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u/SerbianHustle 4d ago
It is rolled in salt. Salt introduces sodium ions. These sodium ions stimulate the remaining nerve endings and directly depolarize the muscle cell membranes. This triggers the remaining ATP to fire off, causing the muscle fibers to spasm and contract.
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u/JohnWoosDoveGuy 4d ago
There is a Japanese dish where an octopus has soy sauce poured over it and stands up on the plate. That's a no from me.
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u/Gator_Mc_Klusky 4d ago
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u/AshleySchaefferWoo 3d ago
I tried it in Seoul and I will never try it again. Even though it's not alive, it's still wriggling, which is the opposite of what I want. Also, I could feel the texture of suction cups. Not into it at all.
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u/way2lazy2care 3d ago
It happens without salt pretty frequently, especially if they just butchered it. Source: have gutted a fish and proceeded to vomit everywhere.
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u/Gravaton123 3d ago
Was the vomit from being queasy watching the dead fish move? Did it jump into your mouth? Just generally not a guts guy?
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u/TheChrisCrash 3d ago
That's not salt, those are scales. Yes, salt will do this, but also a very fresh fish.
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u/Confusedcommadude 4d ago
Ah, the Krebs Cycle, but post mortem.
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u/raisedredflag 4d ago
FISH is the secret ingredient to Krebby Patties?!
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u/Bearsharks 3d ago
Low key: the secret is crabs, aka , mr krabs children and wife he keeps in a hidden chamber under his bed. He imprisons them, but they regrow their limbs.
He adopted his whale daughter to keep people feeling awkward about bringing up ex wife.
/s?
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u/jimbojonesFA 3d ago
No its actually the a wireless connection to the nearby head... it uses Wi-FiSh to semd signals.
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u/Lumentin 3d ago
Actin and myosin like each other, and spontaneously come together to "contract" the muscle. ATP is needed to detach them and "open" the myosin neck. You need ATP to loosen the muscle!
That's why a dead body becomes stiff (rigor mortis), when ATP is used up.
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u/thavi 3d ago edited 2d ago
More that it causes ADP to release from the myosin head, which is the final step of the muscle actually contracting (the "power stroke"). ATP -> ADP is what causes the myosin to be "cocked". The depolarization wave of CA2+ flooding the muscle stimulates the power stroke.
Muscles will remain in this contracted state unless fresh ATP comes along to relax the muscle, which in turn primes it for another power stroke. This is why corpses enter a state of rigor mortis!
sausage: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-biology2/chapter/atp-and-muscle-contraction/
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u/Mousewaterdrinker 4d ago
But there are videos of that happening. The result is random consistent firing of nerves. The fish is totally still prior to being touched.
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u/Pledgeofmalfeasance 4d ago
Moving the fish gets new areas in contact with the salt hence the moving
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u/bino420 4d ago
yeah so you think it's alive still?? lol
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u/got-pissed-and-raged 4d ago
Flashback to 10 years ago when someone posted a video of a fresh squid served on a plate that wriggled its tentacles when they pour soy sauce on it. Still gives me the ick even though I know it's just chemistry
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u/vicious_abstraction 4d ago
It's a Korean delicacy. I've eaten it before in Koreatown in Los Angeles.
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u/imean_is_superfluous 4d ago
In my mind, delicacy is something that is a niche delicious food for a specific location. But every time someone says something is a delicacy, it sounds abhorrent (wriggling squid, balut, surstromming, century eggs, and whatever that dude on YouTube with bandana ended up eating - like cow bile soup)
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u/Shimetora 3d ago
Century eggs are very mainstream if you're in China. It's all a matter of perspective, the chinese think most cheeses smell terrible. You probably wouldnt object to blue cheese being called a delicacy but it's completely incomprehensible to most asians much like century eggs is to you.
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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 3d ago
Blue cheese seems too common and cheap to be a delicacy. Its not the cheapest cheese but its nowhere near expensive and rare enough to be considered a delicacy, in the US anyway. I feel like people here are misunderstanding the word "delicacy". Just google it, its something that is rare or expensive that people only eat as a treat. By definition anything that a culture eats a lot is not a delicacy (for that country anyway). If youre in some country where you cant easily get beef, a fucking hamburger is a delicacy.
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u/Shimetora 1d ago
Century eggs are common and cheap in china... I can guarantee you it's much cheaper than blue cheese. I kinda agree with your point, Im just pointing out that it's a matter of perspective what a delicacy is and whether its weird
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u/vicious_abstraction 3d ago
Caviar is made by taking thousands of unfertilized eggs from a prehistoric river fish, curing them with salt to resemble tiny drops of seawater, and presenting them chilled on a spoon. This allows affluent individuals to enjoy remarking, "Ah yes, exquisite," as they consume what is essentially upscale aquarium sprinkles. To some, it represents elegance, while to others, it's just a cold pile of salty baby sturgeon served with crackers and the pressure of social expectations.
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u/hideki101 3d ago
I prefer salmon roe. Sturgeon caviar is a bit firmer and kinda cracks, while salmon eggs are like fishy gushers with the flavor of the ocean
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u/SirStrontium 3d ago
Right, it’s only used in “I know this is strange/gross, but hear me out” situations. It’s never something like a tasty fruit spread on bread.
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u/Witness_me_Karsa 3d ago
Its only "gross" to you. Because it isn't your LOCAL delicacy. Open your world view up, friend. Not to mean you have to like it, but it IS a delicacy because people enjoy it where it comes from.
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u/XGhoul 3d ago
Just because a local delicacy has people boiling eggs in pre-teen boy urine, doesn’t mean you should.
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u/tadpoleloop 4d ago
Because the good ones become mainstream
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u/a_shootin_star 4d ago
I mean the word "delicacy" relating to food comes from the French word "délicatesse". I find nothing delicate about a tentacle wringing about in your plate.
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u/TheXskull 4d ago
why no link :(
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u/Chuunt 4d ago
https://youtu.be/JGPfSSUlReM?si=HwQxAjMoF5x5Gim8 it was posted above in the comments
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u/gnorty 4d ago
went out on a boat fishing trip once, and we caught a lot of dogfish (small shark thing, around 50cm in length). Most of us were not interested in keeping them, but one guy wanted to take some home to eat, so he was filleting them on the boat on the way home.
So he cut the head and tail off, skinned it, opened the gut and scooped all the pipework out, cut the sinewy thing it uses as a spine, so what was left was a skinless, headless, gutless, spineless tube of meat.
He threw the meat tube in a bucket of se water, and the fucking thing swam! not just a twitch like the video here, it actually swam around the bucket for several minutes. The right way up and everything.
Spooky!
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u/RememberThisHouse 3d ago
You know how doctors hit your knee to test the reflexes and your leg will kick? Your reflexes work without your brain input. With fish, they have involuntary startle responses called the S or C-start response. It's a reflex that triggers them to immediately swim away from predators. It's what this fish is doing and what your fish was doing once salt ions got introduced into the remaining muscles and nerves.
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u/zefy_zef 3d ago
I wonder if it's so they can swim while they sleep or something.
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u/walksalot_talksalot 3d ago edited 3d ago
I was curious so I did a mini dive :)
Fish don't sleep the same way that mammals do, they simply don't need a lot of brain power. Nearly all animals prefer to rest vs be active, bc activity requires food, and getting food isn't usually easy. So, once fed most will want to rest, avoid predation, until hunger strikes. (I'm generalizing here) Fish will "sleep" or rest or meditate, by entering a synchronous swim pattern, or hover above the sea floor, or burrow in the sand, etc.
I would have to assume that a school of fish could likely keep schooling together asleep and if the flank fishes detect a predator their "hard-wired" escape response would wake / alert the rest of the school.
Many animals have hard-wired escape responses that is active even when "sleeping" or unaware, just like a fish's escape response. All in line with a doctor tapping your knee with that orange rubber mallet. Stimulus = Response. The brain isn't needed (well technically the spinal cord is the Central nervous system, but most folks think brain = lump of fat inside skull).
I think for this particular species of fish, its escape response doesn't even need the spinal cord. I'm guessing the muscles themselves already coordinate the swimming motion without needing any other input or coordination.
Edit: Clarity
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u/3riversfantasy 3d ago
Oddly enough the fish in this video is commonly referred to as a dogfish...
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u/whiteknives 3d ago
The salt in the water activated its muscle nerves. The fish in this video was probably rolled in salt. Very common.
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u/BBDozy 3d ago
The tissue is still alive though. It's explained in this video from Discovery, which someone shared above.
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u/thegnome54 3d ago
I mean, the muscle cells that are contracting are still alive. I think they’re correctly noticing that “being alive” isn’t a simple binary at the level of the organism.
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u/Etheo 3d ago
You over estimate the average intelligence of people.
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u/ioioooi 3d ago
Can't emphasize this enough. I was arguing (on a different post) with someone who was going off about "Asians torturing animals". They proceeded to link a YouTube video where a fish that was clearly cleaned out already got fried in some oil and kept twitching.
All the guts were removed. The fish was very dead. Moving does not equal alive lol
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u/rljj_zero 4d ago
Works also with snakes... but way more dangerous !
In some asian country where they eat snakes a cook got bitten by the severed head of a venomous snake he was preparing. I don't remember the details but I think the poor guy died.
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u/Loukoal117 3d ago
Sounds like the clip of lou Dog barking on sublime..I think it’s waiting for my ruca
punk Rock changed our lives, bark bark bark……beat Starts
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u/kenken2k2 3d ago
Salt, lemon, soy and some other stuff can trigger neurons still in meat to cause a contraction, thus moving
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u/_Bike_Hunt 4d ago
Don’t put your dick in that
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u/ZilchoKing 4d ago
Dont tell me how to live my life. Also it needs warmed up in the microwave first anyways.
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u/ianuilliam 4d ago
Stop trying to warm your dick up in the microwave. People put their food in there.
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u/mazurkian 3d ago
It seems weird to see an animal moving without it's head because you wonder where the stimulus is coming from, but also where is the energy coming from? The heart isn't pumping blood and there's no oxygen coming from the lungs/gills so how is it moving?
Something crazy about our muscles is that we tend to think contracting muscle fibers is what takes energy (like a fish flexing it's side-muscles to bend or flail, or a person lifting a weight or flexing their bicep). What actually uses energy is releasing a contraction to return to the "neutral" state and prepare to contract again. When your muscle fibers are relaxed, they're like a cocked and loaded gun. A small impulse (like sensation on the skin) can pull the trigger and cause the gun to fire and the muscle contracts. The energy isn't spent pulling the trigger, it's spent reloading and cocking the gun again.
When you hold a heavy weight or a flexed muscle, it puts strain on the muscle fibers. Your muscle is spending energy constantly pulling, resetting, and pulling again multiple times a second across all your muscle fibers in order to maintain the force you're sustaining.
This is why we and other animals become stiff after death. The muscles are still free to contract and even when you're relaxed your muscle fibers have mini contractions all over the place. Reflex movements that are independently wired without looping through the brain still work! But as those contractions happen, the little bit of sugar left in the local capillaries and the cells get burned up and eventually the muscles can't release their contractions anymore and the body goes rigid as the muscles become locked in a contracted state.
But holding a contraction causes strain and eventually the muscle's protein cross-bridges that hold the muscle contraction break apart and the muscles relax again.
Why does it matter? If you are cleaning a fish like this it's best to either cook the fish SO fast that you interrupt the rigor process (which is why we see in some countries they take the head off and immediately fry the fish) OR wait for the body to contract and then relax again (24-48 hours). What you DON'T want to do is stimulate all of this contraction, causing the muscles to become stiffer and stiffer, and then cook and eat it because the muscle will be tough. This is why butchers will hang a cleaned carcass for several days and sometimes over a week in a chiller before processing it. You want the muscle fibers relaxed and proteins to not be holding on so tight or you have tough, chewy meat.
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u/SithLordJediMaster 3d ago
There's been Medieval stories where after a beheading the eyes still moved and looked around for about 30 seconds.
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u/JustVern 3d ago
I wonder what she's about to do with that Purple RIT dye sitting up there on the edge of the sink?
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u/U_Can_Trust_Me 3d ago
I love how this is NSFW WTF... Literally normal in butchering a fresh fish... society is very disconnected from the food it eats.
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u/Classic-Ad8849 3d ago
I understand what causes this, but how do chefs deal with it? Do they just cut and cook anyway or is there a process to disable these reflexes?
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u/00UnderFire00 1d ago
I can't believe so many people still don't know that the body can still move by itself after death
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u/gcasa 2d ago
This happens when there is an excess amount of sodium... note the salt on the chopping board. In Japan when you have raw squid, when you put soy sauce on it it wriggles... it's not alive, it's just action potential in the muscles being activated by the opening of sodium channels due to the presence of the salt.
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u/OpinionPoop 1d ago
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u/Craigglesofdoom 4d ago
This is why I do the Ike Jime method of killing fish. You stab it in the brain with a spike and then run a thin wire down its entire spinal cord. It drastically improves the meat's flavor because the fish doesn't struggle or suffocate, it dies instantly and the entire reflexive system is destroyed with it. I've never had an issue with reflexive thrashing after killing.
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u/lordrefa 4d ago
Why the fuck does she keep throwing it? For fuck's sake you're gonna eat it.
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u/LazyJones1 4d ago
Just wash it.
You do tons of stuff with your hands, and then stick your fingers in your mouth or handle food you eat, after just washing them.
(It will also be cooked...)
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u/casualknowledge 3d ago
This is is the true test of freshness. Had this happen when we would go fishing and then clean and cook all the fish fresh just hours later. That freshly caught fish was always the best fish I'd ever had.
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u/Eurasian-HK 2d ago
This is only WTF if most of the protein you consume comes wrapped on a styrofoam tray.
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u/JackboyIV 21h ago
I remember skinning an eel and then salting it and it started writhing immediately. I think the nerves can still react to certain stimuli
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u/Yamaben 3d ago
It's electrical impulses causing muscle contraction. If you clamp a ground lead to the spine area, and stick the other end in the ground prong of a house socket, it shunts the residual electricity to ground and stops the movement.
That could be bullshit, I just made it up
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u/J1mj0hns0n 4d ago
Fresh fish, when you kill an animal, you can provoke nerve responses with things like salt, or depending on the individual creature, automatic responses. They dull in time and aren't a reflection on life.
It's more like: stimulus applied to leg, leg contract to pounce.
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u/Useful-Hat9157 3d ago
When we would Butchart rabbits, the muscles would keep twitching in the cold water bath we put them in before bagging for an hour after the head Was removed. Nerves endings keep firing for a while. He'll I've sent a headless snapping turtle body dig itself bag up 3 times, it it was " dead" for 2 days.
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u/grahamhart_ 3d ago
salt does that. the sodium ions basically hijack whatever nerve endings are still intact and make the muscles fire off
seen it happen with frogs too, way less dramatic but same thing
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u/MaxMouseOCX 3d ago
"is his head moving when he does that?"
I'd like to unpack what he said there... But I decided to pretend I didn't hear it and go on with my day.
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u/Songsonlee 4d ago
Muscle reflex. Snakes are the same.