April the 18th, 2023 – Did you know that Adriatic fish aren’t always all that safe to consume? They might generally be tasty, but you might not want to end up with what’s known as a sarpa salpa, or ”dreamfish” next to the blitva on your plate…
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Sarpa salpa, salema porgy, or often the ”dreamfish” is a type of fish that can cause vivid hallucinations, and some historical sources state that the Romans consumed it on purpose – because it was once known as the strongest trip of all.
The dreamfish is a species that inhabits just about all of the Mediterranean, the east coast of Africa, and also part of the Atlantic Ocean, and is a favourite delicacy on the menu of many restaurants, according to morski.hr. Some people have no consequences after consuming this fish, but some experience hallucinations lasting for up to three days, which continues to baffle scientists. Only certain parts of the fish, if consumed, are believed to cause such hallucinations and other unwanted effects.
The first case was documented in Marseille in France and refers to a family that ate grilled sarpa salpa back in 1982 without first removing the internal organs. The hallucinations they experienced as a result lasted for an astonishing ten hours. A case from 1994 is also fairly well known, when a tourist, once agin in France, suffered from blurred vision, nausea and muscle weakness after eating this fish in a restaurant. Torturous hallucinations followed and he ended up in the hospital for three full days in quite a bad state, reports IFLScience.
According to a 2006 article in Clinical Toxicology, there have been two other reported cases of people experiencing terrifying fish poisoning. One of these events happened back in 2002 after a 90-year-old man bought this particular type of fish in Saint Tropez on the Mediterranean coast of… you guessed it – France. After eating the fish, he began experiencing hallucinations which involved people screaming and birds screeching insufferably. He didn’t go to the hospital, and the elderly man’s hallucinations subsided after a few days.
A terrifying phenomenon known as ichthyoleinotoxicism
These terrifying LSD-like trips are known as ichthioallyeinotoxism, a rare hallucinogenic poisoning that occurs after eating certain types and parts of fish. The effects of the poison can cause disturbances within the nervous system and create auditory and visual hallucinations similar to those experienced when taking certain hard drugs. However, scientists are still not quite sure what makes eating the dreamfish cause this effect in some cases. A 2006 study in In Vitro Cell and Developmental Biology suggested that this is due to the fish’s consumption of a certain type of toxic phytoplankton that grows on seagrass.
While the head of the fish is considered the most hallucinogenic part of all, one study found that the liver and internal organs are also highly toxic, and the levels of toxicity the fish contains seems to vary throughout the year. Namely, the largest number of such events seem to occur in autumn. Another study found that the algae these fish feed on contains toxins that accumulate in the animal’s liver, which is another reason to avoid eating this particular organ. This also suggests that the source of the hallucinations may be the sarpa salpa’s general diet.
For all the above reasons, extreme caution is advised when dealing with this species, although numerous sources suggest that the Romans targeted the sarpa salpa on purpose because it contains a substance that can be extremely psychoactive.
“Cases of dreamfish poisoning are as rare as shark attacks”
”It’s true that dreamfish do eat still-unknown planktonic seaweed, which, during a certain part of the year, can cause people to experience terrible hallucinations, vomiting and dizziness, weakness and extremely disturbing nightmares,” Podvodni.hr wrote about this topic at one time. This phenomenon is called (as mentioned above) ichthyoalienotoxicism. However, cases of dreamfish poisoning are rare, almost like shark attacks, and they refer only to the southern areas of the Mediterranean. In Arabic, the salpa is called “the fish that creates dreams”, hence its nickname – dreamfish.
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