Healthy Manatees: A Case Study

In 1996, over 150 Florida manatee, Trichechus manatus latirostris, died from the exposure of brevetoxins in their habitat. In 2013, about 300 manatee mortalities associated with brevetoxins were found in the Gulf of Mexico. Brevetoxins are found to have multiple effects on manatee immune systems. According to the experimental results, scientists found significantly (p0.05) reduced T-lymphocyte proliferation, a process responds to stressed immune system, increased albumin levels, an indicator of rising inflammation, and raised superoxide dismutase levels, an enzyme responds to increased oxidative stress in rescued manatees that have been exposed to sub-lethal levels of brevetoxins compare to healthy manatees (Walsh et al., 2015).In another study,

As mentioned before, brevetoxins can cause human respiratory and digestive illness, and consumption of brevetoxin-contaminated fish and mollusks is associated with neurotoxic shellfish poisoning (NSP). According to the data, people in Sarasota, Florida visited the hospital emergency department for digestive illnesses during red tide outbreaks increased by 40% in 2001 relative to in 2002 when there was no red tide bloom (Hoagland, et al., 2014). In addition, multiple substantial effects of brevetoxin immunotonicity are postulated by scientists, such as the inhibition of cathepsin active sites, apoptosis, the release of inflammatory mediators, cell cycle, and oxidative stress. Several effects listed before can have profound problems on human health such as apoptosis, cell cycle and oxidative stress can lead to cancer. The experimental results suggest that the apoptosis postulation is based on the in vitro assay that DNA damage was observed in human lymphocytes treated with brevetoxins and several apoptotic gene expressions were altered in brevetoxin exposed Jurkat cells. The oxidative stress will result in the depletion of glutathione in U-937 human monocyte cell line treated with PbTx-2. Also, DNA strands breakage and chromosome aberrations were observed under oxidative stress (Fleming et al.,