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The impossible predicament of the death newts

crookedtimber.org

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Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#5

Post by arp242 »

> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins simply ignore. So evolving the resistance must have some cost or drawback.

I'm not so sure that's really the case; it's more that for many animals there simply isn't any pressure to evolve (or retain) this trait.

It's not like the natural selection process has a feature list it can tick off. It operates with zero foresight and an incredibly dumb principle: whatever helps procreation.

Cows are not dying due to tetrodotoxin poisoning in significant numbers, as far as I know, so there is no reason for them to evolve resistance to it. The same applies to most animals, including the snakes outside that area.

Your dog can synthesise their own vitamin C and will never develop scurvy. Most animals can do this – humans and some other primates are the exception. An ancestor lost the trait for vitamin C synthesis by chance, and because these primates were living in trees eating lots of fruit with vitamin C, evolution simply didn't notice. There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait. It didn't affect procreation (at the time). Now we're all stuck with it.

Now, maybe all of this does have a cost for the snakes. But it's far from a given that there is one.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#7

Post by ednite »

Love the title, and great article.

This might be a total tangent, but every time I see “newts”, I think about how Karel Capek actually coined the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R., and then later gave us War with the Newts...really smart amphibians. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#8

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Christ, I handled these as a kid quite a bit. Add that to the list of reasons I will wonder how I survived past age 10.

I used to keep native snakes and lizards (and inadvertently breed them!), and couldn’t keep newts because I wasn’t sophisticated enough to create the right environments for them. This is one species I kept (and killed, unfortunately). I’ve learned to do it far better since then, but haven’t tried keeping newts again. They’re beautiful little creatures.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#9

Post by ryanblakeley »

I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them.

After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms.

But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night.

In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.

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