I have a short story along these lines. When I first started in this hobby back in the day, I purchased a rock with a couple of different colonies of Zoas/Polyps. As everyone does when they are eagerly starting their first tank, I was constantly rearranging things with my bare hands - including this rock.
Around that same time period I started having some very strange heart arrhythmia and other symptoms including a metallic taste in my mouth. This was very scary and I went to see my doc who ran tests and referred me to a cardiologist. I finally, luckily, put two and two together when I ran some searches on "metallic taste" and found a small blurb somewhere concerning a person who had experienced the same thing from touching
Golden Polyps. Guess what was on that rock? Ding!
It was pure chance that searching "metallic taste" caused me to find this after frantically researching for days to try to figure out What horrible disease I had and *** was wrong with me. In short, I never touched them (or that rock) again and the symptoms went away for good.
Edit - These suckers:
Yellow Polyps
If you read down -
Palytoxin
The members of the Zoanthidae family have varying degrees of poison called palytoxin. All of the Palythoa genus and most Protopalythoa genus produce a high level of this poison in their mucus and gonads. Other genera, such as the Zoanthus genus, have it to a lesser extent, and so a less dangerous degree.
These are worse than Zonathus genus evidently. Who Knew? LFS was selling them as "Golden Polyps" and I bought them. It's easy to find info on this now, not so much in 99/2000.
