Good eatin '. bats fruit can be tasty, but they concentrate the toxin from cycad seeds.
The idea was simple, cooling, and controversial: the Chamorro people of Guam who feasted on a traditional delicacy, bats giant fruit may have ingested enough a toxin develop a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disease. Now this hypothesis, released last year, has been given a boost. In the August 12 issue of Neurology , the researchers report that the bats museum specimens frugivorous Guam, also known as flying foxes, are chock full of the neurotoxin BMAA.
For decades, scientists have struggled to explain a significant impact on Guam of a motor neuron disease that combines features of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson's dementia, with symptoms ranging from uncontrolled trembling at paralysis. One hypothesis leading disease related to the consumption of seeds of the cycad plant. These are used to make the tortilla flour and contain BMAA and another neurotoxin, cycasin. Residents can remove most toxins, however, by thoroughly washing the seeds.
Last year ethnobotanist Paul Cox, director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kalaheo, Hawaii, noted that another local specialty, bats giant fruit Guam, like to eat seeds and cycads suggested that cycad neurotoxins have accumulated to dangerous levels in the bat meat ( science now, March 29, 02). But the evidence was only circumstantial. More bats have been killed and eaten on Guam immediately after the Second World War, when weapons became readily available, coinciding with a peak incidence of neurodegenerative disease
Now Cox and ethnobotaniste Sandra Banack of California State University, Fullerton, have the first tangible evidence for their theory. Examine the skin tissue from three 50 bats Guam museum at the University of California, Berkeley, they found concentrations of BMAA hundreds of times higher than in the cycad flour. Cox said he was "stunned". The pair is now planning further research on how changes in power levels influence BMAA bats to better understand biomagnification cycads.
"Research seems to answer many questions that we all had about Guam's disease," said John Stein, a neurophysiologist engine at the University of Oxford, UK, hopes the study will encourage scientists hunting for the cause of various neurodegenerative disorders to "seek more common [environmental] toxins that could be similar to BMAA."
related sites
Recipe for dogfish soup
Cox site
the site Banack
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