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I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will st
by comrade1234 3mo ago
I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
- MillironX 3mo agoWe covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
- zhoBEENG 3mo agoIf they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.
- xattt 3mo agoThere has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.
- 3eb7988a1663 3mo agoTaxine alkaloids[0] The estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of taxine alkaloids is approximately 3.0 mg/kg body weight for humans.[27][28] Different studies show different toxicities; a major reason is the difficulty of measuring taxine alkaloids.[29] It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams. Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids
- esperent 3mo ago> Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill". How much is in one seed? I could only find a few sources saying that you would need to eat about 50g of the needles to reach the LD, and that's... A lot. There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds. Not being a killjoy here, I grew up around yew trees and I was always told to be careful of them, but not with any sense of panic that would suggest "any exposure at all will kill”. I think you'd have a bad time even with low exposure but death seems unlikely by accident.
- golem14 3mo agoA child might not need the whole 50g. Not a good way to go, BTW: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462509/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462509/
- ErroneousBosh 3mo ago> There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds. My partner was worried when we moved into our current house that our then-18-month-old son would eat the poisonous cotoneaster berries on the bush in the garden. But it turns out the LD50 is something like 50g/kg which means that even for a 12kg child they'd be eating huge heaping bowlfuls of them before anything happened. As it turns out, he did eat one of the cotoneaster berries, spat it out, and went looking for some of the far nicer tasting alpine strawberries instead. The cotoneaster berries taste quite particularly horrible, and no-one is going to ever eat even close to the LD50 of them.
- taneq 3mo agoThis reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
- Kim_Bruning 3mo agoYou have a source or observation for that? All I can find is the exact opposite, that they do just fine even in challenging conditions.
- 0x000xca0xfe 3mo agoI often cycle a road with lots of bats hunting and one evening two slammed into my face and upper body (and one only avoided by ducking quickly). It's pretty obvious that they are not perfect navigators.
- type0 3mo agoIf you watch them fly it always looks more chaotic than birds.
- taneq 3mo agohttps://www.vice.com/en/article/bats-crash-into-each-other-all-the-time-high-speed-cameras-reveal/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/bats-crash-into-each-other-a...
- nickdothutton 3mo agoThey are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
- golem14 3mo agoI hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)
- lostlogin 3mo agoThe more I learn about horses the more they seem like a creature that’s continually trying to die - and humans get to try and stop them succeeding.
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- test6554 3mo agoPerhaps that's how aliens would see humans. Perpetually trying to die except for a small group of humans fighting disease, monitoring and protecting climate, keeping order, etc.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoHorses are especially susceptible to *everything*. Millenia of selective breeding to try for the healthiest strongest animals we can, and they're still shit. They'll get ill if they breathe wrong. They'll get ill if they eat a mouthful too much or too little of grass that's ever so slightly too green. They'll get ill if it's too rainy or not rainy enough. How the hell did they even evolve?
- vova_hn2 3mo agoSelective breeding for being useful to humans, not for being able to survive on their own.
- xattt 3mo agoThere was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
- idiotsecant 3mo agoOh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
- seszett 3mo agoI think one of the problems is people thinking kids are more stupid than they are, and blanket "don't do that" statements without explanations don't really work for kids. If they had told you they were highly poisonous instead of just telling you "not to eat them" you might have taken them more seriously. And if they had given you a taste of the red berry around it (which is sweet but not that special either, and the texture is not great) you might just have thought it was not necessary to play with them at all. But that requires education at all levels, around here (Belgium) I sometimes see parents who seem deadly afraid of anything nature, I tell my kids to eat blackberries and they softly tell their kids next to us not to do that. You end up with generations who just don't know anything about what's around them and will eventually do stupid things.
- vidarh 3mo agoIt takes longer than people tend to think before kids learn to infer things well at all, and so being explicit about causal chains tends to make kids more likely to take advice. E.g "put your coat on" might not lead the child to think it is cold, and even a "put your coat on, it's cold outside" might still not lead the child to realise that means they'll freeze without the coat. A lot of tantrums would be avoided if parents were more explicit about why they're giving certain advice.
- hypfer 3mo ago> if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. That is complete bullshit and you shouldn't be posting it this confidently. Those seeds are very poisonous, yes, but not in that cartoonish way. It's not cyanide.
- NooneAtAll3 3mo agoeven cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
- lostlogin 3mo ago> substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose Doesn’t that apply to every single thing that exists?
- reltnek 3mo agoThe old toxicology proverb is: "The dose makes the poison"
- butlike 3mo agoI like to extend it to: "the portion makes the poison." Beyond getting the alliteration, it also includes food, which I think is important. A glass of water won't kill you, two gallons of water will. An ice cream cone once in a while is nothing; one every day will make the doctor's eyes go wide.
- hackeraccount 3mo agoJesus. I had a colonoscopy. Don't tell me about drinking 2 gallons of water. I won't even get started on an ice cream cone a day.
- qingcharles 3mo ago
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- RickJWagner 3mo agoI don’t care if it is poison. Never gonna give yew up.
- butlike 3mo agoYew gonna eat that?
- imtringued 3mo agoMost plants evolved to have their fruit eaten whole and seeds simply pooped out because of the fertilizing effects of animal feces and the fact that the seeds end up dropped far away from the parent plant. That includes large fruit with massive seeds like mangos.