Can error 1231 after importing a MySQL database be a compatibility issue?
It has to do with the max_allowed_packet on the MySQL server. It was set to 16M and when I upped it to 64M in my.cnf located in /private/etc/ (on Mac El Capitan) which was a copy of the my-huge.cnf. 
After stopping the MySQL server and Apache and restarting them made my site work locally again and the error messages went away.