Accidents caused by the sting of Trachinus vipera (known as Lesser weever fish) are relatively common in shallow waters of the Mediterranean. Symptoms after the sting vary from severe pain to edema or even tissue necrosis in some cases. Here we show that purified Lesser weever fish venom induces eryptosis, the suicidal erythrocyte death, and apoptosis of human colon carcinoma cells. The venom l...

BACKGROUND Bites by poisonous European snakes of the genus Vipera lead to local tissue damage and systemic symptoms such as generalized oedema, hypotension, gastrointestinal symptoms, haemolysis and renal dysfunction. Not rarely anaphylactic symptoms like urticaria, localized angioedema and asthma are observed. OBJECTIVE To look for snake venom-specific immunoglobulin (Ig) E antibodies in pat...

Nucleotide sequences of mitochondrial cytochrome b and 16S rRNA genes, totaling 946 bp, were used to reconstruct a molecular phylogeny of 42 species of the subfamily Viperinae representing 12 of the 13 recognized genera. Maximum-parsimony and maximum-likelihood were used as methods for phylogeny reconstruction with and without a posteriori weighting. When representatives of the Causinae were ta...

Epidemiological and clinical aspects of snakebites in Hungary between 1970 and 2006 were surveyed. A total of 97 cases were recorded from 21 species, including the two native vipers, Vipera berus and Vipera ursinii, and various exotic species represented by Viperidae, Elapidae, and Colubridae. Bites by native species on laymen are uncommon (17 cases) and present trivial clinical manifestations....

The fate of released bycatch is an issue of great interest for fisheries research and management. Survival experiments were carried out to assess the survival capacity of animals damaged and discarded during clam dredging operations. Three common bycatch species, two fish (Trachinus vipera; Dicologlossa cuneata) and one crab (Polybius henslowii), were collected during the sorting of catches fro...