How To Anesthetize an Octopus 105
sciencehabit writes Researchers have figured out how to anesthetize octopuses so the animals do not feel pain while being transported and handled during scientific experiments. In a study published online this month in the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health, researchers report immersing 10 specimens of the common octopus in seawater with isoflurane, an anesthetic used in humans. They gradually increased the concentration of the substance from 0.5% to 2%. The investigators found that the animals lost the ability to respond to touch and their color paled, which means that their normal motor coordination of color regulation by the brain was lost, concluding that the animals were indeed anesthetized. The octopuses then recovered from the anesthesia within 40 to 60 minutes of being immersed in fresh seawater without the anesthetic, as they were able to respond to touch again and their color was back to normal.
I for one (Score:2)
....was eager to know... :/
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I for one was eager to know... :/
Give it Slashdot's Microsoft-sponsored front page to read. Even an incredibly alert cephalopod with no discernible neck will be nodding off in seconds.
Re:I for one (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember a little interview (in the New Scientist I think) with a marine biologist who said he stopped experimenting on octopi when, after inserting a probe into the head of an octopus he thought was anaesthetised, the octopus calmly raised its tentacle and pulled the probe back out.
I hear... (Score:1)
Deep frying works too.
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Or Greeks, I guess? Or the tons of other countries in which octopus is not an exotic food?
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Or Greeks, I guess? Or the tons of other countries in which octopus is not an exotic food?
Also, Mexicans in Japan who order "taco".
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He's not talking about food: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Checked that link out. Good thing I never have any "neon meate dreams of a octafish", because I've just lost my appetite..
Re:I hear... (Score:4, Funny)
I have been hunting and eating octopi in greece (plural?)
greeces. You're welcome.
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Only for taste-testing.
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There is a difference ... (Score:2)
between them not responding to touch & them not being aware. Imagine what it would be like, sloshing about in a travelling container of water and not being able to use your suckers to anchor yourself to a surface!
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Yup, that's what happened! It was considered problematic to administer anesthesia to infants, what with the small dosages and all. The advice for doctors was just to use enough tape to prevent the baby's arms and legs from squirming around and disrupting the operation.
Ghoulish, but then again my personal experience with doctors has pretty much done away with any respect I ever had for them, pretty much like how Rathergate destroyed my respect for journalists. It's a sad, empty world without any idols.
Re:There is a difference ... (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother in law is an anesthesiologist. Until I met him, I never realized how dangerous anesthesia is. You are basically turning over your life and your breathing/heart to one person's knowledge of drugs and how your body responds to them. Too much, and your heart or lungs stop working... too little, and you wake up and can feel and remember what's going on. The comforting stat is that only about 1 in 200,000 cases actually die, but just 25 years ago, it was 2 in 10,000.
For a field whose motto is "do no harm," I can see why they didn't want to do very much experimentation at all with anesthesia on babies -- the line between wake and death gets even smaller. And when you think about it, less than 150 years ago, ALL surgery was done without anesthetic..
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And when you think about it, less than 150 years ago, ALL surgery was done without anesthetic..
Yes, but most of them died from shock, hence chloroform which had a much better death rate but much worse (~8x) than ether, and so on to modern anaesthesia.
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Americans tended to use ether (which is a very good, very cheap, and very safe anesthetic, as long as you don't mind that it's highly flammable, tends to form explosive peroxides when stored for too long, and takes forever to wake up from), while the British preferred chloroform. Because ether is so safe, anesthesia duties were often delegated to a nurs
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I had bad anesthesia once. The doctor, surgeon, and most of the rest of the surgical team dropped past after, but the anesthesiologist, who was there before I went under, talking to be, was nowhere to be seen.
There was a common (and expected) complication that lengthened the time I needed to be under. And I was very nauseated after. I think he screwed up lengthening the
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There are a growing number of studies showing long term psychological damage associated with administered anaesthesia on infants. Being part of the club (I had multiple surgeries as an infant), this is of particular interest, to me.
Just do a search, you come up with some pretty serious data.
http://bja.oxfordjournals.org/... [oxfordjournals.org]
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Actually not bullshit at all. Even thirty years or so ago, even local anaethesia was not used on injured children, mostly because one shock response seen in children but not adults is to freeze. Thus it was when, thirty years or so ago I tripped up in the back of a Renault 4 van and gashed my head on the metal surface of the inner wheel housing. The damage was stitched up without the aid of local anaesthetic and I remember the pain to this day.
I also remember the pain of having the stitch or stiches removed
Re:There is a difference ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There is a difference ... (Score:4, Informative)
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today I learned... (Score:1)
How to anesthetize an octopus.
Thanks Slashdot!
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What I learned, is that it works on humans too - just need to keep the human underwater, inhaling seawater with Isoflurane.
Thanks /. (Score:1)
Now I just await information on... (Score:2, Insightful)
...how to titillate an ocelot.
(You oscillate its tit a lot.)
Sounds like a great name for my /. alter ego (Score:2)
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Today octopodes, tomorrow computers. See - relevant!
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Your fallacy is assuming consciousness is dependent on a physical body.
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Re:How?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Octopodes are nerdy.
You do not want to offend Cthulhu. That matters.
Re:How?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Octopus are basically water going aliens that crash landed on earth, they have separate brains for each eyeball and almost as many neurons in the tentacles as the brain, plus their motor cortex is doughnut-shaped and encircles their throat. Yet they're smart enough to unscrew the lid of a peanut butter jar if they're trapped inside one, and more often than not can pick the winner in a soccer match. The fact that we have any idea of how to do anything with something as weird as an octopus is pretty damn impressive. This is hard core nerd biology/medicine, cutting edge right here.
Look, just be glad they didn't post pictures of ktitens, ok?
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Look, just be glad they didn't post pictures of ktitens, ok?
So we don't want to see octopuses eating kittens?
Hey Europe! (Score:1)
Paralyzed yet Fully Aware (Score:5, Insightful)
This reminds me of the cases where they used Curare for anesthesia. Turns out all it was doing was paralyzing the motor systems so the still fully conscious patients couldn't scream or otherwise react as the surgeons operated.
Might be a good idea to ask the octopuses afterwards if they remember from during the anesthetized time period. This can be done and would find out if they're really out cold or if they're just locked in.
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A paralytic is used as part of the three-drug protocol for lethal injection, as the first of the three. It's there to make sure that if the sedative (Drug number two) doesn't actually suffice to knock the condemned out, they won't spend their last moments crying out in agony and making a scene that'll embarrass the prison service and provide a grounds for which later condemned may challenge the means of execution as cruel and unusual punishment. They can still suffer an agonizing death in silence - most of
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I've never been able to figure out why they execute people with drug combinations at all -- if the goal is a quick, humane, unembarrassing death, why not just flood the execution chamber with nitrogen or some other inert gas? By all accounts, dying of nitrogen suffocation [wikipedia.org] is quick, reliable, and painless -- you don't even feel like you're suffocating, since that feeling is brought on by a buildup of CO2 rather than by a lack of oxygen. Instead, you just pass out.
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why not just flood the execution chamber with nitrogen or some other inert gas?
I think it's even easier and I'm not sure why nobody does this: Drain the blood from the person. I gave blood (once) and passed out. It was not very scary, a very short window of "oh, that's weird" and I was gone. I came-to several minutes later and was fine. No gas or dangerous environment, no pain, just drain the blood out.
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FWIW, I'm an anesthesiologist, and if I need to check out early, that's how I'm going.
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quick, reliable, and painless
There are a lot of people who apparently consider the process of execution wholly unsatisfying if the condemned fails to suffer in the process.
I saw a doco wherein a chap campaigning for quick and painless executions was unpleasantly surprised by the volume of opposition to the idea. Those opposed were very sure they wanted the condemned to suffer on their way out.
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That might be 'How to Kill a Human Being' - a BBC program (I think) in which the presenter studies the political situation around the death penalty in the US and controversy over means of execution considering such factors as reliability, painlessness, level of gore and dependence upon executioner training. He does conclude that nitrogen is the ideal means by all standards. At the conclusion of the program he discusses this finding with a representative of a death-penalty campaign group, and is shocked at t
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Awesome, right on the head - thanks SuricouRaven. :)
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My mistake. You get the idea, though.
Re:Paralyzed yet Fully Aware (Score:5, Interesting)
Should be doable. They are quite capable of Pavlovian association. Knock them out, apply suitable stimulus - say, a moderately painful electric shock plus a distinctive scent in the water. Repeat enough time for your unsedated control group to show a fear response to the scent, and see if your sedated octopods have learned the association too.
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Probably better to put the scent in before the shock. The conditioned animals will freak when they smell the shock coming, where the sedated ones will merely say, "cool scent".
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One of my hypotheses about how anesthesia works is that it prevents the fixation of memories. Certainly they have that effect while you are coming out from under them.
If you combine no permament memories with paralysis you get all the signs that I see WRT anethesia. OTOH, I do understand that there are other tests (brain waves, cortisol, etc.) which indicate that more than that is going on.
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When you demand a citation try just Googling. It's faster and right there at your finger tips. It's there even if you're not lazy. I would not want to take the joy of learning and exploration away from you nor encourage your lazy tendencies so consider finding the citations as an exercise for your mind and path to self-improvement.
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fully conscious patients couldn't scream
In Slashdot beta, nobody can hear you scream.
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This reminds me of the cases where they used Curare for anesthesia. Turns out all it was doing was paralyzing the motor systems so the still fully conscious patients couldn't scream or otherwise react as the surgeons operated.
Might be a good idea to ask the octopuses afterwards if they remember from during the anesthetized time period. This can be done and would find out if they're really out cold or if they're just locked in.
Actually that would require two of the three drugs to fail. They give or gave one to paralyze you, one to kill pain and one to shut off short term memory. The scary part was that sometimes the painkiller failed, so the patiant would be awake fealing pain, but they would not remember it afterwards unless the memory drug also failed.
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Protection for anime girls.... (Score:4, Funny)
Ability to respond != Ability to feel (Score:4, Interesting)
Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible. But terror would immediately jolt the adrenal glands and adrenaline would flood the body, wake me up fully with racing heart and profuse sweat. Eventually I went through sleep studies and was diagnosed with very mild apnea and got a CPAP machine that kept my airways inflated with above atmospheric pressure (just 6mm of water, 1 atm= 10.24 meters of water). Then those episodes stopped.
But I will never ever forget the terror I felt when I my muscles would not respond to the commands I was giving them.
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With the vast differences in nervous systems between humans and cephalopods, who knows.
What we do know is that isoflurane in humans does indeed cause loss of consciousness, and it appears that the same happens in octopi. With humans it was fairly easy to determine that conscious recall was lost - how you'd do this in octopi is another matter. Different humans vary in their susceptibility but we know the levels where, say, 95% won't recall surgical stimuli.
It's thought that these agents work by affecting
Re:Ability to respond != Ability to feel (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand these animals do not have long term memory, and they might never remember the terror like we do.
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This thing that you're describing is called sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is a state where you are still dreaming, but you are also partially aware of your surroundings (mainly through hearing) and here is the scary part: you are strongly convinced that you are not dreaming and that you are in fact awake. This combination of dreaming while thinking that you are awake can make for some pretty strange and frightening experiences...
Sleep paralysis is often posed as an explanation for the widespread phenomen
Re:Ability to respond != Ability to feel (Score:4, Interesting)
Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible.
This sounds like the fairly common phenomenon of sleep paralysis [wikipedia.org], which typically occurs during transitions to or from sleep. Estimates usually say that 5-10% of people experience it, but it has also been proposed as an explanation for lots of claims about ghost encounters, alien abductions, etc. Personally, I think the latter explanation makes a lot of sense. When I was a teenager, I experienced quite a few episodes of this, sometimes involving awareness of the environment around my bed (while unable to move), but with some sort of "supernatural" presence or other thing involved. I of course never thought it was actually supernatural, but rather just nightmares -- at some point I read about sleep paralysis and realized what was going on. I also learned to control it through lucid dreaming, since when it happens now I generally recognize that I am dreaming. Sometimes I will thus immediately wake up, but other times it is quite a struggle -- I end up gradually trying to flail around to get my body to move (and knowing it is a dream doesn't always get rid of the deep feelings of dread that sometimes occur).
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If you would have upgraded to systemd none of that would have happened! ;-)
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Obligatory video (Score:1)
I've had something similar, definitely one of the best dishes I've ever had.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Complain all you want, but the money spent on anesthetics belongs to the lab. If not spent there it would be spent on something else related to the lab. It would not be given out to random people. Right or wrong, fair or not, that is how things are done. The lab cares about itself, not about people. And whoever funds the lab cares about the results.
First hit is free. (Score:2)
They should allow the octopus access to the drug tank and see if they prefer it.