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The impossible predicament of the death newts
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- brookst 1y agoFascinating article and really enjoyably written. Though I remain a tiny bit disappointed that it wasn’t about some arcane royalty arrangement for the band “The Death Newts”.
- Redster 1y agoOr Axolotl and the Hellbenders!
- arp242 1y ago> 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 simply ignore. So evolving the resistance must have some cost or drawback. I'm not so sure that's really the case; it's more that for many animals there simply isn't any pressure to evolve (or retain) this trait. It's not like the natural selection process has a feature list it can tick off. It operates with zero foresight and an incredibly dumb principle: whatever helps procreation. Cows are not dying due to tetrodotoxin poisoning in significant numbers, as far as I know, so there is no reason for them to evolve resistance to it. The same applies to most animals, including the snakes outside that area. Your dog can synthesise their own vitamin C and will never develop scurvy. Most animals can do this – humans and some other primates are the exception. An ancestor lost the trait for vitamin C synthesis by chance, and because these primates were living in trees eating lots of fruit with vitamin C, evolution simply didn't notice. There is no disadvantage to being able to synthesise vitamin C, and no advantage in dropping the trait. It didn't affect procreation (at the time). Now we're all stuck with it. Now, maybe all of this does have a cost for the snakes. But it's far from a given that there is one.
- pokpokpok 1y agoNot 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
- y-curious 1y agoAgreed, it's just shorthand/abstraction. Just like my for-loop in python doesn't actually mean my computer speaks Python
- arp242 1y agoI omitted some bits from the quote for brevity and HN's faux-quoting sucks, but that's not really the type of "cost" the article is talking about: "maybe they’re suffering from much more subtle neurological effects, like being prone to insomnia or hallucinations or sexual dysfunction. Or maybe they’re just a bit dim."
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- odyssey7 1y agoThat 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.
- mattigames 1y agoThis 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.
- pegasus 1y agoAnd those adorable koalas made the opposite bet, shrinking brain size in order to conserve energy so as to be able to carve a niche no other mammal cared for: https://youtu.be/dXUp_JMQjvg https://youtu.be/dXUp_JMQjvg
- kentrf 1y agoFascinating and well written article!
- ednite 1y agoLove the title, and great article. This might be a total tangent, but every time I see “newts”, I think about how Karel Capek actually coined the word robot in his 1920 play R.U.R., and then later gave us War with the Newts...really smart amphibians. Thanks for sharing.
- rossant 1y agoAs a French person, it's the first time I see this word. My brain can't help but parse the title as "death news".
- ednite 1y agoI can understand why. You rarely see newts mentioned, even though they’re biologically fascinating. Maybe it’s just because people mistake them for another kind of lizard.
- the_af 1y agoThe War with the Newts is fascinating. An indictment of mankind told with dark humor...
- steve_adams_86 1y agoChrist, 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 keeping newts again. They’re beautiful little creatures.
- dado3212 1y agoI 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.
- boogieknite 1y agofew more generations of handling these lil friends and maybe we can get aposematic coloring in humans
- munificent 1y agoI'm not aware of other newt species in their range that look similar. I do think the article plays up their toxicity some. There's only one reported human fatality I could find, from some dipshit who ate one on a dare. If you handle them gently and don't stuff your entire hand in your mouth immediately after, I suspect you're fine.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoMaybe we’re already in the afterlife. How would we know any different, really? Bested by newts
- zonkerdonker 1y agoSame here. I had no idea they were this toxic, I feel like someone should have told us this as children!
- ryanblakeley 1y agoI 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 she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night. In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.
- sbierwagen 1y agoEating 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.
- Vilian 1y agoYou can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby
- busterarm 1y agoHow many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi? The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year. That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoWhere are you getting your data? Is this a specific country/worldwide/what? If you're just talking about the US, a quick Google search shows your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. This article from the CDC estimated 100 hospitalizations for mushrooms in the US in 2016: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.
- jakey_bakey 1y ago> 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. Second-order effects are so cool
- deadbabe 1y agoCould 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?
- chrisweekly 1y agoI'm curious about the broader concept of species intentionally killing other species for reasons other than food.
- AbortedLaunch 1y agoIntraguild killing (such as lions killing leopards or cheetahs) has been described in multiple species. Perhaps interesting; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34816428/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34816428/ (Still need to read it)
- im3w1l 1y agoTerritorial animals will kill to protect their turf. A successful species could conceivably kill off a less successful one by conquering all its territory.
- tim333 1y agoCats kill things for I guess what you'd call fun, although it is food related as they hone their skills for when they may need them.
- James_K 1y agoWhat would be the advantage of that? Killing the animal comes with the risk of being poisoned, and no reward. It's best to just ignore them.
- fwip 1y agoIn theory, you're killing a species that competes with your preferred prey species for habitat or food, which could mean more abundant food for you and your kin in the future. I am not aware of any species besides humans that do this, though.
- water-data-dude 1y agoOooooh! 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.
- dole 1y agoThanks to YOU for the teal dear.
- tanseydavid 1y agoI 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.
- hn_acc1 1y agoI 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.
- account42 1y ago> It's great in german - 3 syllables for 3 letters, but english/french, it's NINE syllables for 3 letters. Kind of absurd to use multiple syllables for a single letter if you think about it. > I always thought it should have been web.domain.org. It should have just been "domain.org" - the web part is already specified in the protocol. And if you are concerned about domains only having a single IP that could have been (and for many protocols has been) solved with SRV records.
- SwtCyber 1y agoThat just means you're adapting to survive the modern web
- atentaten 1y agoInterestingly 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?
- calebkaiser 1y agoI 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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> 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 animals routinely have delicious mimics of entirely different species who free-ride off of the work the originals do to be poisonous. You can't explain why snakes apparently need to avoid sending a dishonest signal with a theory that predicts that mimics don't exist.
- calebkaiser 1y agoYeah 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-of-an-evolutionary-race-between-hungry-snakes-and-toxic-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.”
- smallnix 1y agoMirror snapshot: https://archive.ph/hJHNM https://archive.ph/hJHNM
- titanomachy 1y agoNewt poisoning of humans must be rare, I’ve lived in this region my whole life and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this!
- jaggederest 1y agoYes, I must have played with these newts at least a couple dozen times as a child, they were under every leaf and log in the forest and near streams where I grew up.
- waynecochran 1y agoI live in the PNW and I see hundreds of garter snakes, some newts, but never a Rough-Skinned Newt. I had no idea such a creature was around here.
- icameron 1y agoI think the article is exaggerating quite a lot > It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once. TBF there is one death reported in Oregon from someone eating an entire newt in 1979, but they aren’t as bad as the article would have you believe. Many of us have handled these newts. There would be a lot more dead people if licking is all it took. > A 29-year-old man drank approximately 150 mL of whiskey at about 11 AM July 9, 1979. At 6 PM he swallowed a 20-cm newt on a dare. Within ten minutes he complained of tingling of the lips. During the next two hours he began complaining of numbness and weakness and stated that he thought he was going to die. He refused to be transported to a hospital and was left alone for 15 minutes and then experienced cardiopulmonary arrest
- prova_modena 1y agoI did several semesters' worth of biology fieldwork in college that involved handling many of these guys, under the guidance of a professor who was obsessed with them. Their toxicity was discussed more as a point of interest rather than an immediate danger. We always wore gloves when handling them, but the rationale was more for the newts' protection rather than our own. I never heard of there being a newt poisoning incident during the past decades of this professor overseeing similar fieldwork. Of course, eating them was out of the question.
- onlypassingthru 1y agoApparently the snakes' immunity pales in comparison to the local caddisflies. [0]https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/a-beautiful-web-of-poison-extends-a-new-strand https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/a-beautiful-we...
- UncleOxidant 1y ago> 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 since it's going to be impossible to tell if a particular snake is immune (and is thus potentially toxic) how would this deter predators? (Especially given the limited range of snakes with this immunity and the probability that there are predators of the snakes that don't necessarily have this same limited range - ravens, raptors, etc.)
- xlbuttplug2 1y ago> how would this deter predators? Maybe the predator's carcass next to a half eaten garter snake is meant to serve as a lesson to other potential predators. Or perhaps the aim is not to deter but to simply take one natural predator down with them for the good of their species.
- cyberax 1y agoEating a snake might not kill a predator outright. And higher predators (like mammals) also have food preferences. They don't always eat stuff indiscriminately, so predators that don't _like_ snakes will preferentially survive. Eventually, this can get established as a genetic trait. Or as a behavioral one, if parents don't teach cubs to hunt snakes.
- tshaddox 1y agoIf the predator species have heritable differences in prey selection, no matter how slight, natural selection can work with that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CaffeineLD50 1y agoI'm pretty sure my degoogled Murena /e/ OS pixel 5 won't have this problem.
- istjohn 1y agoWrong thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193198
- CaffeineLD50 1y agoIndeed
- alkyon 1y agoThe linked article about toxic blue-ringed octopus is even more interesting. https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/14/occasional-paper-the-interesting-home-life-of-the-blue-ringed-octopus/ https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/14/occasional-paper-the-in...
- benlivengood 1y agoThe author points out something I've thought about a few times; we are just giant robots that bacteria use to live in and move around rapidly.
- csours 1y agoNature is not kind.
- k__ 1y agoI 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.
- kulahan 1y agoWater 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?
- rishi_devan 1y agoThe joke here is that: If you stand under a water lily for 10 minutes, you are underwater for 10 minutes
- kulahan 1y agoWell you see, I’m not smart
- nyanpasu64 1y agoI 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.
- SwtCyber 1y agoThough now I kinda want a horror short where someone slowly realizes the water-lilies are the real apex predators
- juantxo93 1y agointersting
- theospeak 1y agoWhat a fasinating read. Thoroughly enjoyable writing. Thank you.
- ryukoposting 1y agoWhat a fun read! One side note: the coloration of that garter snake is very strange to my midwestern eyes. Our garter snakes aren't nearly as vibrant.
- rufus_foreman 1y agoThey're cute. They're pretty much harmless in my experience. They swarm all over the PNW, in season. Don't step on them if you can help it. They're not death newts. I'd be a dead commenter if they were death newts. They swarm all over the trails in spring, and then they're gone for the rest of the season. That's my recollection of it. I don't live there anymore, maybe they have evolved into these dangerous death newts. One can hope.
- Klaus_ 1y ago[dead]
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- anikozxx 1y ago[dead]
- SwtCyber 1y agoHow even when we think we've figured it out the system throws in a curveball. Nature's like, "Oh, you thought this was simple? Cute."
- pmarreck 1y agoI learned a new word: "aposematic" I can already think of uses of this word jokingly in a people context
- mark-r 1y agoDon't snakes find their victims more by smell than sight? Do they even see in color? It seems that "don't eat me" coloration might work for the newts.