Scientists have discovered 1,200 species of venomous fish

"One moment he was reaching for the telephone, the next he was out cold.

William Leo Smith, then a 20-year-old college student, woke up on the floor of the pet shop where he worked, blinking up at a ring of worried faces and feeling as if he’d been stabbed in the hand.

Actually, he’d been stung by a fuzzy dwarf lionfish — a dead one, no less. Someone had thrown it away, and Mr. Smith did not notice it when he tried to retrieve a telephone that had fallen into the same trash can. A row of spines along the fish’s back, armed with venom, jabbed him.

Today, a dozen years later, Mr. Smith is Dr. Smith, an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with an abiding curiosity about venomous fish. They are, he contends, undercounted, misunderstood and sadly unappreciated — an untapped resource for “bioprospecting” to find drugs among their thousands of venoms. Not many of the venoms have been studied, even though they can play havoc with crucial functions like blood clotting, nerve and muscle activity, blood pressure and heartbeat. "

Venom Runs Thick in Fish Families, Researchers Learn - New York Times

 

Awsome! That does sound like the beginning story of a scientist. Cool read.

 

Super cool post! Nice to have some cool background.