Another cute and friendly little guy, spreading a lot of joy.
“once in a lifetime event”? is this an effing joke?
For sure, pettings this cute little guy can be the the experience of the rest of your life, same as listen the sound of the sea in a Conoidea (a bite on the neck or face can kill you in less than a minute)
If you put it to your ear, you can hear the sound of yourself screaming.
I love Octopus, but this on is better not to pet. Yes, you can survive a bite, but only if there is an medical aid very near.
Oh man I would love to live in a town called Effing. If only it wasn’t in South Carolina.
I have good news for you:
Shame they felt the need to censor the name of the petting zoo.
Well they didn’t want people getting the wrong idea.
The bite actually doesn’t kill you, it just shuts down your nervous system so you can’t breath.
People if given cpr immediately (kind of need someone to know it’s what bit you) till it wears off / get on a ventilator will live.
I remember reading about someone who survived. They got but, and a team started doing cpr. The only issue was his eyes were open the entire time on a hot sunny day. So he was blind after the damage the hot sun did.
Ah, great to know! I’ll be taking my kids down there for some blue octopus pets 😁
wears off
I think it is in the duration of hours, rather than minutes before wearing off.
So yes, a team in rotation is required for CPR, or one triathalon participant.
The bite actually doesn’t kill you, it just shuts down your nervous system so you can’t breath.
I feel that’s like saying “getting mauled by a bear doesn’t kill you, it just causes major lacerations so all your blood leaks out”. Technically sure, but it seems like a bit of a pedantic distinction…
Reminds me of people who insisted COVID didn’t kill anyone because it was the symptoms that actually killed people
You’re not totally wrong but some things are not so easily treated as with rescue breathing. This is the same problem with any paralytic agent (e.g. botulism) is that the mechanism of death is suffocation since you can’t breathe. But from a rescue standpoint its really easy to breathe for someone whereas its not easy to stop multiple lacerations leading to exanguination and I think that is the point they were making is that this could be a survivable event if a rescuer is nearby.
I was thinking “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”
It’s not the sudden stop at the end that kills you. It’s the different times at which parts of you stop.
Getting bit by a venomous snake in Australia and you’re blood starts to disassemble itself. The only counter is antivenom or die. Your blood breaking down is what kills you. And there is no way to separate the bite from that.
Being able to counter the venom in such a simple way is what makes it different. You can logically break it down into steps that are separable.
Yeap, but that’s because the venom is a hemotoxin rather than a neurotoxin.
Correct.
For the hemotoxin, you aren’t going to “just wait for the effects to wear off.” The toxin will kill you.
For the neurotoxin, you can just wait out the effects by countering the symptoms. Can’t breathe? Respirator can save your life.
The hemotoxin itself is doing terrible damage, but the neurotoxin itself doesn’t do any “damage” other than disabling systems.
Yeah that’s mostly true… But it’s not like a hangover… I had a friend bitten by a snake out in the Mojave once and I’m sure she would have strong opinions about how strenuous the recovery was from it. Neurotoxins, especially potent ones, can be disruptive enough to create long term disabilities. If you are someone who performs a lot of skilled fine motor movements as part of your job or as part of a hobby or something it could be a significant amount of time for you to fully recover from a neurotoxin.
Cytotoxins are interesting as well, though generally not considered deadly they can really mess up your quality of life and be extremely debilitating, even disfiguring.
Generally just a good idea to stay away from anything venomous.
Breathing - famous for being optional for those that would like to live.
Yes, there have only been around 3 people killed by them (largely because they’re shy, aquatic, and somewhat uncommon), and intervention can be made to stop them from killing you, but they’re one of the most toxic animals on the planet, and are unquestionably deadly.
We do have a lot of experience with their toxin though, since so many other animals people like to eat and play with also use TTX like newts(on their skin itself), pufferfish, and sea slugs. The blue ringed octopuses are just unique in using it as a venom. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507714/
I’m shy, aquatic and uncommon
Blind as permanently blind?
Correct, nothing can move, not your lungs, not your eye lids, nothing. So he went very blind from staring at the sun for 30mins straight while people did cpr until ambulance arrived
Yep.
They couldn’t close their eyelids.
Better blind than dead.
Too bad no one had a shirt or something they could’ve covered their eyes with…
Hindsight is 20:20. It may seem obvious when you’re sitting here reading about it, but if my buddy was suddenly paralyzed I’d probably be too preoccupied with keeping his blood moving and oxygenated to have the extra processing power to think about whether his eyes needed to be closed.
Hindsight is 20:20
😂
Is it though?
What about the heart?
It would take a very large dose to affect the heart and even then it would just lead to a slower heart rate instead of stopping it. The heart does not need nerves to tell it to beat and it’s action potential triggering is different than muscles and nerves. They’ll be brain dead from being without oxygen before they’re heart dead, similar to opioid overdoses.
Thus the CPR, I would imagine.
Does it just automatically restart beating after effects wear off?
I would personally imagine that you may need to be defibrillated at some point but otherwise probably yes? The toxins are causing the paralysis and people do survive it so I can only imagine that the heart takes back over after a certain amount of effort. Otherwise, I don’t actually know.
Defibrillation is only useful if the problem is your heart is doing some kind of fibrillation.
If it’s not beating at all, other methods like manual massage or chemical restarts (epinephrine) are the right move.
You might need external/transesophageal pacing with a severe exposure to TTX, but that would only be temporary. It shouldn’t cause v fib.
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Hmm, does one also not feel pain during such event? Also what happens in your head during it? Are you conscious or it also just shuts down your brain as whole?
It depends on the dose, but yes you can be conscious with respiratory failure due to TTX. If you get a large enough dose you’ll lose vascular tone and go into shock. At that point even CPR may fail to save you because what you really need is vasopressor drugs.
So what you’re saying is I should take a date to see the blue ring octopus. Then I should get stung and tell them to give me CPR for a few hours or I’ll die.
Get bitten by that spider that gives you a permanent boner first to make it super awkward.
Well, at least you won’t be embarrassed for long after she turns you down.
It’s win win
Yeah that might be the best of your lifetime as it might be drastically shortened
Petting a blue ring octopus could definitely be a once in a lifetime event!
Well they were planning on Effing it, so maybe they were wearing “protection”.
I grew up on the East Coast of the United States. MD and FL to be specific. Going to the beach was a regular thing in our household, whether it was the Chesapeake Bay or the Atlantic Ocean somewhere in West Palm Beach. My grandad has a house on the actual bay. Grew up spending every family gathering there. The adults would visit/catch up, and us kids would be in the water. I was NEVER scared of the water.
Then, as a young adult, Im sitting at an inprocessing for a base in Okinawa, Japan, and the briefer is going over local hazards in the region.
I had never heard of the Blue Ringed Octopus before.
And from that moment on, I became terrified of things in the ocean.
My husband always laughs about that story because its rare that they even make it into the waters around Oki, but that genuinely really was the moment that my brain was like “Omg, you have to worry about more than sharks in the ocean.”
The ocean is beyond beautiful. Spent some time on the shores of NC and VA…
Started studying marine biology due to the oceans vast amount of mystery…Now it’s “The ocean is beyond beautiful and just as deadly.”
The ocean is indeed beyond beautiful. I’m not a marine biologist, but I went to Jamaica for my honeymoon and truly appreciated it there. A lot of my time was spent just … Admiring the water.
I remember a Jamaican local commenting that she’d seen the ocean around the USA in movies and wouldn’t swim in the ocean around the country based on that.
Also, I got punched in the face by a fish while I was down there.
Beautiful, though.
Also, I got punched in the face by a fish while I was down there.
Please elaborate.
There was a cluster of fish and the water was so clear that you could see them from the surface, which I thought was cool. Some of them were even jumping out of the water, which I’d never seen in person before! Because of that, I worked my way to around the middle of the cluster and crouched, then just kind of settled down to watch. Eventually, I guess I had been still long enough that they forgot I was there and started jumping around me. When I was done surveiling them, I stood up and turned around, only to receive a fish directly to the face.
It was so unexpected (to me and, I presume, to the fish) that my first thought was that someone had thrown a rock at me, but my newly minted wife clarified that it was, in fact, a fish.
not OP but I’ve been slapped in the noggin clean by a nice big salmon while fishing. was quite the nice greeting. I’ve also been jizzed on as well.
Started studying marine biology
How were you able to dissect one?!?
(recorder clicks on) “It seems the diet consists…mainly of a waxy chunky substance…apparent preference towards bright primary colors.”
Strap them on the table tightly
For a while, I lived in Havre de Grace, MD. In that timeframe, I experienced several fourths of July. One of those times, for some reason, my then-girlfriend and I got in a mood to watch horror movies.
We opened Netflix (then our only streaming service) and looked in the horror category, eventually settling on The Bay. We’d never heard of that movie before and selected it pretty much at random.
Turns out that movie is implicitly set in HdG and explicitly on the fourth of July. Kinda freaked us out for a bit.
After that, we looked up movies set in HdG and that’s how I found From Within, a mediocre movie featuring Bruce Willis’ daughter; and also that’s how I found out that House of Cards filmed Kevin Spacey’s home town there…
edit: basic grammar.
If not friend, why friend shaped?
You see, it’s not.
I love the Effing petting zoo!
I didn’t read ‘Effing SC’. I was confused as to why they’re cursing the petting zoo.
Maybe because they’re trying to get people to pet a blue-ringed octopus?
Once in a lifetime. Probably the crowning achievement
Because they brought in blue ringed octopi for casual petting
Has the “swim with the box jellies” experience reopened since the accident… and the other accident… and those 3 accidents that happened before that?
Good god Im dead just watching this
Blue-ringed octopuses are among the world’s most venomous marine animals, carrying enough venom to kill 26 adult humans within minutes.
These little bastards have an AoE attack?
