One time i had a dream where i was picking mushrooms underwater, and ever since then I've wondered if perhaps there could be entheogens that are underwater... 90 percent of the livable space on the earth is underwater anyways...


is it too far fetched to believe that there could be such a thing existing out there?

Now that is some nice proposal. People are indeed focused on land plants, even though we have some indications that marine environment can be rich in psychedelics. As a matter of fact, we may be missing a whole world of amazing substances.

There is a condition called Ichthyoallyeinotoxism. Allegedly it is caused by eating some species of fish, and it includes visual and auditory hallucinations (similar to LSD?). The same article purports that a likely source of the hallucinogens in those fish might be coming from their diet, which is, algae.

Now that can bring forward some interesting concepts; growing algae is very easy and the hallucinogen might be powerful enough to be active in small quantities.

^^For sure there could be psychedelic compounds in the oceans. There is now a large effort in natural products chemistry to find new drugs from the oceans. However most of the screening efforts are not directed in seeking out psychedelics components but more for cancer drugs etc.

True. But people who screen the underwater flora must be using some high-throughput analytical tools, e.g. chromatography coupled to MS. And as long as the whole metabolome is screened, one should put all these data in some database.

This is very common in high-throughput approaches, some group screens a plant or similar, then publishes the few (out of thousand) results that are more "interesting" to them and the majority of the scientific community. But the rest data are obscured, even though they are deposited in databases. Plenty of those databases are open and easily accessible to the academics as well as the general public.

Are any of the more chemically inclined minds in this forum aware of any good databases of this kind?

The group SWIM works with is involved in such things as making databases of plant compounds. Its tough to get a good database out there though because so many different labs use different equipment or methods.

Screening an entire metabolome with LC-MS also does not always give the necessary structural information to know the structure of the compound especially if its never been seen before, also compounds that are not ionizable are not seen. The only technique that truly sees all (except things that below to limit of detection) is NMR. The NMR spectra of crude mixtures is very difficult to interpret but it is possible and statistical and data processing methods are available to do this. Fun stuff!

The ideal situation and there are some labs doing this kinda thing (but its $$) is to have an LC system first go into an NMR and then after each fraction or peak has been analyzed by the NMR then send it out to the MS. Thats serious shit though with tons of data.

But again building a database that everyone can get nice information from is sometimes tough. I can ask some collegues if they know of any however. I personally don't use them.

I had a dream I was swimming under the sea and below me grew Astrophytum and Lophophora like starfish or coral.

I've thought about this before too, there must be some entheogens in all that water, it's mindblowing to imagine a new psychedelic becoming popular, like LSD in the 60s. That'd be so awesome.

I think i read somewere that thats what inspired blue oyster cult to name themselves just that, after a tribe of psychedelic oyster eaters. could be myth though

Got anymore info on that fractal?

Wow its a surprise how hard it is so find databases open to the public on these things. I have a mass spectral data base with 190,000 compounds but it was very expensive (although the company gave for free for some work) and copyrighted and couldn't even share it if I wanted too. If your into MS its called the NIST library you may have heard of it. NMR spectral databses are almost non existent for free on the web.

I once downloaded a list of psychedelic animals (maybe off Erowid I think?)... a hell of a lot of them are fish. I remember goatfish being one, because I'd been swimming with them many times and thought "dammit, if only I'd known!".

I'm guessing that people know about all these fish because they've been caught historically and eaten and made people trip. Obviously we don't know so much about the other stuff down there because it's less easily attainable... so I'd guess there's a lot of trippiness down there that we don't know about, exciting!

They can schedule all they want, the psychonauts have scuba gear now!

read this...

http://olm.blythe-system...Mon-20060410/035764.html

Taken from TIHKAL:

Interesting article. How the hell do you pronounce that name?

I would love to find a vegetarian ocean enthogen. I have a very deep connection with the sea so I would love to find an ocean enthogen
Ive thought about this option countless of times but i haven't found any yet.

Much Peace

So you need to hunt down whatever algae they're eating!

How can they asses whether or not an effect is similar to lsd or any hallucinogen as animals especially fish are very difficult to determine whether or not they are hallucinating?

Regardless algae and cyanobacteria contain a wealth of interesting compounds, some are serious neurotoxins however.

It's just an article with laymen as their audience, rather than psychonauts, I guess they're just using acid as an example because everyone understands the concept of what 'acid' is even if they haven't ever tried it. Whoever wrote it hs probably never touched anything of the sort.
I wonder if there's been any credible scientific research into underwater entheogens? Maybe one day we'll all have our own fishtanks next to the cactuses and mushrooms!

Well there is certainly credible scientific research into useful compounds from the ocean. However right now no one is looking for psychedelic drugs from the ocean but rather looking for cures for cancer and things like that.

I'd like to add that I read about a fish a long time ago, which when eaten live produces somekind of hallucinogenic compound. The information on it is pretty scant, but IIRC It was called 'Dream fish'. Im not sure if it lives in saltwater or freshwater though...