Recovery from cyanide poisoning
Peter N. King
peking at mail.asiandevbank.org
Mon Jun 2 03:15:21 EDT 1997
As you may know, the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, GEF, AusAID,
JICA and the Government of Indonesia are formulating a major Coral
Reef Rehabilitation and Management Project in Indonesia and we seek
the cooperation of Coral-List members in providing the technical
backstopping for this ambitious undertaking.
One of the unresolved areas debated in Indonesia and the Philippines
is the extent to which coral reefs can recover from cyanide poisoning
associated with illegal fishing for the live fish trade. In a 1986
paper, Peter Rubec noted that researchers in the Philippines were
divided on the question of whether squirting sodium cyanide at coral
reefs caused their death. "Scleratinian corals reacted by retracting
their polyps and exuding a mucoid substance. In a matter of minutes,
the polyps came out again positioned in the usual way." "A second
dose was given four months after the first. A day after the second
application, all corals appeared to have recovered. But when the
stations were revisited three months later, all corals in the test
quadrats were dead." The results may have been confounded by an
outbreak of COTS (Acanthaster sp.).
Can anyone explain a mechanism that would allow the corals to survive
for four months after the first dose, apparently recover after the
second dose, and then appear to have died 3 months later? What have
other field or laboratory tests shown in relation to recovery rates
following cyanide poisoning?
Peter King
Asian Development Bank
Manila, Philippines
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