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How To Anesthetize an Octopus
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.
....was eager to know... :/
NO SIG
Until 1987, doctors didn't anaesthetize babies for surgery on the logic that "babies don't feel pain". In fact, they do. Yikes.
...how to titillate an ocelot.
(You oscillate its tit a lot.)
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..
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.
No anime girls can carry isoflourane spray kits to stop tentacle rapists!
Silence is a state of mime.
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".
Medicine isn't related to science? Who knew.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Medical stories are high-tech, or have you never heard the term Bio-Tech? Also, with the advent of "good enough" computing, most people no longer care about the latest cpu and graphic card advances, so gotta find something else to get excited about.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I am an anesthesiologist who takes care of adults primarily. I did about 9 months of pediatric anesthesia in my 36 month residency after medical school. The pediatric anesthesiologist I trained under were spectacular and caring clinicians. I think you might be generalizing in your post. Until the late 1980s, doctors did not anesthetize boys routinely for *circumcision*. For other operations, infants and children were anesthetized similarly to adults. Studies came out around that time (late 1980s, IIRC) on the levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol during circumcisions that proved the infants were responding physiologically exactly like older children and adults feeling pain. That was the end of the 'babies don't feel pain' hypothesis, which no one subscribes to any more. Remember that anesthesiologists are parents too. A lot has changed in medicine and anesthesia in 30 years. Undergoing anesthesia can be as scary as needing surgery in the first place, so I wanted to say anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists study a long time (and are tested repeatedly!) to make sure we know how to get patients through surgery without feeling pain in the OR. If you or your child needs surgery, talk to the anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist!
I have been hunting and eating octopi in greece (plural?)
greeces. You're welcome.
Several years ago I had three procedures done back-to-back over about a week, and had the good fortune to have the same anesthesiologist for all of them. After the first one, I'd felt sick as a dog, so I told him about that when he visited me prior to the second one. He said, "Good to know, thanks for telling me - we'll try something different this time." After the second and third procedure I felt great (well, as great as could be expected). +1 for talking to your doctor when you're having issues.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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?
moox. for a new generation.