Giant African Rat Kills With Poisonous Mohawk 97
thebchuckster writes "The African crested rat has been known to kill local dogs, but researchers have just figured out how. After eating the 'poison-arrow plant,' the over-sized rodent stores its poison-laced spit in special hollow hairs in its mohawk. Then, when a predator grabs the rat, the animal gets stung with the poison and spit-tipped hairs which can sicken and kill."
Punk (Score:2)
Punk (Score:2)
Another Marvel character, I thought.
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More like a randomly generated Gamma World character
"Poisonous / Ratman"
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No, that's trendy.
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We're breeding it into our next gen Marine stock. Semper Fi!
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Now that's Spunk ....there ...fixed that for you.
Is this tool use? (Score:3)
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Only if the rat bought the quills at the Home Depot.
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I wouldn't call chewing bark tool use. Nor grooming. It's "manipulation" only in the broadest sense of "using", but eating food is "using" an object for the animal's benefit.
Regardless of semantics, it is doubtful this is a sign of intelligence (which tool use is usually taken to suggest).
However it is a sign of awesome. Punk rock murder rats? Hell yes.
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Chimpanzees have to be taught to fish for termites with a stick. Chimps don't have any evolutionary adaptation specific to fishing for termites (an opposable thumb is not specific to this behavior or even to primates). My understanding is that some populations of chimps (and even individuals within a population) learn / exhibit this behavior, others don't.
The giant crested rat chews poison bark and gro
How did this evolve? (Score:4, Interesting)
It does make you wonder how something so specific could evolve, the relationship between a poisonous plant and then the distribution mechanism.
I know that when I eat certain herbs, I sweat them out and smell strongly of that herb whereas other people I know are fine. I wouldn't be surprised if that is related, the rats that could not sweat out the chemicals died, those that could survived, the ones who sweated through barbs fared even better. Do animals that disperse poison even know it's a defensive mechanism?
How can they evolve that knowledge? Or is it aggression that is evolved too? A poisonous rat that is passive will probably not survive (it might still get eaten if it kills its predator) whereas one that is aggressive can attack its predator before it eats it.
What do you think?
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I'm having a hard time telling whether this is a troll
Are you really?
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unfortunately, yes.
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Well let me help you out -- regardless of what else that post was, whether earnest or in jest, it was definitely a troll.
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Now repent and send me money for telling you so.
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Look up what a scientific theory entails and maybe you can post without someone calling you an imbecile. Intelligent Design isn't even a decent hypothesis, let alone a theory. You're the one with a closed mind.
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I'd like to encourage you to watch Professor Kenneth Miller of Brown University speaking at Case Western Reserve University [youtube.com]. Every irreducible complexity argument has been debunked, and if you were to argue that this rat's unique ability is evidence of irreducible complexity, I'm sure it would be too. There have been many other instances that were much more convincing than this rat, all of which have been explained to my satisfaction and the satisfaction of most of the scientific community. Some of these ve
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It's a complete non-sequitur. One simply doesn't follow from the other. Designers can design simple things and complex things can arise without a designer.
You complain about open minds but provide no actual argument -- you do what everyone who has ever put forward the argument from design or one of its variants does -- you go, "See, see this complex thing! Doesn't that blow your mind? Yep, it just makes
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I blame Douglas Adams, the Bablefish proof is obvious prior art for the concept of Intelligent Design.
With a bit of luck they will all get knocked down at a zebra crossing. :P
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Yeah, but the Babelfish proof actually disproves god and he vanishes in a puff of logic.
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Yes, the theories all those scientists have come up with, pieced together from many data and refined time and time again to account for new data, has nothing against your assertion backed by "BE
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That's because there are a lot of folks out there who have little tolerance for other people's belief. By the way that goes both ways. There were people burning each other over toasty coals because they disagreed on the finer points of Jesus, long before science nerds heckled the faithful. In fact the holiest church in all of Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, has for generations had its door locked and unlocked by a Muslim family because the various sects of Christianity don't trust each other
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I have to post this as "A.C." because if I use my real ID, the retribution is intense!
Hold on a sec, if real Intelligent Design is yours, you must be God. Now there's a first, the supreme deity posting on slashdot. Although you'd expect Him to have a slashdot account so that He can do some proper smiting to us unbelievers.
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How can they evolve that knowledge? Or is it aggression that is evolved too? A poisonous rat that is passive will probably not survive (it might still get eaten if it kills its predator) whereas one that is aggressive can attack its predator before it eats it.
In this example, aggression is not required. If an animal is killed but also kills the predator in the process, then the DNA of that animal will be more likely to survive via the increased likelihood of survival for it's relatives due to the death of a local predator.
For example, mother and baby rats get attacked by a fox. One baby rat dies along with the fox. Now the mother and remaining babies have an increased chance of survival. Because they all share similar DNA, the DNA traits that killed the f
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People seem to think evolution is akin to this situation: "I was walking down third street just past the bank when I looked down and found a 1999 series A twenty dollar bill that happened to appear on the ground about six inches from the no parking sign, so I picked it up and put it in my left pants pocket." Evolution is more along the lines of "I found some money on the ground."
In this case, the rats probably evolved the hollow hairs for a reason (IIRC these aren't uncommon in the animal kingdom. Isn't pol
Re:How did this evolve? (Score:5, Interesting)
Polar bear fur isn't hollow, but it is transparent, and directs sunlight down to the bear's skin like a coat of fiber optic cables, which is basically what they are.
But yeah, this isn't that unusual. Chewing and grooming are normal behaviors for rats. The hairs could have evolved for any number of reasons, and may have been quite different, maybe just specialized whiskers, before the poison plant made predator-poisoning the main selective pressure.
There's other cases of this kind of thing. For example, hummingbirds and the flowers they feed from will often undergo runaway evolution where the hummer's bill will be specialized to feed on the flower's specialized form that only the hummer's bill will fit. Even more amazing, there's a species on a Caribbean island where the males and females aren't just different in plumage, but also very different in bill shape which is unusual. Each of the two sexes feeds exclusively from two different but closely related species of flower.
The theory was that when the hummers first arrived on the island, there was only one species of flower, and the more aggressive males monopolized the flowers that had the highest nectar output while the females were stuck with the ones with lesser output. The result was that the higher output plants were cross-pollinated by the males while the lower output plants were pollinated by the females, setting the stage for the two populations of flowers to begin diverging into separate species, and for each sex of hummer to follow.
I dunno, I thought that was neat.
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Nevermind, I guess my info was outdated and wrong.
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I know that when I eat certain herbs, I sweat them out and smell strongly of that herb whereas other people I know are fine. I wouldn't be surprised if that is related, the rats that could not sweat out the chemicals died, those that could survived, the ones who sweated through barbs fared even better.
This is a common mistake made by people with a poor understanding of anatomy. Toxins in your body are excreted by your liver and intestines, not your skin.
Your sweat glands are there to regulate your temperature and are in no way designed to expel toxins.
People smell like things they've eaten because it's on their breath and on their hands.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garlic [wikipedia.org]
Garlic is known for causing halitosis, as well as causing sweat to have a pungent 'garlicky' smell, which is caused by allyl methyl sulfide (AMS). AMS is a gas which is absorbed into the blood during the metabolism of garlic; from the blood it travels to the lungs (and from there to the mouth, causing bad breath) and skin, where it is exuded through skin pores.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garlic [wikipedia.org]
Garlic is known for causing halitosis, as well as causing sweat to have a pungent 'garlicky' smell, which is caused by allyl methyl sulfide (AMS). AMS is a gas which is absorbed into the blood during the metabolism of garlic; from the blood it travels to the lungs (and from there to the mouth, causing bad breath) and skin, where it is exuded through skin pores.
Yes, ok, some exogenous organic compounds make their way into sweat. But garlic is not a toxin, and the gas that gets to your pores is a byproduct, not a design feature of sweat glands. Since you obviously know how to use wikipedia, try reading the one on perspiration.
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Really? I know if I eat curries/tajines with a lot of fenugreek in them the smell is strongest in my armpits.
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If I stand next to someone long enough, it gives them a disadvantage ;-)
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hmmmm, but not to smell like dinner in places where cannibalism was recently given up.....
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No.
I can eat foods that do not taste of a herb with a knife and fork and my skin smells very strongly of the herb - even if you could not smell the herb in the food.
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I'm not sure which one of us you are saying it disagrees with, but if it's me, I'll have to disagree in turn with your reading of the linked article.
The key point I see is that while 8 compounds of the total 44 identified in sweat are associated with fenugreek consumption, none of them were determined by the olfactory experts to have a related odor.
The only GC zone characterized as having that odor was an unidentifiable substance. The researchers *merely speculated* that it might be a metabolite of the key
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It does make you wonder how something so specific could evolve, the relationship between a poisonous plant and then the distribution mechanism.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is related, the rats that could not sweat out the chemicals died, those that could survived, the ones who sweated through barbs fared even better.
Oh, and rats do not sweat. They regulate their temperature by constricting or expanding blood vessels in their tails.
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First of all, the rat (Lophiomys imhausi) evolved into a non-rat, with a nice, cute, fluffy tail (see exhibit A [youtube.com]. That prevented them from being killed by humans. The poison quill adaption was just to piss off dogs.
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If you read the fucking article, you'd know these weird rats chew the bark of the plant and then lick their fur to store the poison on it. They don't sweat the poison out.
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If you read the article, they still don't know why they don't die when they chew the bark.
Idiot.
hedgehogs do it as well (Score:3)
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=self-annoiting
If a hedgehog tastes something nasty, the froth it up and spread it on their spines. It works - if you get pricked hard, you can see a bit of an allergic reaction around the pricks (the spines are not like porcupines, ie, they don't have barbs. They're just somewhat sharp.)
How can they evolve that knowledge? Or is it aggr
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There is no such thing as macro-evolution. The rat doesn't all of a sudden start eating poisonous plants and sweating them out.
Most likely the selective pressure was made in several small steps:
- There is less food at one point and the only thing left is poisonous plants. Some die of the plant, some die of hunger. Those that are somewhat 'immune' to the poison get to breed.
- If there is less food for the rats, there is usually less food for the rest of the ecosystem as well. Things start eating or bringing
It's a shame... (Score:2)
That the rat isn't from Sumatra.
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Coat (Score:1)
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next thing... (Score:1)
he gets a starring role in the desperate A-Team 2: What else can we do to ruin Mr. T
New Pets (Score:1)
Whoa. (Score:2)
Whoa.
I dated that chick.
The 80s were cool...
Pity (Score:3, Funny)
I pity the fool who touches my mohawk!
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Damn (Score:2)
'70s flashback (Score:2)
Ratvis Bickle: [Ratvis is admiring his crest in the mirror] Huh? Huh?
[Flexes]
Ratvis Bickle: Faster than you, fucking son of a... Saw you coming you fucking... shitheel.
[Crest Stiffens]
Ratvis Bickle: I'm standing here; you make the move. You make the move. It's your move...
[Lunges]
Ratvis Bickle: Don't try it you fuck.
[Reflexes]
Ratvis Bickle: You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talking... you talking to me? Well I'm the only one here. Who the fuck do you thi
Rat poison (Score:1)
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Okay guys, what book are you gonna put this on the cover of?
Introduction to Ratfor?
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Managing Samba4.
This rat would (Score:2)
make quite the politician.
Chew (Score:2)
Summary is a bit inaccurate, leading to uninformed comments and questions on this thread. From the article,
The researchers found that the rats chew the bark of the poisonous tree and lick themselves to store their poisonous spit in specially adapted hairs.
They do not eat the plants. They chew it. This is the same way people chew certain herbs and then apply it to wounds to numb the pain. They don't eat those plants - if they did they'd be in poor health indeed.
It's an acquired Immunity! (Score:1)