I know there are creatures like pufferfish etc. that have some poisonous organs or body parts. I’m talking about creatures where the flesh itself is inedible.
Any creatures like this?
Poison dart frog?
I think we had a thread on this a couple months ago but I can’t find it at the moment.
from discovery channel
Blowfish
Blowfish or puffer (Tetraodontidae species) are more tolerant of cold water. You find them along tropical and temperate coasts worldwide, even in some of the rivers of Southeast Asia and Africa. Stout-bodied and round, many of these fish have short spines and can inflate themselves into a ball when alarmed or agitated. Their blood, liver and gonads are so toxic that as little as 28 milligrammes (1 ounce) can be fatal. These fish vary in colour and size, growing up to 75 centimetres in length.
Triggerfish
The triggerfish (Balistidae species) occur in great variety, mostly in tropical seas. They are deep-bodied and compressed, resembling a seagoing pancake up to 60 centimetres in length, with large, sharp dorsal spines. Avoid them all, as many have poisonous flesh.
Barracuda
Although most people avoid them because of their ferocity, they occasionally eat barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda). These predators of mostly tropical seas can reach almost 1.5 metres in length and have attacked humans without provocation. They occasionally carry the poison ciguatera in their flesh, making them deadly if consumed.
Other Dangerous Sea Creatures
The jellyfish, and the cone and auger shells are other dangerous sea creatures.
Jellyfish
Jellyfish-related deaths are rare, but the sting they inflict is extremely painful. The Portuguese man-of-war resembles a large pink or purple balloon floating on the sea. It has poisonous tentacles hanging up to 12 metres below its body. The huge tentacles are actually colonies of stinging cells. Most known deaths from jellyfish are attributed to the man-of-war. Other jellyfish can inflict very painful stings as well. Avoid the long tentacles of any jellyfish, even those washed up on the beach and apparently dead.
Cone Shell
The subtropical and tropical cone shells (Conidae species) have a venomous harpoon-like barb. All are cone-shaped and have a fine netlike pattern on the shell. A membrane may possibly obscure this coloration. There are some very poisonous cone shells, even some lethal ones in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Avoid any shell shaped like an ice cream cone.
Auger Shell
The auger shell or terebra (Terebridae species) are much longer and thinner than the cone shells but can be nearly as deadly as the cone shells. They are found in temperate and tropical seas. Those in the Indian and Pacific oceans have more toxic venom in their stinging barb. Do not eat these snails, as their flesh may be poisonous.
Somewhere I have an Air Force survival manual. I remember that it said something about survival on a tropical island: Silver fish are generally safe to eat. Brightly-coloured fish often have poisonous flesh.
This is the only place I’d ever read or heard that (as a generality – triggerfish specifically I’ve just read here).
28 milligrams is 1/1000th of an ounce, so that’s quite a bit of a difference. I might be tempted to take my chances if I was starved enough and there was a 28 gram margin left after removing the intestines, but not with milligrams.
Considering the fact that I’ve eaten blowfish myself, this isn’t right.
If you clean them properly, there’s no danger. Basically, you just eat the tail muscle and throw away all the rest.
(BTW, Japanese fugu are blowfish.)
Depending on your definition of “inedible,” the obvious choice is the menhaden. Also known as bunkers, these fish are basically just a mass of tiny bone and oily flesh that starts to rot almost as soon as they are removed from the water. They smell pretty bad, too.
Am I to understand that there are no inedible mammals? reptiles? only fish?
If you remove poison then we can just about eat any living thing. We may not get nutrients from it, it may make us sick, but it can be swallowed and passed. The only exception I can think of is cellulose from plants. It can be eaten just not digested.
Im not sure if your question includes grinding or cooking the food up. I doubt you could eat a sea urchin raw without hurting yourself in some way eventually. I guess you would have to make a distinction between flesh and shell, but for many sea creatures their shell is their flesh. Their soft interior is just a different flesh. The question doesnt seem fair if you can arbitrarily ignore a turtles shell or porcupine spines. I doubt many people could eat that stuff raw.
My interpretation of the OP is different from yours. By ‘wholly inedible’, I took it to mean that no part of the animal is safe for humans to eat; not whether the whole organism could be eaten.
That is correct. Is there an animal that is more or less completely inedible WRT it’s flesh.
So even if its just 2cm of flesh? Yeah, there’s nothing we cant eat then. We can pass steel, so if it isnt poison I cant think of a reason why it cant be put into ones mouth, swallowed, and passed, especially if we have the option of cooking and/or grinding.
However, the bodies themselves of some animals are toxic, such as monarch butterflies and their caterpillars. Of course it would take a lot of them to kill you; but you couldn’t eat many without getting sick.
In these and other toxic amphibians all or most of the toxins are in the skin. If you skin it carefully, you could probably eat it (though I wouldn’t want to take the chance.)
Trilobites, at least in their current state.
Off topic story. When I interviewed for grad school, I met a professor that went deep-sea fishing one day and caught a barracuda. He took it home, cooked it up, and invited his lab over. They all got sick and were out of commission for a week or so. He told a friend of his in Florida about his experience, and the Florida guy said the rule of thumb with barracuda is that if it’s longer than your arm, don’t eat it. When they’re that old, there’s a good chance of getting sick.
But even they’re still edible if you gut and ice them immediately.
Sorry about any dramatic inaccuracies, it was copied and pasted from a page at discovery channel, any math errors are theirs not mine.
You make it sound trivial to do this. But doesn’t Japan require chefs to be specially trained and licensed to prepare fugu? I wouldn’t think that the training consists of, “Basically, you just serve the tail muscle and throw away all the rest.” And still, once in a while somebody dies.
It was trivial to do it. When I was growing up, we had blowfish as a matter of course. I even cleaned a few myself. I was certainly under 12 when I did it and the only training I had was watching my grandfather do it. No big deal. No one ever mentioned that they were potentially poisonous.
IIRC, you would make a cut just behind the fin to cut off the tail and peel it out of the skin and throw the rest away. That kept away from any of the poisonous organs; you’d only eat the tail muscle.
Now these were the Atlantic Ocean variety, which may have been different than the ones the Japanese eat (though I believe they still have the poison). Also, we always cooked blowfish, which could have broken down the poison (fugu is served raw).
Finally, looking at a video of a Japanese chef preparing the fugu, he’s doing it completely differently, in a way where it is much more likely that the poison gets on the meat if there’s a mistake (but where you get more meat from the fish).