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- [00:00]
A
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Today'S episode once again discusses the deaths of individuals. If this sort of thing upsets you, may I suggest you read a book. Maybe something like Cannery Row. Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with your host Dr. Kendall crowns. Today's episode Foraging Misadventures When I was driving to work the other day, I heard a story on the radio. It was about individuals in Arizona that were reportedly licking toads. Evidently, recent unseasonal monsoonal rains in Arizona had caused an increase in the appearance of this particular toad. The toads had come out of their ground habitats to breed in the puddling water. People believed that if they catched these toads and licked them, they would get high. When I heard this, it reminded me of a couple of my high school friends from years ago. They were really into drugs and they were really into hallucinogenic drugs and often talked about finding new ones. And somehow they had heard a story about toads that if you licked them you could have a crazy hallucinogenic experience where they found this information out about these magical toads. I still don't know to this day, but I know they went on a hunt to find one of them in the wilds of Kansas and they were definitely armed with bad information because they caught a couple of the toads and attempted to lick them and ended up throwing up for about 24 hours. They showed my other friends and I the toads that they had caught. They were large, light yellow toads with dark green spots that were outlined by a lighter color. They had a large lump between their eyes and numerous warts on their body. Comparing them to pictures in a book, it appears they had caught a Great Plains toad, which is very common in Kansas and not known to secrete hallucinogens. It is instead known for secreting a toxic substance known as bufotoxin. And they were lucky that all they did was get nausea and vomiting because if this toxin is in high enough levels, it can actually make you go into heart failure. I had forgotten about this until I heard this radio show all these years later, and I thought, are these indeed the magical toads my friends were looking for? After a little research, I found out they just might be. The mythical toad from my high school friend's quest is known as the Sonera desert toad or Colorado river toad. It is a large, olive green to brownish gray toad with relatively smooth skin and prominent parotid glands behind each eye and some large warts on its hind legs. It can be found in Colorado, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, but definitely not Kansas. So my friends had been doomed to failure from the start. This toad is special because it secretes a toxin from its parotid gland known as 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine, which is a neurotoxin, and actually, in humans, a powerful hallucinogenic which can cause audio and visual distortions, alter your perception of time, as well as amplifying emotional states and feeling of awareness. It can even make you feel like you've been reborn. The effects can last for an hour and leave the user with an altered mood and perception. And so, really, can you go on a magic carpet ride by catching one of these toes and having a good lick? I had to find out the answer to this question, and the answer is possibly, but not by directly licking them. In fact, what most people do is extract the 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine and make it into a paste and smoke it or do other things with it, but not lick the toad. The problem with licking the toad is the substances they are releasing are when they are captured by a predator, picked up in a dog's mouth or something like that. And they release these substances as a fear response, and they don't regulate how much they release. And so you never know how much you're going to get when you attempt to lick one. And if you get too much of the toxin, it can actually cause you to have a seizure, go into a coma, and even die suddenly. Plus, they secrete other toxins as well, which are cardiac glycosides, which can cause gastrointestinal issues like nausea and vomiting and diarrhea. And they can also be cardiotoxic, which means it results in poisoning of your heart. And these toxins can cause your heart to slow down, cause irregular heart rates or dysrhythmias, which can result in sudden death. From an article I read, it stated toad poisoning comes with a high mortality rate. So if you're into licking toads, it's a risky endeavor that can result in death and I wouldn't recommend it. Often when people experience nature, they take in the beauty. They see the sights, they smell the smells, they take scenic pictures. They don't seek out peril or things that can result in disastrous consequences. But some people, often males, actively seek these things out. And more often than not, their actions result in a free trip to the morgue. And also we will be playing a double header of everybody's favorite true crime game show. Is it alcohol, meth or women? So get your Scantron answer sheets out, sharpen your number two pencils and have your answers ready at the end of each case. So let's get started. The first case we'll be discussing is a 20 year old male. He loved to go hiking in the forest and experiencing nature firsthand. And on his latest hike, he saw what he thought were magic mushrooms. He went to the library, looked them up, studied pictures and flipped through many books on mushrooms. And it was certain he he was right. He told his friends he had discovered magic mushrooms and he was certain of it because he had seen pictures in the library and he said he was going to go back out there and harvest them and asked if they wanted to come along, to which they all said no. And he said, well, okay. He would bring them back to share with them and they would all have a great party. The problem is, though, a lot of mushrooms can look alike. Mushrooms are the member of the kingdom fungi, which is one of the largest, most diverse groups of organisms, second only to insects. It has been estimated that there are more than 10,000 species of mushrooms found in the United States and the area he was living in. In the state of Illinois, there are at least 2,000 species that can occur, and some of them are edible and some of them are deadly. And those deadly ones are fairly similar in appearance to the safe ones. A mistake can have horrible consequences. When he went out, he ended up finding his quarry. They were growing in abundance in the wet Illinois woodlands, popping up on the rotting wood of fallen trees. He picked dozens of mushrooms and brought them home. He then dried them out over the next few weeks, excited about the possibilities of what was going to happen. And he told his friends he was going to make a killer psychedelic tea. And all his friends could come over and drink his tea and have a crazy wild party. When he felt the mushrooms were sufficiently dry, he ground them up, put them in boiling water and made them into a tea. He called his friends and invited them over to partake in his concoction. But no one wanted to. And he responded to them with, well, I guess that's more for me. And he drank his magic elixir. And he was disappointed because nothing happened. Everything was just normal. He didn't hallucinate or anything. After several hours, though, something did occur. He began vomiting and then he began having explosive diarrhea. This was not the experience he was hoping for. And this continued for about a day or so. And after it ended, he called one of his friends and told them how sick he had been. And they told him, do you think it was the mushrooms? And he said it's a possibility that maybe he had gotten the wrong type of mushrooms and he wasn't going to try them again. His friend told him maybe he should go to the hospital and get checked out. And he said, no, he was doing better now and he was okay, so he didn't need to go to the doctors. A day or two later, he didn't show up to his job and one of his friends went to check on him. They had a key to his apartment, and when they entered, they found him on his bed. He. He was still alive but unresponsive, and his skin was bright yellow. The friend called emergency medical services. They responded and took him to the hospital where he was found to be in liver and renal failure. He was admitted to an icu, put on a ventilator, and slowly progressed to multiorgan failure and eventually died. After several days at autopsy, he had marked jaundice and scleral icterus, which means his skin was highlighter yellow as well as the whites of his eyes. And this is evidence of liver failure. Internally there was pulmonary congestion and edema, which is fluid on his lungs. His liver was softened and necrotic with areas of hemorrhage. So basically the tissue was dead. And there were small pinpoint penticular hemorrhages along his kidneys and on the mucosa of his stomach. He died from multi organ failure, it was obvious. And the reason his organs went into failure was most likely due to the mushroom concoction that he had drank. So the question became, what mushrooms were they? We sent the death investigators back out to the apartment to see if they could find the mushrooms that he had consumed. They did find them in the trash. The decedent had gone out in the woods to find a particular mushroom known as a Liberty Bell or Liberty cap. And these are the magic mushrooms that everybody knows. They are little brown mushrooms with a distinctive conical or bell shaped cap that contain the psychoactive compounds psilocybin. Psilocin and bayocysteine. And these compounds can cause visual distortions, mood elevations and auditory hallucinations. After being dried, magic mushrooms can be consumed. They can be cooked up, put in food, crushed into seasonings and of course, made into a tea. But he didn't find those mushrooms. What he found wasn't liberty bells, but instead mushrooms with the scientific name of Galerina marginata, which has the ominous name of funeral bell mushrooms. These are relatively small, rusty brown mushrooms that can have caps that are broadly convex to flat to slightly bell shaped, which makes them easily mistaken for liberty bells. Funeral bells do not contain psilocybin, but instead contain the most potent mushroom toxin known, which is called amatoxin. Amatoxin poisons the body by causing damage to liver cells, resulting in cellular necrosis, which then results in acute liver dysfunction and liver failure. Amatoxin is responsible for 90% of mushroom poisonings worldwide. It's thermostable, which means cooking it won't destroy it, nor does freezing. A single mushroom can contain up to 15 milligrams of the toxin, and 0.1 milligrams kg can be fatal to humans. For perspective, a 180 pound individual is roughly 82 kilograms, and that means 8.2 milligrams would be fatal, which is a little over half a mushroom. After the identity of the mushrooms was confirmed, the cause of death was determined to be amatoxin toxicity and the manner of death was determined to be accident. Case closed. So pull out your answer sheets and mark down your answers. Was it alcohol, meth or women? The answer to this case is it was women. He was trying to impress some of the women at work with his forestry knowledge and his fancy psychedelic concoctions. But he had picked the wrong mushrooms and thankfully the women he was trying to impress didn't come over. So he didn't get multiple deaths. The rest of his drug screen was negative. No alcohol, no methamphetamine even, no marijuana. It was just his poor foraging skills that resulted in his death.
- [13:23]
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- [13:51]
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This case was a 28 year old male who was swimming in a lake with his Friends. His friends witnessed him to start struggling to stay afloat and he went underwater and didn't resurface. His friends panicked. They began swimming and looking for him and they eventually found him. After several minutes deep underwater. They pulled him ashore and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation and called 911. Emergency medical services arrived and took the CPR over and he was eventually airlifted to a hospital. They had gotten return of spontaneous circulation. So his heart was beating and a CT of his head was done. But it showed he had hypoxic ischemic injury, which means his brain had not gotten enough oxygen and was basically dead. A CT of his chest and abdomen showed extensive changes of his lungs consistent with drowning. And also foreign bodies in his mouth, the bronchi of the right lobe of his lung and in his stomach. He was placed on a ventilator and admitted to the icu where he continued to decline and eventually was pronounced dead. I performed his autopsy and he was a well developed, well nourished male appearing the reported age. He had swelling of his brain or cerebral edema and fluid on his lungs or pulmonary edema. All these findings are consistent with drowning. When I opened up his stomach, it contained numerous intact and crushed shells. I cleaned them up and looked at them more closely and they were zebra mussel shells and I instantly knew what they were. The shells were also located in his esophagus and bits and pieces of the crushed up shells were embedded in the roof of his mouth and in his gums and tongue. Evidently while he was out with his friends, he had decided to consume zebra mussels raw and chew them and crunch their shells. We had the death investigators do follow up questioning and when they questioned his friends that were at the scene, no one claimed to have seen him eat anything, but it was obvious he had done this intentionally. But why? Law enforcement came up with a theory that the zebra mussels could have gotten into his mouth and stomach after he died. But the thing about it is, he didn't die initially. He was unresponsive. And also he wasn't underwater long enough for the zebra muscles to even gotten on his body or moved in because they don't move that fast. And there had been no passive flow of water into his airway. And because they were crushed up, he obviously had chewed them. And again, the question is why? Before we go further, let's talk about zebra mussels because they did play a role in the decedent's death. Zebra mussels are fingernail Sized mollusks that are native to the freshwaters in Eurasia. Their name comes from their dark zigzagging stripes on each shell. They have a distinctive flat bottom shape to their shells as well that allows them to sit flat against solid surfaces. They are not native to North America and evidently arrived here in 1986 in the ballast of transatlantic ships delivering goods to the US and when the ships entered into port, they would dump the ballast tanks and the larvae got free and took hold in the Great Lakes. And after this, they spread throughout the US and appear in lakes and streams almost everywhere. And they accomplished this by adhering to boats that were in contaminated waterways, that were then taken to uncontaminated waterways, releasing the mollus into a new territory. The United States Geologic Survey, a scientific bureau with the Department of Interior, says they do not recommend that zebra mussels be eaten by people, but fish and ducks eat them and don't die, so they aren't necessarily harmful. But zebra mussels are so small that you would have to eat a lot of them to be able to become full. And you'd have to be pretty hungry to want to eat them. Zebra mussels reproduce rapidly and quickly, take over waterways in which they invade. They're filter feeders and can filter up to a liter of water an hour, and there'll be thousands of them filtering the water. And this changes the ecosystem of the waterway that they are in and promotes the growth of a lot of different things, particularly harmful organisms. In this particular lake the individual was swimming in when he died, the zebra mussels had promoted the growth of cyanobacteria, also known as blue green algae. At that time of the year, there had been several large blooms of blue green algae, especially in this lake. There were warnings put out because several dogs, in particular Labradors, had been playing in the lake and had died from their exposure to the algae. Cyanobacteria are the most toxic algae group. In freshwater lakes, rivers and ponds. Their blooms can look like iridescent slicks or mats of blue green algae in the water. They can produce toxins known as cyanotoxins that can cause illness. Common cyanotoxins include microcystins, anatoxins, saxitoxins, and nodularins. These toxins can cause effects in the human body that range from neurologic problems, liver failure, and irritation of the skin. And when the toxins get high enough in the water, it can pose severe health problems for people as well as birds and animals. In birds, it can result in avian Vacular myelinopathy. This disease causes birds to crash into objects, lose coordination, fall from the sky, and exhibit tremors. One interesting fact is a similar neurotoxin called domic acid, produced by the diatom of the genus Pseudonytschia, caused something similar to avian vacular myelinopathy in birds in Monterey bay, California, in 1961. It caused the birds to crash into cars and houses and other things, as well as fall from the sky, seizing when they were on the ground. This incident was widely publicized, and it became the partial inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock to write his avian fueled horror movie, the Birds. Cyanotoxins also claim canine victims due to their propensity to not care what water they drink and their love of swimming. The dogs drink the contaminated water or lick their skin covered with the itchy algae, and then die from seizures related to the neurotoxins. Humans can get exposed as well by swallowing the contaminated water while swimming or eating contaminated fish or mussels. And you can absorb it through direct contact with skin. Symptoms in humans can vary depending on what particular cyanotoxin was at the highest level and when the individual gets exposed to it. With this case, there was no real reason why he suddenly started struggling in the water. So it was made pending because he ate the zebra mussels, and it was so unusual. I really thought he was going to have methamphetamine in his blood. I had to send out his gastric contents to an outside lab to get special tests for the cyanotoxins. And we waited. After a few weeks, his toxicology finally came back, and he was found to have several cyanotoxins, specifically microcystins, anatoxins and saxitoxins. And these toxins were associated with him consuming the zebra mussels. The levels that were found in his gastric contents were not high enough to have a lethal exposure, but they could have been enough to cause him to become compromised in the water, resulting in him starting to struggle to stay afloat and eventually going underneath the water and drowning. So his cause of death was made drowning with a significant contributing factor of cyanotoxin toxicity. And the manner of death was made accident due to the fact that he was probably not forced to eat the mussels. And this was probably something he did on his own. So case closed. And once again, pull out your answer sheets. And what was your answer? Was it alcohol, meth, or women? And the answer is, and once again, it was women. Other than the cyanotoxins found in his system. He showed no drugs or alcohol in his toxicology. He ate the zebra mussels completely sober and the assumption can be made the swim group he was swimming with also had several women in it and he was probably trying to impress them with his ability to eat something disgusting. As an aside, one of the guys I knew in high school, one of the toad lickers, he liked to vomit to impress girls. He one time drank an entire 2 liter bottle of strawberry pop and yes, I say pop, not soda or coke and vomited in front of a group of girls at a mall late on a Friday night. I can still see him wearing his AC DC Fly on the wall T shirt with the sleeves cut off, Ben puking up bright pink fluid that splattered all over the white and brown tile of the mall floor. I can also remember the horrified expressions on the girls faces before they quickly ran off screaming and saying how disgusting we were. As far as I know, this tactic never worked for him and after high school I lost track of him. I hope wherever he is, that he's found someone that understands him and accepts his crazy hijinks and I hope he's happy. And that brings us to the end of the episode. I hope you learned something like all mushrooms are edible, some only once, and I hope you were entertained until the next time.