Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
July 02, 2004
Last week, I found a pile of nets and ropes washed up on Kailua Beach. Among this snarl lay a beautifully weathered white float that I wanted for my collection.
When I bent to pick it up, however, I found the float firmly attached to one of the nets. I tugged and pulled, but the nylon line tying my treasure was unbreakable.
Searching the sand, I found a wedge of plastic and, with its jagged edge, sawed against the tough rope. No progress. And then I spotted a solution. On top of the tangle lay a pufferfish, its drawn-back lips exposing four big white teeth.
Four teeth in a foot-long fish might not sound like much to work with, but pufferfish teeth are formidable. Two fused teeth line the top jaw of the fish, and two line the bottom, the result being a pair of tiny, curved machetes.
And they’re that sharp. The tooth ridges of pufferfish could easily slice through a strong line.
All I had to do was lay the fish near the float and work the line back and forth against the gaping teeth.
But as I reached for the fish, I remembered once seeing an angler’s forefinger after he tried removing a pufferfish from a hook.
The fish had lopped off the top of the man’s finger, through bone and all, as neatly as if a surgeon had cut it with a scalpel.
Since my fish was dead, I wasn’t afraid it would bite me. But what if I cut my own finger during the sawing motion? Might some pufferfish poison get in my wound? Would that kill me even faster than eating some?
Fearing pufferfish poison, called tetrodotoxin, might seem silly, but this stuff is scary. Tetrodotoxin is 10 times as deadly as the venom of the many-banded krait (snake) of Southeast Asia, 10 to 100 times as lethal (depending upon the species) as black widow spider venom and 10,000 times as deadly as cyanide. One milligram of tetrodotoxin, the amount you could put on the head of a pin, can kill an adult.
And it can cause an Edgar Allen Poe kind of death. Victims gradually become paralyzed, unable to move or breathe, but remain lucid until just before death.
This danger is apparently the appeal to some people in Japan who flirt with death by eating this fish, called fugu.
The dish is expensive in more ways than one. This $400 meal kills several people in Japan each year.
Recently, researchers at Nagasaki University raised 5,000 pufferfish containing no tetrodotoxin. When these biologists fed their penned pufferfish only nonpoisonous food, the fish were toxin-free.
I e-mailed a friend in Tokyo. “If fugu was not potentially lethal, would people there still like it?”
“No,” she wrote back. “Fugu would not be appealing if there was no chance of dying. Danger is attractive.”
I wanted that beached float badly but decided to take the path of safety and leave both it and the pufferfish alone.
Losing that float, however, bugged me. So the next day, I went back to the beach with a knife.
When I got to the site, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The net lay where I’d left it, but the float was gone, its yellow rope cleanly cut.
And next to that severed rope lay the pufferfish.
Could it be that someone else used a pufferfish to cut a cracked float full of barnacles from a stinking sodden net? It doesn’t seem likely. But if it’s true, I have a soul mate.