1, sea urchin spines toxicity

Sea urchins are poisonous and non-toxic, some sea urchin spines with toxins.

How to tell a poisonous sea urchin: A poisonous sea urchin looks much prettier than a non-toxic one, and the colors may be more vibrant.

2, prevention and treatment:

Emergency treatment of sea urchin injuries and prevention:

①Sea urchin injuries should be carefully examined to see if there is any residual sea urchin spiny protrusion of the injury, if necessary, take the surgical side

removed, and then coated with anti-inflammatory, antipruritic, pain relieving drops, to prevent secondary infections; first aid

② sea urchin injuries by the sea urchin spines if the symptoms of poisoning, to immediately send to the hospital for treatment;

3,

The sea urchin spines are not poisonous. To be immediately sent to the hospital for treatment; first aid

③ fishermen or scientific research, exploration personnel in the sea operation, to strengthen personal protection, wear gloves, do not touch the sea urchin, so as to avoid being stung by sea urchins; prevention

④ in the sea area between the reefs and forests or harder mud and sandy shallow sea area of the tourists play play, but also to do a good job of personal protection, to avoid touching or touching the sea urchin. Prevention

After being pricked by sea urchins, poisoning symptoms may arise in several cases:

①Immediately after being pricked by sea urchins, you will feel burning and severe pain, which can last for several hours, with bleeding from the skin, and edematous erythema and occasional blisters appearing around the wounds soon afterward, and the rashes will gradually subside in 1-2 weeks.

②The local appearance of round hard nodules about 0.2-0.5cm in size, single or multiple, within 1 year after the stabbing. Nodule surface warty, hard texture, light red or greenish color, usually painless or have mild pressure pain, mostly in the hand. This granulomatous nodule may be the sea urchin pricked skin, brittle and easy to break the tip of the spines remain in the skin, months after the formation of foreign body granuloma.

3) Injuries of infiltrative plaques may occur simultaneously with granulomas or separately. Within a few months after pricking the skin, localized diffuse dark red infiltrating mass, mostly occurring in the finger, later the finger can appear pike deformity, and limited bone destruction and symptoms of synovitis in the adjacent phalangeal joints, so that the finger activity is limited, this symptom is not healed for a long time, and a few can be absorbed naturally.

4 As the venom or neurotoxin in the sea urchin body is injected into the human body, in addition to causing local skin damage, sometimes there can be different degrees of systemic poisoning symptoms, such as dizziness, headache, palpitations, blood pressure drop, breathing difficulties, facial paralysis, or even general paralysis and death.

The sea urchin is an ancient creature in the ocean, a close relative of the starfish and sea cucumber. According to scientific evidence, it has hundreds of millions of years of existence on earth. In the distant Paleozoic and Mesozoic Era, they have many kinds of fossilized sea urchins found as many as 5000 kinds. As a result of the vicissitudes of the sea, fossils of sea urchins have been found on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Many of the extinct species are fossils that mark the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras.

The earliest known sea urchins were found in the rocks of the early Ordovician, and the reason they have managed to survive to this day is that they were a successful and diverse group of organisms. In well-preserved specimens, even the spines are preserved, but most of the specimens found are only hard-shelled. Sometimes individual spines are found on fossils. Some sea urchins (e.g. Tylocidaris clavigera from the Cretaceous in Britain) have clavate spines, which make it difficult for predators to break through and make the urchins appear to be difficult to deal with. The spines also facilitated movement on the soft seabed.

There are two toxin-producing organs in sea urchins: the forked spines and the spines, which can cause poisoning by ingestion of the urchin's reproductive glands and ovaries during the reproductive season, or by spines or forked spines. Dozens of species of sea urchins have been reported to be toxic, including the white-spined trilobite sea urchin, the globular sea urchin, the poisonous sea urchin, and the rock-pen sea urchin. The role of sea urchin toxin is different, some of the animals can cause respiratory distress, muscle paralysis, convulsions and even death;

Some of the red blood cells of the animals have a dissolving effect, and can cause the activation of the heart and make the muscles do not respond to non-directive stimuli, with potential medicinal value. In addition, the toxic gland extracts of the sea urchin have a contractile effect on isolated smooth muscle, which is proportional to the dose of the toxin; the coronary circulation of the rat heart perfused with intestinal cells produces a change in the amplitude and rate of the heartbeat, causing varying degrees of heart block. The white-spined trilobite sea urchin also has a toxic heat-resistant protein, whose main effects are the release of histamine and the production of kallikrein, suggesting that this substance has potential pharmacological value.? Pharmacological activity and utility of some sea urchinsSea urchin toxins are soluble in water.

Highly toxic substances are present in the globular forked spines of the white-spined trilobite sea urchin, which are non-dialyzable and stable in the pH 4.3-10.6 range but are inactivated at 45.0-47.5 °C. Saline extracts of sea urchin globular forked spines contained toxic substances dialyzable, not heat-resistant, and were destroyed by holding in 0.25 mol/L NaOH solution for 1-2 h. They had a similar ethylphthalylcholine-like effect.

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