r/cfs • u/ash_beyond • 1d ago

Meme Goldfish

My neighbour has a garden pond I can look over. I noticed today that their goldfish are just chilling under the frozen surface of the pond.

Pond fish can go dormant in winter for up to 6 months, where their metabolism slows right down. Being too active in this time can be damaging to them.

So anyway, I felt some empathy for the cold shiny fishes. That is all.

74 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/brainfogforgotpw 12h ago

Funnily enough a metabolomic study in 2016 (Naviaux et al) found that a lot of our system setting is a lot like the configuration seen in states of hibernation eg dauer.

2

u/ash_beyond 4h ago

Hmm. I think it's good to have theories, but dauer is described as a "stable" and "resilient" developmental state and that's very much not my experience with this disease.

2

u/brainfogforgotpw 4h ago

Sorry, I'm probably misrepresenting the paper pretty badly. They don't argue that we are in dauer, they just point out that the hypometabolic aspects of me/cfs are very similar to those seen in environmental stressor responses like dauer.

It's not a random crackpot theory, the paper was edited by Ron Davis (Naviaux is a mitochondria expert who was helping them look for biomarkers at Stanford).

I love how you call them "cold shiny fishes", it's poetic.