The California Department of Fish & Wildlife recently issued a warning against consuming sport-taken bivalve shellfish from Santa Barbara County. The species include sport-harvested mussels, clams or scallops.
This is a common and nearly annual summer through early autumn warning regarding the presence of domoic acid.
It is important to note that this warning does not apply to commercially sold clams, mussels, scallops or oysters from approved sources. These shellfish harvesters and dealers are subject to frequent mandatory testing to monitor for toxins.
Wild, naturally occurring mussels have been recently found to contain dangerous levels of domoic acid, also referred to as Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning (ASP). This naturally occurring domoic acid toxin can cause illness or death in humans.
Sadly, cooking does not destroy the toxin. I wish it did.
Here is the warning about what can occur:
“Symptoms of ASP can occur within 30 minutes to 24 hours after eating toxic seafood. In mild cases, symptoms may include vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headache, and dizziness. These symptoms disappear within several days.
“In severe cases, the victim may experience trouble breathing, confusion, disorientation, cardiovascular instability, seizures, excessive bronchial secretions, permanent loss of short-term memory, coma or death.”
These warnings are meant to sound scary and should be taken seriously. Still, it is important to know that these warnings typically come out annually at about this time of year.
The heightened levels of domoic acid typically last into November and sometimes into December.
We recreational seafood harvesters have long known about this annual situation, and before the department came out with warnings, we had an old rule we lived by, which was: don’t eat sport-caught shellfish in any month that ends in “r.”
That would include September, October, November and December.
The remainder of the year they are generally fine to eat and many of us enjoy them. Meanwhile, if you want some fresh shellfish during a month that ends in “r,” see a commercial harvester or fish market.
Related to this, I’ve heard that the famous story “The Birds” was written after the author witnessed disoriented sea birds crashing into things in a northern California coastal town. It must have been a strange scenario to observe first-hand.
The theory is that the birds had eaten naturally occurring seafood with a high level of domoic acid and were suffering from the poisoning.
If you have a mind like director Alfred Hitchcock, who used the British author Daphne du Maurier’s chilling short story as the basis of his 1963 thriller film “The Birds,” you are naturally going to turn the experience into a horror story.
