Ciguatera poisoning is a food-borne disease that can come from eating large, carnivorous reef fish, causes vomiting, headaches, and a burning sensation upon contact with cold surfaces. Teina Rongo, a Cook Island Maori from Rarotonga and a Ph.D. student at the Florida Institute of Technology, and his faculty advisers Professors Robert van Woesik and Mark Bush, wrote in the Journal of Biogeography that based on archeological evidence, paleoclimatic data and modern reports of ciguatera poisoning, they theorize that ciguatera outbreaks were linked to climate and that the consequent outbreaks prompted historical migrations of Polynesians.
It is true that Modern Cook Islanders are surrounded by an ocean teeming with fish but they don’t eat fish as a regular part of their diet instead eats processed, imported foods. In the late 1990s, lower-income families who could not afford processed foods emigrated to New Zealand and Australia. The researchers suggest that past migrations had similar roots.
They believe that the fish in areas around the Modern Cook Island contains fish poison that had wiped out the Polynesians. It is believed that the heightened voyaging from A.D. 1000 to 1450 in eastern Polynesia was likely prompted by ciguatera fish poisoning. There were few options but to leave once the staple diet of an island nation became poisonous. According to van Woesik this approach bring them a step closer to solving the mysteries of ciguatera and the storied Polynesian native migrations.
