NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Invasion of the
toxic pufferfish
Chris Baraniuk
AN INVASIVE pufferfish is causing
havoc for Mediterranean fishers,
and the toxin it carries is turning
up in native shellfish.
The silver-cheeked toadfish
(Lagocephalus sceleratus,
pictured) is native to the Pacific
and Indian Oceans. It has thrived
in the Mediterranean since
arriving this century, apparently
via the Suez Canal.
It is a pufferfish, the group
eaten as the delicacy fugu in
OREN KLEIN
The murky
world of the
bitcoin scam
BITCOIN buyers beware. As well
as holding their nerve as the
cryptocurrency’s value rockets and
plummets, potential investors have
to be wary of hacks, Ponzi schemes
and confidence tricks.
Marie Vasek at the University
of New Mexico, and Tyler Moore at
the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma,
scoured reports on the cryptocurrency
12 | NewScientist | 13 January 2018
Japan. Some of its organs contain
tetrodotoxin, a lethal poison.
But so far its toxicity isn’t the
main problem. Instead, the fish
bite through fishing nets that cost
thousands of pounds to get at the
catch inside.
“We showed the fishermen
photos of fish and we asked which
one do you come across, and they
identified [the pufferfish],” says
Vahdet Ünal at Ege University
in Turkey. “Then we asked how
much damage this species causes
to their fishing gear.”
message board site bitcointalk.org
and found that between June 2011
and November 2016 there was a new
scam nearly once a day: 1780 in total.
These varied from confidence tricks
to double-your-stakes gambling to
Ponzi schemes. Half the schemes
Vasek and Moore detected lasted a
week, and a quarter lasted less than a
day. However, one ran for three years
before finally being shut down.
A typical scheme might start with
a post prompting users to invest their
bitcoins into a plan that will pay back
120 per cent of their initial investment
after 48 hours. Every person they
Ünal has repeatedly surveyed
hundreds of Turkish fishers. From
2011 to 2013, the losses reported
by small-scale fisheries more than
doubled, from about €2 million to
€5 million. His latest unpublished
data offers no respite. “The
problem is increasing,” he says.
The EU’s BlueBRIDGE project
is investigating how far the fish
will spread. Its unpublished
results suggest the population
will rise further before levelling
out. However, the species could
establish itself in the western
Black Sea: a key fishing area
troubled by rising pollution.
However, “it will not expand
completely in the Black Sea
because it seems to prefer quite
hot waters,” says team member
Gianpaolo Coro at the Alessandro
refer to the scheme will increase
their returns by 10 per cent.
Participants are sent to a website
where they are instructed to deposit
their bitcoins into an account; once
they do so, they lose control of their
investment.
Not all schemes make money for
the perpetrators, but some make
thousands or millions. “For the ones
that we could find data on, we found
“Half the schemes they
saw lasted a week, but
one ran for three years
before being shut down”
Faedo Institute of Information
Science and Technology in Italy.
Toxicity could become a
problem. Tetrodotoxin is turning
up in Mediterranean species such
as shellfish, as are the bacteria
thought to make it for the
pufferfish, says Chris Elliott at
Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
“We’re pretty sure that pufferfish
are the carrier,” he says, but this
hasn’t been conclusively shown.
The toxin is spreading. A 2015
survey of UK waters recorded it in
molluscs. A follow-up published
in 2017 found it was widespread
in UK waters, including in edible
species like mussels (Marine
Drugs, doi.org/chnb).
“[Tetrodotoxin] is there in low
amounts, it wouldn’t make people
ill,” says Elliott. “But we would say
in about one, two or three years,
this will be very serious and there
could be fatalities.”
There are few options for
removing the pufferfish, says
Bella Galil at Tel Aviv University in
Israel. “We are always closing the
door after the horse has bolted.”
However, the trick could be
finding a use for tetrodotoxin. It
may be useful for pain relief, for
example during chemotherapy.
“If you can find a way to extract
[the toxin], that would create a
market for the fish and there
would be more removals of it,”
says Demetris Kletou at Marine
and Environment Research Lab
in Cyprus. ■
an average of $250,000 per scam, but
that’s a biased sample,” says Vasek.
Schemes involving bitcoin are
trackable because every transaction
is recorded on a digital ledger called a
blockchain, but they are not traceable
to a named individual.
As more people look to
cryptocurrencies as get rich schemes
there will be more people susceptible
to scams, says Vasek. Her advice?
“If you’re going to put money into
bitcoin services, use the same
knowledge and scepticism you’d
use when investing in anything in the
real world.” Chris Stokel-Walker ■