Mark Siddall – October 11, 2020
While filming Yellowbeard on location in Mexico, on December 2, 1982, Marty Feldman was discovered dead in his hotel room at age 48.
Feldman was a comedy writer genius who burst on the British television scene with his bulging, misaligned eyes in “At Last the 1948 Show” with Graham Chapman and John Cleese a few years before the advent of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One of the originals in The Four Yorkshiremen sketch, Feldman is probably best known for his role as Igor (“eye-gore”) in Young Frankenstein.
The hilarious Group Madness: The Making of Yellowbeard by Michael Mileham is much funnier than the Mel Brooks flop it covers from behind the scenes.
In any case, the day before his heart attack, Feldman and Mileham partook of the same spiny lobster lunch on an island they swam to from the old fishing village of Zihuatanejo. The following day, with Feldman having suffered a heart attack, Mileham complained of seafood poisoning suggesting that they had both been poisoned by the same lobster.
There is a variety of forms of shellfish poisoning, all of which are related to Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). The algae responsible are not kelp or seaweed but rather tiny single-celled protists like dinoflagellates and diatoms, and more specifically the toxins they produce.
Filter feeding invertebrates like mussels clams and oysters feed on these photosynthetic protozoons concentrating their poisons all the while. Small amounts early in the warm months cause milder symptoms than the heavy doses an oyster slurper like me could ingest in the midst of a red-tide.
Not every bivalve in a bushel likely to be equally pernicious. I was the only one laid low by a quahog in my future postdoctoral advisor’s stew in 1993. Outbreaks happen periodically but more often there are clusters of cases in which only a few people seek treatment.
In October, 2006 it was a brevetoxin-tainted po-boy and my recollections of the symptoms of neutotoxic-shellfish poisoning (NSP) includs progressive disorientation and confusion… like being really, really drunk, followed by uncontrollable purgations and voiding. It took me a while to figure out that it was the oyster sandwich as the symptoms did not hit me until fully 3 hours after eating it.
The more common paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) caused by saxitoxins typically manifest within a half an hour of exposure. Both NSP and PSP illnesses can persist for days. Mine lasted about 36 hours total. But neither of these could be the cause of Feldman’s heart attack. He was feeling fine more than a day after eating the lobster.
Lobster meat is not likely to be the source of any of marine shellfish poisonings as that’s not where the stuff gets concentrated. Lobsters and other crustaceans could acquire and bioaccumulate these toxins from the molluscs that they like to eat, but the poisons would end up in the green fatty hepatopancreas. Which is to say that either diarrheic shellfish poisoning (DSP) or amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP) could have resulted from tucking into a tomalley tamale.
No one has ever died from the effects of okadaic acid that causes DSP. The same cannot be said for domoic acid; four of 107 known cases of human amnesic shellfish poisoning have been fatal. The toll taken on wildlife is much worse. Domoic acid wasn’t even known to be a problem until the first human outbreak in 1987, confusingly in land-locked Alberta where scores fell victim to P.E.I. blue mussels; three of whom died.
The most common manifestation is short-term memory loss anywhere from 5 hours to a day after exposure. Domoic acid is now known to be responsible for some dolphin strandings, manatee deaths, and in particular, waves of expired pelicans and sealions along the California coast in 1991, 1998 and 2007.
It’s quite possible that harmful algal blooms are increasing as a result of phosphate run-off from coastal farming practices or from significantly warmer ocean surface temperatures. But it’s also clear that domoic acid producing diatom species of Pseudo-nitzschia have been around for longer than just a few decades.
Residents of Capitola California woke one summer morning to the sound of sooty shearwaters smashing through living room windows, shrieking and attacking people on the streets. It was 1961, and Alfred Hitchcock was vacationing in nearby Santa Cruz. His masterpiece of nature gone mad “The Birds” was out in theaters two years later.
Poignantly, about a week before Marty Feldman passed away he told a reporter that he felt “too old to die young, and too young to grow up.” Did a domoic acid laced lobster fell Feldman? Possibly, but I doubt it. I’m guessing it was the six-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
Mark Siddall curated the award winning “Power of Poison” exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History (reviewed in the New York Times) and is author of “Poison: Sinister Species with Deadly Consequences”.