I'm pretty sure my degoogled Murena /e/ OS pixel 5 won't have this problem.
Wrong thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193198
The impossible predicament of the death newts
91–100 of 192 posts
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#92> Turns out there is an answer: the garter snakes sequester the tetrodotoxin, storing it in their livers. This makes them toxic to their own predators. But this doesn't seem as immediate as the newt's defense where it's on the skin and thus causes potential predators to spit them out or even to seize up - meaning that at least some attacked newts survive the encounter. Eating the liver means the snake is dead. And si…
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Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#93Oooooh! 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 was thinking it must be a play on "steel-man" but nope.
Thanks for the taking the time to find out for the rest of us.
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#94> 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 cheap.
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#95Earlier 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.
Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers: Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably (This was a quick scan) https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]
Meanwhile 48 million Americans get some kind of food poisoning each year. Eating food is dangerous!
I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
AAPCC annual reports, linked to from an actual mushroom foraging guide. Also I said plants and mushrooms. Not specifically mushrooms. AAPCC doesn't track mushrooms separately and I would consider the CDC to not be the authority on poisoning -- their specialty is diseases.
Here's the relevant section from the 2023 National Poison Data System: https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png 8294 case mentions, 3039 hospitalizations. for outcomes check the table.
Huh, that is quite interesting, thank you.
Looks like that includes the hallucinogenic mushrooms, which leads to 2139 case mentions and 1146 hospitalizations a year.
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.
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.
A lot of the cost per calorie is in preparation; if you can cook your own meals, you can reduce your cost per calorie signficantly. The problem is a lot of people don't have the time (or maybe will-power) to cook every meal; a few of my previous jobs made it very difficult to cook my own meals, so I ate fast-food alot, and gained a lot of weight.
When your boss starts pushing Return To Office, ask if the company has a worthwhile kitchen in the office; at least a burner and plenty of room in the refrigerator for ingredients; it should be feasible to cook breakfast and lunch, but also dinner, in case you need to work late.
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#98Earlier 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…
Yeah that particular aspect of his claim feels like the weakest.
Here is a slightly more in-depth piece where a wildlife biologist mentions other possible forcing functions that cause the snakes to eat the newts: https://baynature.org/2022/04/06/the-bay-area-is-the-center-...
From the article:
> “When garter snakes are born in the late summer, they often live under mats of drying pond vegetation … That happens to be where the newly metamorphosed newts come out in the fall, and we suspect there could be a lot of interaction between predator and prey just because of this overlap in microenvironment. That could have led to strong selection in the past that resulted in such high levels of resistance.”
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#99> 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…
But a nonzero number of animals and people die of tetrodoxin poisoning, so there is some pressure. Therefore if it were cheap and easy enough, it’s likely we all would have evolved it. That cheapness threshold might just be incredibly high.
If it is rare enough it probably doesn't exert much selection pressure.
Has anybody modeled what percent of a population has to die from something for the protective gene to become widespread?
Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers: Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably (This was a quick scan) https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]
Meanwhile 48 million Americans get some kind of food poisoning each year. Eating food is dangerous! I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.
To be honest, I will probably still pass. Mushrooms kinda freak me out on a biological level anyways. What is crazy to me is how people find certain things scary or risky but they'll literally strap themselves inside a metal box on wheels that has uses a controlled explosion produced with highly carcinogenic toxic chemicals, that has hundreds of parts that can fail, it can slam into the other contraption next you tear you in half, all so they don't have to ride a bike or walk for an extra twenty minutes..