Hooked by a Fish : Painful Sting of Lionfish Prompts Suits Against Pet Stores

The way June Kisiel tells it, she fell for the story hook, line and sinker.

She says she believed it when she was told that the sad-faced little fish she was buying for her home aquarium was a finicky eater and a slow-motion swimmer. So finicky and slow, in fact, that it would only eat specially raised minnows fed to it by hand.

As it turned out, the creature with zebra stripes and sunburst-like fins that the Burbank woman proudly added to the tank in her family room was anything but a pussycat.

It was a lionfish. And when Kisiel accidentally dropped its minnow dinner into the aquarium a few months later, it stuck her with a poison-tipped spike growing out of its back.

These days, Kisiel is hoping to stick it to the pet store that sold her the fish. In a lawsuit that goes to trial on Monday, she contends that the Studio City shop never warned her that the lionfish was venomous.

Her 1986 brush with the fish left her hand throbbing and her thumb aching as if someone was pounding on it with a hammer, Kisiel said.

She is not the only one who feels that they have been stung by pet stores selling the exotic tropical fish, which come from the seas surrounding Indonesia.

Rosamond resident Connie Rae Wright is suing a Lancaster pet shop for allegedly failing to warn that a lionfish she bought was dangerous. She contends that it spiked her as she cleaned its tank a few days after she took it home in 1990.

Operators of both Mark’s Pets and Fish in Studio City and Critter Country in Lancaster have denied wrongdoing and vowed to fight the lawsuits. But the two cases are having a ripple effect in aquarium shop circles.

Some fish collectors worry that the flap could signal an attempt to ban lionfish and other venomous fish from California. Others have set their own strict rules for the sale of such animals.

“I get people who buy lionfish to sign releases stating they’ve been warned,” said Jim Wolf, saltwater fish manager for the Aquarium Stock Co. in West Los Angeles. “I started doing it after that first case was filed.”

Wolf said he will not sell lionfish to people under 18. And he does not stock venomous fish whose bites or stings can be lethal--such as stonefish and the blue ring octopus.

Lionfish stings are not fatal. But they hurt.

“The pain was excruciating,” Wright stated in a deposition made with her lawsuit against Critter Country. Her lawyer, Edwin C. Martin Jr., declined to allow her to be interviewed for this story. “I began screaming, yelling, running. I felt a burning pain from the finger up through my arm.”

A friend rushed her to paramedics at a fire station. They hurried her to an emergency room where the prescribed treatment was to soak the wound in hot water. “I screamed all the way to the hospital,” she stated.

Kisiel’s lawsuit against Mark’s Pets and Fish described her sting this way:

“I immediately felt intense pain in my right hand. The pain was indescribable. It was as though one was taking a hammer and slamming at full strength the hammer upon my right thumb. It was excruciating. Then, the pain worsened. It was too terrible to think about.”

Days later, Kisiel remembers feeling nauseated and blurry-eyed. She said she eventually lost feeling in her right fingertips and felt “shooting pains in my right arm and hand.”

Others who have had close encounters of the worst kind with lionfish agree that it is something one does not soon soon forget.

“There’s nothing like firsthand, aching-hand experience. It’s terribly, terribly painful,” said sting victim John McCosker, head of the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco. “A very hot pain goes into the hand and into the joints. It was nature’s way of telling me I was stupid.”

McCosker’s aquarium receives three or four inquiries a year asking how to treat accidental lionfish stings. “They’re a very popular aquarium fish. But I can’t imagine someone not being aware of the fact they’re venomous. You look at one of those fish displaying those spines. It would be like staring at a king cobra and not knowing he was trying to tell you something.”

Frances Weindler, a supervisor at the Poison Center at County-USC Hospital in Los Angeles, said her organization frequently gets calls from hospitals about such stings.

Although later statistics are unavailable, figures for 1989 indicate that the Poison Center was consulted 49 times for lionfish or similar scorpion fish stings. Thirty-three calls were logged the first nine months of last year.

Kisiel’s lawyer, Robert Sainburg, said the stage was set for Monday’s jury trial in Glendale when pet shop owner Mark Weitz rejected a $75,000 settlement recommended in an attempt at arbitration.

Sainburg said the case will boil down to “whether the jury believes my client when she says: ‘Do you believe I’d buy a poisonous fish with children feeding it when it had to be hand-fed?’ ”

Weitz said his lawyer will not let him talk about the case before the trial starts. However, he stressed:

“Our store policy has always been to have ‘venomous’ signs up on tanks with venomous fish. That’s been the policy since 1981, and it hasn’t changed,”

Candy Hauptman, co-owner of Critter Country in Lancaster, said her attorney has given her similar orders about Wright’s case, which has not yet been scheduled for trial.

Other aquarium owners said they are watching both cases closely because of suggestions that new regulations are needed for lionfish and other venomous sea life.

As of now, such creatures are legal to own, said Paul Gregory, a marine biologist with the state’s Department of Fish and Game.

“That’s because they would not live in the wild if they were to get loose,” Gregory said, explaining that his agency’s primary job is to protect the state’s natural resources. Anyway, he said, “people rarely handle fish. For the health of the fish you don’t want to handle it,”

San Francisco’s McCosker agreed that the lionfish threat is small.

“They shouldn’t be banned,” he said. “I don’t think the risk is that great. They are not life-threatening, and they are well-known in the hobby.

“It takes so much knowledge to keep them alive in an aquarium. I can’t imagine someone not knowing they are venomous, too. It’s not like buying a goldfish and putting it in a bowl.”

But lawyer Sainburg said fish-tank labeling laws are needed if import laws remain unchanged.

“I think the warnings have to be different. There has to be some sort of written signature by the customer,” he said.

“It would emphasize the importance of knowing you have a poisonous fish.”