The impossible predicament of the death newts • Hacker News Board

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#121

Post by rzzzt » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

imp0cat wrote: post #63

sbierwagen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then, what do you think about eating fugu?

With foraged mushrooms and bear that you have fought as a side dish.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#122

Post by stevenwoo » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

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…

Maybe a better way to frame it is over time, there's some genetic sequence that gave the snake a preference for eating this newt in particular out of all potential prey and some other genetic sequence that gives them a bit of resistance so they can store the poison inside them. Those snakes that eat more of them with that genetic makeup, up to a point, are better able to reproduce. Run a few thousand years of iterations over this process, where the snake and newt are in a red queen situation, both running faster and faster just to keep up. It is possible to look at this as situation where neither the snake or newt is conscious of the choices or there is no ability to make decision, there is only following the built in behavior.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#123

Post by lurquer » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 10:28 PM UTC

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…

> There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait.

So why did the trait of that mutant primate spread throughout the entire population? There should instead be a mixture of those who can and those who can’t synthesize vitamin C.

(Indeed, one should perhaps not so blithely assume that there was sufficient fruit for everyone and so C didn’t matter… for it is precisely the ability to survive in times of drought and scarcity that drive evolution, and there id no reason to suspect a population that could synthesize their own vitamin C was less fit than a population that couldn’t. The issue of vitamin C is far from simple…)

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#124

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#125

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #68

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.

Starve now or die later is not a difficult choice for most people.

"Starve now"? If you're talking about the US, get real.

Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US:

> Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#126

Post by kulahan » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 11:05 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #105

I recently learned, there is a dangerous plant in many gardens around the US. If you stand under it for more than 10minutes, you're pretty much dead. Turns out, it's the water-lily.

Water lillies not only are not dangerous, they’re partially edible and have also been used in medicines. Do you mean peace lilly or calla lilly? Neither is deadly, but they can make you ill. Water hemlock is deadly and has white flowers?

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#127

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 11:08 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#128

Post by kulahan » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 11:11 PM UTC

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 found this on Wikipedia, but tldr they taste test it.

> Successful predation of the rough-skinned newt by the common garter snake is made possible by the ability of individuals in a common garter snake population to gauge whether the newt's level of toxin is too high to feed on. T. sirtalis assays toxin levels of the rough-skinned newt and decides whether or not the levels are manageable by partially swallowing the newt, and either swallowing or releasing the newt.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#129

Post by rishi_devan » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

kulahan wrote: post #126

k__ wrote: post #105

I recently learned, there is a dangerous plant in many gardens around the US. If you stand under it for more than 10minutes, you're pretty much dead. Turns out, it's the water-lily.

Water lillies not only are not dangerous, they’re partially edible and have also been used in medicines. Do you mean peace lilly or calla lilly? Neither is deadly, but they can make you ill. Water hemlock is deadly and has white flowers?

The joke here is that: If you stand under a water lily for 10 minutes, you are underwater for 10 minutes

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#130

Post by xenadu02 » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 11:33 PM UTC

mekoka wrote: post #94

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…

I think it might be more useful to look at the author's claim from the other side of the lense. We do carry around barely useful traits, like resistance to toxins that we seldom come in contact with. We can assume that carrying such traits is cheap. If resistance to tetrodotoxin was one such cheap trait, it might have been more prevalent, but it's not so, it could be inferred that it's expensive. Or at least, not che…

This is another case of a huge fallacy humans seem endlessly afflicted with: The Root Cause Fallacy.

You are assuming there is but one cause for development and/or loss of resistance.

There may not be much pressure to develop resistance to tetrodotoxin for most species. Simultaneously there might be a higher metabolic cost to retaining it for some species but not for others. It is also possible that resistance with low cost is very rarely lost which is why we carry resistance to toxins we don't often see but population bottlenecks in ancestral lines can cause loss of a trait to propagate - even by accident. And much like Vitamin C loss if it doesn't matter the loss sticks. We should not forget that there are multiple resistance mechanisms as well: an immune system generally primed to fight certain common causes of mortality can, entirely by accident, also be primed to recognize and destroy certain proteins conferring resistance to some toxins and not others.

I have barely scratched the surface above. The random walk of evolution and its constant hoarding tendencies should make everyone skeptical simplistic mechanisms of action as well as "just so" explanations of evolutionary history.

FWIW most things are multi-causal. I previously made the same argument about house prices. People who claim it is caused by foreign money, low interest rates, restrictive zoning, etc all want their pet theory to be The One True Reason. In reality the market is complex and many of the proposed causes are merely contributing factors.