cthulhu77;112634 said:
Not really sure what your point is here, Monty.
Yes, blue rings can be lethal, but being bitten is pretty dang hard to do. Box jellies? All over the place.
I doubt collecting blue rings for the aquarium trade is going to have an effect on the bite/death ratio other than the collector's who are likely to be bitten. And the people who buy them. And ship them. Etc.
I know my stance on this is unpopular, but I do think it is logical.
Well, first I wanted to agree with you on what it makes sense to worry about... blue rings aren't ever going to be common enough that their low-aggression behavior will result in a lot of bites. The main thing that irritates me is that some dealers don't even bother to tell people that they're toxic at all, let alone one of the most lethal animals on the planet.
But most of my post was regarding the consequences... people are basically irrational when it comes to risk analysis, and I'm not sure how this plays out. If you have a digueti, you're far more likely to be bitten, but far less likely to die... how does that balance? Most of the time, there's no cost to having a blue-ring and a very obvious cost to the digueti, yet if you weigh a chomp from a small octo and an early death, I think most would prefer the former. With the box jellies, you're much more likely to be stung and suffer a lot, but somewhat less likely to die if you are envenomated, so it's sort of hard to compare... but all-in-all, I consider death or permanent brain damage to be worse than temporary extreme pain (I don't even remember moments of doubt when I had a kidney stone.)
I suppose mostly I was going off on a tangent, though... people are pretty much irrational. Lots of people are scared of living near a nuclear power plant, yet don't wear seatbelts or motorcycle helmets, for example, which, from a risk assessment standpoint, is just silly. Blue-rings are sufficiently non-aggressive in the wild that I think worrying about them in most cases is silly, as well, although being aware that they might be in nooks and crannys in the region and being careful seems wise.
In a home tank, though, since they're in an enclosed space where maintenance is required sometimes, they can escape if they get the urge, and the owner may have visitors with 8 year olds who are "I saw your octopus and decided to pet/poke it" or something, I weigh the "could cause death" factor as pretty big, even with the "rarely is a problem in practice" part. This doesn't mean I think that people should be prohibited from keeping them, but it does mean that I think they ought to take the responsibility pretty seriously for at least taking precautions to keep others safe (I'm pretty open to people who want to risk getting themselves killed in ways I think are pointless, as long as it's an informed choice, but I'm pretty harsh on people who put other people at risk through their own negligence. Although I tend to think that having trained attack dogs or driving a car with failing brakes poses a higher risk than having a blue-ring, for what that's worth... but in all of those examples, they can be handled responsibly or negligently.)