The truth is that very little is known about how much palytoxin is in any given zoa (except Palythoa toxica, which I believe are only found in one tide zone in Hawaii?). That and the fact that 99% of what people call palys are actually Zoanthus species (assuming that palytoxin is named for the most likely carrier of the toxin-Palythoa's), the likelihood of the zoas we play with having any measurable palytoxin is probably pretty low. My main argument is that if these are as poisonous as all of the armchair pseudo scientists claim they are, why are there NO medically documented cases of palytoxin poisoning (other than, oh, you fragged something in a saltwater aquarium with palytoixn, ah, so that must be the cause)? There are plenty of cases where palytoxin is blamed, but from the info I've seen on palytoxin, you're most likely not going to suffer a mild numbness, etc. There are so many things in our aquariums that cause infections and so little known about them. It sure is easy to jump on the bandwagon, though.
This seems to be reaching mass hysteria proportions, as I've seen several people talk about cleaning their tanks out of the 'toxic' corals and that they were floored that someone would sell them something so deadly and not tell them about how this coral can kill you if you touch it. If you take everything out of your tank that can cause infection, you'd end up with pretty much an empty glass box. Over reaction because of misinformation from those who 'know' more than they actually know is a sure way to mislead people. I don't think it is intentional (people are just passing on the misinformation they've heard from other misinformed sources), but it speaks to our habits (and not necessarily in a good way). Let's burn the witch (unless she floats like a duck
)...
Some semi famous writers and reef 'experts' put the blame of losing a lot of SPS on the fact that he had an overgrowth of Palythoas. The fault was not the Palythoas, but the fact that he used a wire bruch to scrub them off the rock in the tank. Gee. I wonder why everything in the tank died. Scrub out any animal in your tank and tell me if everything is fine the next day. Like most people, this person obviously couldn't accept the fact that he had done something completely bone headed, so he blamed the issue on the Paly's (and gleefully mentions how he singlehandedly put the squash on zoa collecting in Europe. He obviously thinks very highly of himself. This same person prints in one of his articles that .000001g of Palytoxin will kill a 220 pound human. According to the info I saw from an Army toxin research site last year (link is in one of the palytoxin threads in this forum, though you can't view the site anymore), .15g/kg was required to kill a mouse... I don't know what a mouse weighs, but lets say they weigh 10 grams (.01kg). That would mean that the required amount to kill the mouse would be somewhere closer to .0015g ((10g/1000)=(.01kg*(.15g/kg))-a far cry from .000001g... I'm no neurotoxin pro, and the mathematics I used may not be correect in term of actual relationship of the reaction, but even if I'm off by 100% on the calcs, I'm still showing a lot more is required to kill a mouse than was reported to kill a human. I tried to keep myself from ranting in the other thread...
