What It’s Like to Nearly Die From the Venom of a Blue-Ringed Octopus

Then you picked her up. You were probably paying so much attention to the wiggle of her tentacles and the texture of her tiny suckers that you didn’t notice the painless nip from her parrotlike beak.

Now, 10 minutes later, you notice something strange. Your lips are going numb. So is your face. You want to yell for help but can’t: It’s getting harder to speak. And your stomach feels—oh, gross! Right in front of everyone.

Somebody calls an ambulance. It’s getting tough to stand. It’s getting tough to breathe. The numbness is spreading to your hands, feet, and chest. And you continue to be aware for every agonizing moment of it.

You get to the hospital in time. You get hooked up to a ventilator, the machine forcing air into your lungs because your diaphragm is paralyzed. No antidote, the doctors say. You have to wait it out. About 15 long hours later, your muscles start working again. They take you off the ventilator. You can breathe.

Congratulations! You survived being bitten by one of the world’s most venomous animals.

So what the hell just happened?

Let’s go back to that little octopus who was just minding her business. When you picked her up and she bit you, you got dosed with venom from her salivary glands. If you were a crab, some chemicals in her venom would have paralyzed you so that she could dine on your delicious insides. But because you’re a human, it’s a different chemical in her venom that affects you: tetrodotoxin. The same chemical that makes puffer fish meat so deadly; the chemical that an Australian doctor calls “one of the most potent toxins known to mammals.“

When that frightened little octopus bites, the tetrodotoxin in her saliva quickly enters your bloodstream. With lethal biochemical precision, it blocks the tiny channels that let sodium ions enter your nerves—sodium ions that are necessary for your nerves to tell muscles like your diaphragm to move. It doesn’t take much tetrodotoxin to paralyze your diaphragm. A single 25-gram octopus—not quite the weight of one slice of bread—has enough tetrodotoxin to suffocate 10 men.

But don’t villainize the blue-ringed octopus. She was just hanging out, hoping for a crab snack, when you went all Curious George on her. Of course it’s part of our nature to gawk at cool animals we find on the beach. But it’s part of her nature to defend herself.

After all, she did try to warn you.