Cool Story on Venomous FishAnd how the guy who
discovered a whole bunch of ones that were supposedly harmless, got his start.
One moment he was reaching for the telephone, the next he was out cold.
William Leo Smith, then a 20-year-old college student, woke up on the floor of the pet shop where he worked, blinking up at a ring of worried faces and feeling as if he’d been stabbed in the hand.
Actually, he’d been stung by a fuzzy dwarf lionfish — a dead one, no less. Someone had thrown it away, and Mr. Smith did not notice it when he tried to retrieve a telephone that had fallen into the same trash can. A row of spines along the fish’s back, armed with venom, jabbed him.
