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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

#11

Post by pokpokpok »

arp242 wrote: post #5

> 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 s…

Not wrong, but one could frame that as a "cost" that you pay in the space of genealogical problem solving. Having one less constraint makes it easier to adapt to other evolutionary pressures

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#13

Post by water-data-dude »

Oooooh! I saw “I’ll have to teal deer it” and thought it must be some strange idiom. Had to go to Urban Dictionary to find out “teal dear = tl;dr”, and now I feel as dim as a garter snake that’s evolved resistance to large amounts of tetrodotoxin.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#14

Post by atentaten »

Interestingly written article. Raises some questions:

>Newts with weaker poison? They get eaten. Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. So the arms race continues.

How does a snake know that the Newt has weaker/strong poison? Is it leaving some Newts along and eating others, or is it eating any Newt it runs across? Does a strong-poison newt survive snake consumption attempts?

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#15

Post by dado3212 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

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 ke…

I also handled these all the time as a kid in northern Oregon, literally hundreds in a day because they would hang out in a series of lakes nearby. Is there a non-poisonous rough-skinned newt variant? I find it impossible to believe that as a young kid I wouldn’t have licked my fingers after years of doing this.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#16

Post by calebkaiser »

atentaten wrote: post #14

Interestingly written article. Raises some questions: >Newts with weaker poison? They get eaten. Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. So the arms race continues. How does a snake know that the Newt has weaker/strong poison? Is it leaving some Newts along and eating others, or is it eating any Newt it runs across? Does a strong-poison newt su…

I think the preceding sentence in that paragraph answers it. Important context here is that garter snakes tend to swallow prey whole. tldr: a strongly poisoned newt survives consumption attempts.

> And it explains why the newts keep evolving to be more toxic: the snake may want to eat newts generally, but if an individual newt packs enough of a wallop, the snake may just retch it up and go after a different one. Newts with weaker poison? They get eaten. Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. So the arms race continues.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#18

Post by sbierwagen »

ryanblakeley wrote: post #9

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…

Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#20

Post by riffraff »

atentaten wrote: post #14

Interestingly written article. Raises some questions: >Newts with weaker poison? They get eaten. Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. So the arms race continues. How does a snake know that the Newt has weaker/strong poison? Is it leaving some Newts along and eating others, or is it eating any Newt it runs across? Does a strong-poison newt su…

it was mentioned elsewhere on the article that the snake may spit out the newt of it's too strong, kinda like a human with chili peppers, I suppose.
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