Exactly What It Says On The Tin

Exactly what it says on the tin

Rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) are kind of ugly and hella poisonous.

They produce tetrodotoxin, which makes it a really tragically bad idea to eat them.  Unless you’re a garter snake, anyway.  Garter snakes are currently locked in an arms race with them where the newts get more and more poisonous, and the snakes get more and more resistant to it, and eventually we’re going to have snakes that you just can’t poison and newts that can take their poison and shoot a concentrated beam straight out of their eyes.

And they do, as far as we can tell, produce it.  It’s not like with poison dart frogs where they get it from something they eat, and frogs raised in captivity aren’t toxic.  The newts remain poisonous as hell no matter how long you keep them in an aquarium, and at least one study has demonstrated that a well-kept rough-skinned newt will get more poisonous over time rather than less.  That’s just how they roll.

Females pass the tetrodotoxin along to their egg clutches, which keeps most things from eating them.  It actually attracts certain predators, like caddisflies, though. 

Above: Those dicks.

They eat the eggs and sequester the toxin for use in their own defenses in a maneuver not unlike caterpillars loading up on alkaloids intended to keep herbivores off of the plants that produce them in order to keep predators off the caterpillars instead.  Also (we think) not unlike the fucking garter snakes that feed on them.

No, for real.

Basically, when a garter snake’s liver is dealing with the tetrodotoxin it’s ingested, it winds up with this effective half-life of like eight days in the snake’s system.  So it takes two months for the poison from one newt to fully metabolize out of the snake’s body.  The poison functions in most animals by jacking up the sodium channels in cells.  In garter snakes with a particular mutation, there’s no receptors for the poison to sneak in and bind to and fuck everything up.  So they get a little fucked up on the poison for a few hours, but after that it’s no real thing.

But while the poison hanging out in the snake’s system isn’t hurting the snake, it makes no promises if you stuff the snake in your face and attempt to digest it.  And if the snake’s making a pretty steady living eating newts, it’s packing enough poison in its body that anything that tries to prey on it’s going to wind up sick as hell and quite possibly dead.

These guys basically fear nothing as a result.  Their response to being threatened to is poison harder and do a little yoga lift.

Above: You thought I was fucking kidding, didn’t you?

That pose is called the unken reflex.  It’s used primarily by animals that engage in some sort of crypsis most of the time but are in fact ready to fucking fight you if you mess with them and have some aposematic surprises to show off.  Animals that are venomous, poisonous, or just generally possessed of some nasty defense mechanisms love this one.

So, certain snakes and certain flies will eat them.  What about humans?  Yes, humans will also eat them.  We are, in fact, the only mammal that will voluntarily ingest these little bastards, almost always following the phrase “As the result of a drunken dare…”.  And yes, for the record, one newt contains enough poison to off an adult male human.  We know this because a fucking dude fucking ate one and then fucking died from it after going to the fucking hospital.  (Another, earlier dude ate one and then barfed it up in a reasonable amount of time.  He was fine after a lengthy and unpleasant bout of medical intervention.)

In conclusion: Do not make drunken bets involving eating these newts, Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you, they taste terrible and will kill you.  Unless you’re a garter snake, in which case where did you even get that booze, snake?  Does your mother know you’re drinking?  You’re not driving anywhere after this, are you?

I tried a 2-D printer once, and the paper jammed.

So now I just painstakingly re-create my paper copies by hand, like a medieval monk.

'Horsing around' reduces stress hormones in youth

The results are published in the American Psychological Association’s Human-Animal Interaction Bulletinthis month.

"We were coming at this from a prevention perspective," said Patricia Pendry, a developmental psychologist at WSU who studies how stress "gets under the skin" and the effects of prevention programs on human development. "We are especially interested in optimizing healthy stress hormone production in young adolescents, because we know from other research that healthy stress hormone patterns may protect against the development of physical and mental health problems."

NIH grant to apply hard science

Her work is the first evidence-based research within the field of human-equine interaction to measure a change in participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

"The beauty of studying stress hormones is that they can be sampled quite noninvasively and conveniently by sampling saliva in naturalistic settings as individuals go about their regular day," Pendry said.

While human-animal interaction programs with horses, dogs, cats and other companion animals have been credited with improving social competence, self-esteem and behavior in children, scientifically valid research to support these claims — and an understanding of the underlying mechanism for why people report a positive experience in these programs — has been limited…

She approached the coordinator of PATH (Palouse Area Therapeutic Horsemanship) at the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine, which had been offering a therapeutic riding program for over 30 years. Pendry has been riding and working with horses since she was a child and reacquainted herself with therapeutic horsemanship when she began to look for her next research project at WSU…

Children were randomly assigned to participate in the program or be waitlisted. Based on natural horsemanship techniques, the program provided 90 minutes weekly to learn about horse behavior, care, grooming, handling, riding and interaction.

Participants provided six samples of saliva over a two-day period both before and after the 12-week program. Pendry compared the levels and patterns of stress hormone functioning by measuring cortisol. The results were exciting, she said.

"We found that children who had participated in the 12-week program had significantly lower stress hormone levels throughout the day and in the afternoon, compared to children in the waitlisted group," she said. “We get excited about that because we know that higher base levels of cortisol — particularly in the afternoon — are considered a potential risk factor for the development of psychopathology.”

Evidence to support human-animal work

Pendry said the experimental design underlying the study gives more scientific credit to the claims of therapeutic horsemanship professionals, parents and children who have reported a positive impact from these types of programs. In addition, she hopes the results will lead to development of alternative after-school programs.

While the research focused on prevention, Pendry said she believes it could provide a starting point to look at the impact on children of high levels of stress and physical or mental health issues.

"Partly because of NIH’s effort to bring hard science to the field of human-animal interaction, program implementers now have scientific evidence to support what they are doing," she said. (full article)

You won’t allow me to go to school. I won’t become a doctor. Remember this: One day you will be sick.

Poem written by an 11 year old Afghan girl 

This poem was recorded in a NYT magazine article about female underground poetry groups in Afghanistan. An amazing article about the ways in which women are using a traditional two line poetry form to express their resistance to male oppression, their feelings about love (considered blasphemous).

Here’s the link

(via conansdoyles)

America’s First Cat Café Opens: Drink Coffee Alongside Adorable Cats

Yesterday, America’s first cat café opened in New York City. Cat lovers, you now have only three more day to sip coffee and eat pastries alongside adorable cats! Purina One teamed up with the North Shore Animal League, the country’s largest no-kill shelter, to create this pop-up café that’s the temporary home to rescue cats. While the concept of a cat café has been around for a while, with Asia and Europe leading the way, this is the first time one has opened in the United States. Two permanent cat cafés are scheduled to open in San Francisco this year.

The concept is simple. Visitors pay an hourly fee or cover charge to sit and lounge with cats. This one, on 168 Bowery, is free. Sixteen cats roam the premises and you’re welcome to pick one up and snuggle with it. If you fall in love with a particular one, you can even adopt it! (Read about each individual cat, here. Looks like “Sushi” is featured in the photo, above.) To get your feline fix, stop by the store from 10a to 7p each day till April 27. If you’d like to learn a little something, you can listen to different cat experts talk about cat health and behavior. The store’s capacity is limited to just 65 people, so you may have to wait in line.

Via My Modern Met