Nontoxic Fugu is Boring

[emperor]

[gomichild]

that does take all the fun out of it.....

[Mulboyne]

Emperor's original link has died but the article is still on the net here. And here's another virtually identical article a year later on safe fugu:

Japan Times: Group hopes poison study helps break fugu-liver taboo
Researchers at Nagasaki University claim to have unlocked the long-standing mystery surrounding the origin of the puffer's poison, claiming the livers of cultivated fugu carefully grown outside of their natural environment contain no poison and can be served as a safe delicacy. "We've examined more than 5,000 tora-fugu and none of them had the poison at all," said Tamao Noguchi, a former Nagasaki University professor and key member of the research group. Tora-fugu are considered the best of the edible fugu and are the only kind farmed in Japan...Academically, the origin of tetrodotoxin has long been a mystery. Some scholars argue that the poison is produced by the fugu's body, while others believe it accumulates as the fish eats certain marine creatures.

Noguchi, believing the latter theory, thinks certain bacteria in the sea produce tetrodotoxin, and that the poison goes up the food chain through marine creatures that the fugu eats, such as starfish, shellfish and crabs. To prove his hypothesis, Noguchi started a project in 1981 to dissect and check the liver of cultivated tora-fugu that were raised only with feed proven to be poison-free. These fish were raised in fish preserves on land or in enclosed nets in the sea.

Noguchi has examined the livers of more than 5,000 samples of tora-fugu grown under these conditions, but tetrodotoxin has not been detected in any of them, he said. "We did what we had done in the laboratory (to detect the poison) on a massive commercial scale. But no poison was detected. I believe this has proved our theory," Noguchi said.