Culling Green Polyps
- Thread starter ianward
- Start date
drummereef
Team RC
You need to cut the mat, not the individual polyps. Use a razor blade to cut the mat where you want then peel it off of the rock.
drummereef
Team RC
Oops, sorry! So they are more like a paly then? I think you are going to have to gently slice the rock below it's foot to take them off. Then you can superglue them to another rock.
xcreonx
Premium Member
Be very careful with polyps like that. Palythoas, if that's what they are, are VERY toxic. As drummerreef said, you need to get underneath them. Cutting them near the base will probably kill them. Try to get a small sliver of the rock with them. If it's aragonite, it's very easy to chip off under corals.
ianward
New member
Wow how right you are...
I chipped away at the polyps and gathered them in a net but one bunch was on a scallop shell so I just pulled the shell away from the LR, I noticed I had a small glob of Goo on my finger so I washed it off right away and finished repositioning the polyps.
Well about two hours later I came down feeling sick, I was sweating profusely felt disorientated and sick to my stomach.
I laid down for a spell and felt much better but very tired, I slept for 2.5 hours in the afternoon (unusual for me).
Today I feel fine except for a slightly tight chest.
I have no cuts on my hands but do you think I might have been poisoned??
I was back in the tank today but wore my gloves.
Cheers
Ian Ward
I chipped away at the polyps and gathered them in a net but one bunch was on a scallop shell so I just pulled the shell away from the LR, I noticed I had a small glob of Goo on my finger so I washed it off right away and finished repositioning the polyps.
Well about two hours later I came down feeling sick, I was sweating profusely felt disorientated and sick to my stomach.
I laid down for a spell and felt much better but very tired, I slept for 2.5 hours in the afternoon (unusual for me).
Today I feel fine except for a slightly tight chest.
I have no cuts on my hands but do you think I might have been poisoned??
I was back in the tank today but wore my gloves.
Cheers
Ian Ward
Yes. You were probably poisoned. The same thing happened to my wife and it took her an hour or two to recover feeling in her hand. Most people have tiny fissures and lacerations in their skin that can provide access to palytoxin and similar poisons. If you eat the coral, you die. If you hurt it, it's internal fluids are filled with poison to combat predation.
Note that palytoxin is one of the deadliest toxins known to man at the time I looked it up. At least one person wrote about squishing a nudibranch that fed on the polyps. He was hospitalized for about a day from the effects and also didn't have open wounds or the like. Polynesians used to use some of these corals to coat their spears so that a glancing cut would still kill the target.
Note that palytoxin is one of the deadliest toxins known to man at the time I looked it up. At least one person wrote about squishing a nudibranch that fed on the polyps. He was hospitalized for about a day from the effects and also didn't have open wounds or the like. Polynesians used to use some of these corals to coat their spears so that a glancing cut would still kill the target.
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