The More Intelligent The Species … Ctd

Recent indications that dolphins may get high off puffer fish nerve toxins have not swayed Christie Wilcox, though she does admit that recreational “use of tetrodotoxin [TTX] by dolphins would be really, really cool.” She insists that TTX “simply doesn’t make sense as a drug (and let’s be honest—if it did, humans would be snorting it off bathroom counters already)”:

In very, very, very low doses, tetrodotoxin causes numbness, tingling, and the slight lightheadedness that fugu, the Japanese preparation of raw pufferfish flesh, is known for. … I find it tough to believe that dolphins are so careful that they can walk the fine line between tingly lips and maddening paralysis, especially when different individuals of the same species of pufferfish can carry vastly different amounts of toxin in their tissues.

Instead, what I hear in the BBC’s description [of the behavior] is naive animals learning a hard lesson: soon after ‘puffing’ on puffer, young male dolphins were filmed behaving strangely, even near-motionless at the surface. It doesn’t sound like a happy high; it sounds like the first stages of tetrodotoxin-induced paralysis, with the dolphins instinctively (and perhaps luckily) hovering in shallow water to retain the ability to breathe. It seems unlikely that they interact with puffers like this routinely. Even if the dolphins were pleasurably intoxicated, the inability to react quickly would leave them dangerously exposed to predators like large sharks, not to mention the inherent risks to their lives associated with the toxin involved.