to produce more and more spines from around its gills by the second Not fancying a venomous spine in the hand i let the toad fish go and face whatever consequences it had coming and went upstairs to have a look on TFF.
Finding the forum was having some down time i went back down stairs, this was about 5 minutes after i had let the toadfish go, to my horror all 3 shark cats in the tank were floating upside down with their slime coats pealing from their bodies and thick slime pouring from their gills while no other fish in the tank showed any signs of trouble at all!!
I removed the sharks to a empty tank with clean water in the fishroom but within 24 hours all 3 were dead.

All the usual water tests showed nothing wrong and no other fish have shown any signs of stress or illness leaving the only explanation i can think of that the toadfish must have released a toxin into the water while i was prodding it about, why this would only effect the catfish i cant fathom but there really is no other logical explanation.

The toadfish appears to have now digested the puffer and has suffered no problems from its supposedly poisonous meal

 

[Bloo]

How bizzarre ! Sounds like a very weird thing to happen to those Sharks
Shame abou the puffer too - 4 fish lost in 24 hours

 

[Miss Wiggle]

wierd! sorry for your losses

 

[nmonks]

Hello CFC --

The interesting this with this story is that the scientific wisdom at the moment is that pufferfish lose their toxicity in captivity after a few weeks or months. Certainly, your GSP should have been entirely non-toxic after 18 months. Pufferfish cannot synthesise their poison from scratch: they need to eat very specific bacteria (marine puffers) or dinoflagellates (freshwater puffers) before they can make the tetrodotoxin or saxitoxin. When removed from the wild, the poison is gradually metabolised away. So whatever else caused the problem, it shouldn't have been poison -- at least, not according to the scientists!

So, given what happened, and your explanation seems perfectly valid to me, it might be worth whipping off an e-mail to some of the experts in the field for discussion. If by luck or judgement you've found a species of puffer (or a way of keeping them) that keeps its toxin in captivity, that would actually be quite a useful discovery.

Tetrodotoxin is a neurotoxin, and in humans at least, provided you can keep the person alive on an artificial respirator, they will make a full recovery without any additional treatment. No damage is done (beyond the nerves not working for a while). On the other hand, there are fishes that routinely eat pufferfish, sharks for example, so it cannot be equally toxic to everything. It's dangerous to assume something deadly poisonous to us is just as dangerous to everything else -- puffers certainly didn't evolve their posion to stop Japanese fishermen catching them! So the fact your toadfish is fine doesn't surprise me at all.

Cheers,

Neale

 

[QuotheRaven]

Thats horrible to read... sorry about your loss

 

[CFC]

I was more thinking that the toad fish itself secreted some form of toxin into the water as a defence against me prodding it about to try and get it to spit the puffer, but i supose there is also the possibilty that it came from the puffer within the toads stomach. If the toxin did come from the puffer it would have had to have been through diet, i feed food grade mussels, prawns, clams and cockles from the fish mongers and bi weekly treats of live feeder shrimp, so the sea food could possibly have contained the nessesary bacteria.

What i find it really puzzling is that the scats, monos, goby and moray were all unaffected, even the few feeder shrimp that have managed to survive in the rocks and hermit crabs have shown no signs of problems and inverts are usually more sensative to chemicals in the water than fish, whatever it was was highly toxic to catfish and nothing else.

 

[nmonks]

I was more thinking that the toad fish itself secreted some form of toxin into the water as a defence against me prodding it about to try and get it to spit the puffer...

Right. I see. Yes, that makes more sense. Not heard of it though. I know some boxfish can do this though, so it's not impossible. But usually stuff is either poisonous or venomous, but not both. Since toadfish have venom in their spines, I wouldn't expect them to have poisonous mucous (or whatever). All very mystifying.

What i find it really puzzling is that the scats, monos, goby and moray were all unaffected...

Agreed, that's very odd. That all three shark cats were affected and none of the others would seem to indicate that this was not some random process. Given that shark cats eat crustaceans in the wild (mostly) it doesn't seem very likely that toadfish would have evolved a toxin specifically for shark cats and not, say, moray eels which are often piscivorous.

Cheers,

Neale

 

[CFC]

Toad fish are extremely strange fish and their abilities never cease to surprise me, when we first got ours some years ago i watched it use what i believe must have been some kind of chemical attractant to draw feeder shrimp to its mouth so being able to release a toxin to deter predators wouldnt be a shock.

It was emaciated from not being offered the right food so we had it in a separate small tank where we could make sure it was feeding well. After having it in its tank for a few hours we added a dozen feeder shrimp to the tank which started to do what shrimp do, swimming about and cleaning up algae and detrius while we watched eagerly for one to go close to the toad. Then something odd happened, the toadfish opened its mouth wide and all 12 shrimp turned and walked right up to the toadfish and started to pick at the bristles around its mouth, then in one gulp it inhaled the lot of them faster than you could see, one second they were there the next they werent!

This trick was repeated a few times over the next few weeks until we started to have success with dead foods offered with tongs and then we stopped giving feeder shrimp, and now the toad fish is in the large brackish community tank we seldom get to see it so we dont know if it still uses the trick when we add shrimp as clean up crew and fish treats.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Toad fish are extremely strange fish and their abilities never cease to surprise me, when we first got ours some years ago i watched it use what i believe must have been some kind of chemical attractant to draw feeder shrimp to its mouth so being able to release a toxin to deter predators wouldnt be a shock.

It was emaciated from not being offered the right food so we had it in a separate small tank where we could make sure it was feeding well. After having it in its tank for a few hours we added a dozen feeder shrimp to the tank which started to do what shrimp do, swimming about and cleaning up algae and detrius while we watched eagerly for one to go close to the toad. Then something odd happened, the toadfish opened its mouth wide and all 12 shrimp turned and walked right up to the toadfish and started to pick at the bristles around its mouth, then in one gulp it inhaled the lot of them faster than you could see, one second they were there the next they werent!

This trick was repeated a few times over the next few weeks until we started to have success with dead foods offered with tongs and then we stopped giving feeder shrimp, and now the toad fish is in the large brackish community tank we seldom get to see it so we dont know if it still uses the trick when we add shrimp as clean up crew and fish treats.

wow that sounds so cool. can i come to your house and just watch your fish for a bit?!

I think Ian would like those abilities too, we were watching something the other day where someone had telekenetic powers but could only use them on biscuit's. Just think of the ultimate relaxation while your buiscuits dunk themselves on your coffee and float to your mouth!

 

[AMS]

Very odd indeed CFC. I can't even come up with a possibility

 

[SLC Flyfishing]

I would be willing to bet that the toadfish was able to inject somekind of venom or toxin into the water when you were disturbing him. It is true that boxfish do this as well. I'd assume that even if it were venom and logic would say that it shouldn't be harmful through external contact, maybe it was somehow harmful when it came into contact with the permeable membranes in these fishes gills. You did mention that they had slime oozing from the gills. I'd be very interested in researching the possibility that this may be the case.

Well I know it is going to cause an uproar but wouldn't it be interesting to try and recreate the situation again? See if it happens another time and thus be able to authoritatively discourage others from keepin these fish together?

I think it's fascinating.

SLC

 

[Flumpus]

Is it possible that the shark cats could have been punctured by one of the spines? That would explain why they were the only ones that suffered any negative effects. If not, then that's very interesting, especially since the shark cats were the only things effected.

 

[Nevergone815]

i'm sorry about the loss. it is an interesting thought. it sounds logical that the toadfish could've excreted something into the water and it affected the shark cats.

i hate to "hijack" this thread, but if anyone can point me into the right direction for information. like a link ro something. or even a reference to what exactly to google as my research is coming up blanks with useless info. liek what size tank, brackish/marine tolerance. how "marine-like" can i make the water. i would love to have one of these in a tan kwith a snowflake eel.

i am putting together a long term project to insert fish into the tan kand since most fish associated with brackish/marine keeping are usually expensive, i don't want to have a bunch of $50 snacks for some of my fish, so thorough research is being done first.

any help would be great. thanks guys!

 

[CFC]

Is it possible that the shark cats could have been punctured by one of the spines? That would explain why they were the only ones that suffered any negative effects. If not, then that's very interesting, especially since the shark cats were the only things effected.

No, they never came into contact at any point while i was there and as soon as the toadfish was released it went straight back into the rocks where the sharks cant get in, it would also be extreemly unlikely that all 3 sharks would be stabbed at once.



Try searching for Allenbatrachus grunniens which is the fishes scientific name.

 

[Nevergone815]

Try searching for Allenbatrachus grunniens which is the fishes scientific name.

thanks a lot!