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The impossible predicament of the death newts

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Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#131

Post by darkerside »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
calebkaiser wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Newt…

> Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. That's got to be an extremely weak effect. No snake gets an individual benefit from eating the newts. They get a collective benefit, that predators recognize the species as poisonous, in which all snakes, poisonous and delicious alike, share equally. The problem is large enough that actually-poisonous a…

> The problem is large enough that actually-poisonous animals routinely have delicious mimics of entirely different species who free-ride off of the work the originals do to be poisonous.

When cargo culting goes right.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#132

Post by im3w1l »

chrisweekly wrote: post #24
deadbabe wrote: post #12

Could being a toxic or venemous creature be bad for survivability of a species in the long term if smarter creatures discover you’re lethal and thus become determined to kill your kind on sight?

I'm curious about the broader concept of species intentionally killing other species for reasons other than food.

Territorial animals will kill to protect their turf. A successful species could conceivably kill off a less successful one by conquering all its territory.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#133

Post by hn_acc1 »

water-data-dude wrote: post #13

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.

I didn't get it either, but now I'm just sad that it's come to this, where we have to replace 5 characters with 9 just to seem "cool". Sure, it's 2 syllables instead of 4, but then we REALLY should have avoided using www as the prefix for the web. It's not like we talk about surfing "the WWW" - and even saying the 3 letters is WAY longer than saying "World Wide Web".

It's great in german - 3 syllables for 3 letters, but english/french, it's NINE syllables for 3 letters. I always thought it should have been web.domain.org.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#134

Post by nyanpasu64 »

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.

I recently learned that (Wikipedia) "Vascular cambia are found in all seed plants except for five angiosperm lineages which have independently lost it; Nymphaeales, Ceratophyllum, Nelumbo, Podostemaceae, and monocots.[1]" Four of these lineages are aquatic plants (including water lilies) and some scientists theorize monocots may have also evolved in the water. I seem to recall reading that aquatic plants don't "need" woody growth for structural stability, but can't find a source right now.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#135

Post by mekoka »

xenadu02 wrote: post #130
mekoka wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> You are assuming...

I made no assumptions. As I pointed out to another commenter, you might be in too much of a haste to play at being a contrarian. It might be more useful to pay closer attention to what you're objecting to.

Evolutionary game theory demonstrates that evolution is a matter of fitness payoffs. If cost of a trait increases, fitness is reduced. The prevalence of a trait in a fit population is indicative that, at best, the trait increases fitness, at worst, it doesn't hinder it. In both cases, the genes tend to be passed on and the game is allowed to continue. When carrying the trait becomes costly, there's pressure to get rid of it (through the usual evolutionary means).

The above model encompasses all the unnecessary specificity you tried to bring into the matter. If you object to it, address your concerns to the scientists that are leading us all astray.

For now, let's circle right back to the author's original argument. Absence of an actually useful trait to increase fitness (i.e. protecting ones from certain food sources and others from predators) might be indicative of a hefty tax to pay for carrying it.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#136

Post by lithocarpus »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #101
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.

Eating plants at random must be more dangerous than eating mushrooms. I have heard that there are far more poisonous plants than fungi, and greens have almost no calories.

Hopefully nobody is eating plants or mushrooms at random!

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#137

Post by kulahan »

rishi_devan wrote: post #129
kulahan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well you see, I’m not smart

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#138

Post by odyssey7 »

mattigames wrote: post #107
odyssey7 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That claim jumped out to me as well. Evolution is supply and demand, cost and benefit, capacity and constraints, none of it balanced by anything apart from luck.

This is categorically false, we know evolving bigger brains required us to reduce our muscle mass compared to other primates, for the energy budget required to create such brains.

That cost and benefit trade-off emerged as an opportunity only through luck and it survived only through luck, even if the odds were in its favor.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#139

Post by mr_toad »

mattigames wrote: post #107
odyssey7 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That claim jumped out to me as well. Evolution is supply and demand, cost and benefit, capacity and constraints, none of it balanced by anything apart from luck.

This is categorically false, we know evolving bigger brains required us to reduce our muscle mass compared to other primates, for the energy budget required to create such brains.

Do we know that? I thought that the evidence suggested that early hominids lost muscle mass, especially in our arms, as they came down from the trees. We also switched from stronger muscle fibres to high endurance muscles.

You’re right that there was an energy trade-off, but it was being able to run faster and longer that was more important than strength for our ancestors, who still had quite small brains (the brain of an Australopithecus is only 35% the size of a human).

Brain size developed later, probably in a feedback loop with our diet - as we began to eat more meat our brains got bigger, which made us better hunters. And hominids actually got bigger and stronger as their brains grew.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#140

Post by mattigames »

odyssey7 wrote: post #138
mattigames wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is categorically false, we know evolving bigger brains required us to reduce our muscle mass compared to other primates, for the energy budget required to create such brains.

That cost and benefit trade-off emerged as an opportunity only through luck and it survived only through luck, even if the odds were in its favor.

That's a very broad definition of the word luck, like saying I landed a job by having luck that some company was offering that role, therefore everything is luck, and communication wise would make the word almost useless.
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