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Eco-Friendly Fish
Poisons |
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Tubli |
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Tubli has been used throughout Eastern
Asia for centuries, perhaps millennia, and maybe even for a lot
longer. It wouldn't take a lot of deduction to note that certain
plants, which grow along streams anyway, have roots that can kill
fish.
It's very, very easy
to use; simply pull up a few roots and swish them in the water where
there are fish. They will float up to the surface quite
quickly.
Alternatively, crush
the roots and make a more concentrated concoction.
I'm not sure whether
Tubli just stuns the fish, or kills them. I'm told they
recover quickly if they are big enough to get only a small dose,
weight for weight, so you have to be quick to pick them
up. |
Scientific
Name: |
Derris elliptica
(Leguminosae) |
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Local
Names: |
Bauit,malasiag,tibalau,tibanglan, tubi, tugli,
tugling-pula (Tagalog) lapak (Bicol) tabali (Mindanao) upei (Bontoc)
tura (Batanes) tuba (Malaysia) |
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Description: |
Tubli is a rambling climber with branches covered
in brown hairs. Leaves pinnate 30-50 cm long with 9-13 leaflets
oblong, smooth above and silky beneath when mature. Racemes are lax
15-30cm long, with reddish flowers. Pods 5-8cm containing 1-3
seeds.
Tubli is found abundantly in thickets along streams
in secondary forests at low and medium altitude from Northern Luzon
to Mindanao. |
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Toxic
Parts |
Roots |
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Many
'old-fashioned' amateur gardeners will be familiar with Derris Dust
- it has been around for a century and a half now, and was one of
the first 'industrial' insecticides.
Rotenoids, the rotenone-related materials, have been used
as crop insecticides since 1848, when they were applied to plants to
control leaf-eating caterpillars. Derris root has long been
used as a fish poison and its insecticidal properties were known to
the Chinese well before it was isolated by E. Geoffrey in 1895. The
use of the ground root of certain species of Derris was
patented in 1912, since when it has been established that the active
compounds are rotenoids, of which the main insecticide is
rotenone.
There
are reports that rotenone can hasten the onset of Parkinson's
Disease, but that's the very least you could expect of a potent
insecti- and pisci-cide. |
Active Toxin
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Rotenone
Rotenone is the most potent of six
rotenoid esters occurring naturally in the derris plant. It is
unstable in light and heat and almost all toxicity can be lost after
two to three days during the summer. It does not readily leach from
soil and it is not expected to be a groundwater pollutant. It is
very toxic to fish, one of its main uses by native people over the
centuries being to paralyze fish for capture and consumption.
Crystalline rotenone has an acute oral LD50 of 60, 132 and 3000mg/kg
for guinea pigs, rats, and rabbits (Matsumura, 1985). Because the
toxicity of derris powders exceeds that of the equivalent content of
rotenone, it is obvious that the other esters in crude preparations
have significant biologic activity. The estimated fatal oral dose
for a 70kg man is of the order of 10 to 100g. |
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From this little
start, the whole delightful industry of Western industrial poisons
grew up.
My London flatmate
in the 1980s was actively involved in helping the Iraqis build an
'insecticide' plant at Ar Rutbah in Anbar province, for use on the
Iranians, who'd just thrown out the Americans. When the Americans
rushed into Iraq, 20 years later, Ar Rutbah was one of the first
places they took, hoping to find 'Weapons of Mass
Destruction'.
It should have
been a doddle - except they forgot one of the first principles of
American manufacturing - 'planned obsolescence'.
How could they
possibly find anything 'made in the USA' that still worked 20 years
later?
Botanical information source:
Useful Plant Species with Toxic Substance (Philippines) - Wilma C
Dichoso (Research Information Series on Ecosystems - Vol 12 No
2) May-Aug 2000 - available as pdf on
net |
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Lagtang |
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Scientific
Name: |
Anamirta cocculus (L)
Menispermacaeae |
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Local
Names: |
Ana (Mindanao),
ligtang, bayati (Tagalog), bayating (Ilocos), lagtal, laglang
(Visayas), lagtang, lantal (Pampanga) |
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Description: |
Large, woody vine
with corky grey bark and white wood. The stems are sometimes 10cm
thick with stout smooth branches. Leaves are heart-shaped, 10-20cm
log with pointed or tapering apex. Flowers are small, yellowish
white, sweet-scented 6-7mm across, crowded on 3-4.5cm long pedulous
panicles. Lagtang fruit is a drupe, round, smooth and hard, about
1cm in diameter when dry. |
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Distribution: |
It is found
throughout the Philippines, India, Malaysia and New
Guinea. |
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Toxic
Parts |
Fruit -
Berries |
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Active
Toxins |
Picrotoxin,
picrotoxinin, picrotin, occulin, minispermine,
paramenispermine |
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Lagtang
is the infamous fish poison described on another
web page on this site:
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
where night
fishermen, using lights to attract small fish, toss in a lagtang
groundbait to stun the fish, letting them tumble about, flashing
their silver sides and bellies in the light, and attracting
bigger..., and bigger..., and bigger
fish. |
| Upas
Tree |
| This is the
ultimate fish-poisoning tree, and has had such a wonderful legend
attached to it that I had to include it here.
In the Middle
Ages, it was known as the Bohun Upas - which was, more than
probably, a miswriting of 'Pohun Ipoh' the Malaysian name.
It soon became one
of the most feared 'obstacles to the East' and those who had already
been there lost no time in selling the fable.
The tree was said
to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 m. or more. The
poison was fetched by condemned malefactors, of whom scarcely two
out of twenty returned.
All this is pure
fable, and in good part not even traditional fable, but mere
invention.
The milky juice of
the tree contains an active principle named antiarin, which has been recommended as a cardiac stimulant. It is without any properties,
however, that entitle it to clinical employment. The tree is
described as one of the largest in the forests of Java, the straight
cylindrical stem rising without a branch to the height of 60 to 80
ft. It has a whitish bark and on being wounded yields plentifully
the milky juice from which the poison is prepared.
Wikipedia |
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Extracting the latex from Antiaris
toxicaria
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Scientific Name: |
Antiaris
toxicaria (Moraeaceae) |
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Toxic
Parts |
Everything |
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Active
Toxin |
3-(6-Deoxy-b-D-glucopyranosil)oxy]-5,12,14-
trihydroxy-19-oxocard-20(22)-enolide
, or to put it in a different way,
Cardenolides 12 beta-hydroxycannogenin 3
beta-O-beta-D-deoxygulopyranoside and 3
beta-O-alpha-L-rhamnopyranoside, terbitan Dihydrochalcone
(antiarones), a-antiarin, b-antiarin.
C29H42O11
for short |
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Bito-on -
Barringtonia |
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Bito-on tree - Beautiful flower but inedible fruit - this one grows
in the local churchyard.
I have only just realised this
just may be the tree mentioned in:
"Amongst the most remarkable was a fringe of stately
old Barringtoni, covered with orchids and other epiphytes–gorgeous
trees when in flower; the red stamens, five inches long, with golden
yellow anthers like tassels, depending from the boughs; and their
fruit, of the size of the fist, is doubly useful to the fisherman,
who employs them, on account of their specific gravity, in floating
his nets, and beats them to pieces to stupefy the fish."
The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes - Chapter XVI (By
Fedor Jagor et al)
Just
yesterday, wandering down the beach, I saw a pile of these fruit
outside a fisherman's hut, and today I came across the reference in
Jagor et al.
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It's
not just a decorative churchyard tree, but a remnant of a
widespread beach forest, right on the beach edge itself, that
has been almost completely cleared by human habitation. It,
like the Talisay tree, is still valued for its shade and
its fruits, and is found in almost every Philippine beach
town.
"The stunted beach forest contains
Casuarina and Barringtonia mixed with other
lowland species. Palms, vines, bamboo, and Pterocarpus
indicus are present only in rare back-beach swamps. This
habitat type is extremely rare (now) because of coastal
habitation (Heaney and Regalado 1998)".
Mindanao-Eastern Visayas rain
forests (IM0129)
Its fruit are still used by
Polynesians as fish poisons right across the Pacific
Ocean. |
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Barringtonia
is also interesting for another reason.
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"Beaches of French Polynesia are often
littered with a buoyant drift fruit resembling a small coconut
with flattened sides. It is called box fruit (Barringtonia
asiatica) and is one of the most durable and widespread of all
drifters, remaining buoyant for at least two years. In fact,
they are used as fishing floats in Southeast Asia. This was
one of the first tropical drifters to reach Krakatau after the
catastrophic volcanic eruption of August 1883."
Drift Seeds and Drift
Fruits |
| See: Coconut Origins
There I show how Barringtonia,
the coconut crab, and the coconut all have the same
distribution (by sea currents and winds) right across the
Indian and Western Pacific oceans. They have drifted to these
places without the help of man, and were naturally established
there, possibly several million years ago.
The coconut and coconut crabs could
have fed some of the best diet on earth to Early Humans,
two million years ago, as they trekked and wandered
along the shoreline of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific.
See also: Indo-Pacific Shoreline
Ecotone |
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'Primitive' People Use
a Wide Range of Fish Poisons |
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"Different hunting
tools are found in this showcase from both (Filipino)
Pälawan and Batak ethnic groups. Pälawan blowpipes are made of
two bamboo tubes of a small diameter enclosed in a larger diameter
bamboo (Schizostachyum lumampao). The darts
having an approximate length of 30 centimetres are balanced by
a cone-shaped head made of the main veining of the ‘bätbat’
(Arenga undulatifolia) and ‘busniq’ (Arenga
brevipes) leaves. At least eight vegetable species
are employed in the making of the poison: five of them are
trees: ‘sumandar’, ‘uläs’, ‘kämändäg’, ‘rinsab’
(Alstonia scholaris), and
‘sälugän’ (Antiaris toxicaria); two are
vines – ‘lupas’ and ‘ditaq tigbung’
while ‘bigaq badjang’ is a species of the genus
Alocasia.
(Badjang is very familiar, a
wild relative of taro (Alocasia spp). To me, it looks
like any other kind of taro plant, most of which are very good
food plants, with a tuber or corm containing oxalic acid that
must be carefully peeled before eating. Badjang,
though, also has poisonous, irritating leaves.)
The Pälawan
utilize at least eight different vegetable species for
fish-poisoning: ‘bägna’, ‘mäglangutän’, ‘mälägisa’ (Croton
tiglium),‘bäsak’ (Alstonia macrophylla),‘känumäj’
(Diospyros multiflora),‘ulam’ (Barringtonia
racemosa),‘tuba’ (Derris elliptica), and
‘lagtang’ (Arcangelisia flava (?)). Depending on
the species, bark, fruits, roots or leaves are pounded
and placed where the river current is slow. The pounded
substance releases some toxic components, which have the
effect of stunning or even killing fish and amphibians."
Orto
Botanico Universita' Degli Studi Di Napoli "Federico
II" | |
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Now, this is beginning to add up:
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Don't you
think, if Early Humans (Homo erectus) (2 million
years ago) had enough sense to travel 30+ kilometres to obtain
a certain type of stone for their tools, they might not have
put two and two together, and realised that that particular
box-shaped fruit, when it fell hard enough to crack the seeds
in a local rock pool, was the cause of those easily available
stunned fish? |
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If
chimpanzees can distinguish and seek out certain medicinal
plants couldn't Early Humans (Homo erectus) have done
so too? |
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You can't
poison land animals just by poisoning their atmosphere. It
wasn't until the 20th century that anyone (British and
Germans) tried it. More often than not, their poison gases
afflicted both sides. That just doesn't happen if you poison
your victim's water, and not your
air. |
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You don't
need sophisticated tools, like hafted spears, or bows and
arrows, to catch stunned fish. You just chuck in a
Barringtonia fruit, some Tubli, or some Lagtang,
or some sap from a Upas tree, and wait until lunch makes
itself available. |
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I suspect
that someone, at about the same time as fish poisons became
generally known, realised that you have to get the poison
into a land animal, and poison darts and arrows were invented.
"Arrow shafts are from
the stems of Miscanthus floridulus stems. Arrow tips
and heads have different shapes according to the animal to be
hunted. For large game hunting (e.g. wild pigs and monkeys)
arrow tips are poisoned with the latex of Antiaris toxicaria"
Orto
Botanico Universita' Degli Studi Di Napoli "Federico
II" |
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And the arrow (or spear) heads
didn't need to be made of stone. So long as they were sharp,
and hard enough to pierce an animal's skin, a suitable poison
would do the rest. |
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To put the proposition around the
other way, just suppose that the places where ancient stone
weapons are found happen to be places where hard woods and
plant poisons are not available - the temperate zones,
and open grass plains anywhere. If stone weapons are the only
things that survive millennia, you can hardly blame
archaeologists for concentrating on them - and perhaps drawing
some of the wrong
conclusions. | | |
