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| Frederick |
 Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2003 9:37 am |
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Party animals
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=3&id=mg18024265.800
New Scientist vol 180 issue 2426 - 20 December 2003, page 56
So why did Rudolph have a red nose? Could it have something to do with reindeers' famous passion
for the red, spotty fly agaric mushroom? In folklore at least, deer go wild for this hallucinogenic
fungus, even eating snow soaked in the urine of people who had eaten the mushrooms.
But reindeer aren't the only animals that might have a taste for mind-altering drugs. Drunken
elephants cause mayhem in India, sozzled monkeys flirt and brawl in Caribbean bars and American
cows hooked on "crazy weed" are queuing up for rehab programmes. Rumour has it that koalas are
permanently stoned and lemurs get kicks from biting millipedes. Can it be true? Hazel Muir
separates the facts from the fiction about the world's most notorious party animals
1 Loco in acapulco
For decades, farmers in the western US and Mexico have struggled to stop their cattle succumbing to
the pleasures of locoweed, literally "crazy weed". When cattle munch locoweed - the collective name
for many species of Astragalus and Oxytropis - they start to lose their marbles after a couple of
weeks. First of all, they become loners, avoiding their herd. Then they develop an odd, uncertain
gait.
Eventually they lose the ability to sensibly negotiate obstacles, bumping into telephone poles or
making huge, exaggerated leaps to get over a tiny stick. They also become belligerent and charge
furiously at anyone who goes into their field. "They just freak out," says Michael Ralphs, a
researcher for the US Department of Agriculture in Logan, Utah.
Like some lonely barfly, a cow that gets a taste for locoweed mischievously encourages other
animals to do the same. Traditionally, people thought it was all down to addiction, that the cows
relished the plant for some kind of psychotropic high. But according to Ralphs, recent research
suggests the plant is simply a poison. The animals eat locoweed, especially when lush grass is
sparse, because it tastes nice and doesn't immediately make them feel ill.
Locoweed contains an alkaloid called swainsonine that inhibits the breakdown of glycoprotein
molecules. Eating the plant leads to these molecules accumulating in cells all over the body and
eventually choking the cells to death. This wrecks the animals' nervous systems, hence the odd
behaviour. But the glycoprotein overload also makes it difficult for the cows to absorb nutrients,
so they lose weight and eventually die of malnutrition, if not in some clumsy accident. Horses and
sheep can also come under the spell of the weed.
Usually, farmers try to move their livestock to locoweed-free pastures when they see an animal
eating it. For extreme cases, Ralphs and his colleagues have also started a rehab programme.
They've found a way to make cows shun locoweed, by feeding them the weed along with a dose of salt
that makes them sick.
2 People say we monkey around
If there's one animal that loves a swinging party, it's got to be a vervet monkey. In experiments
on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, scientists have found that their drinking patterns are
curiously human.
Given the choice of whether to drink or not, 15 per cent of the vervets stay teetotal. But most of
them are moderate, social drinkers who like their alcohol diluted with fruit juice. About 15 per
cent drink heavily and like their spirits neat, while 5 per cent are binge drinkers who gulp booze
down at top speed, pass out on the floor and do it all over again the next day.
Their social traits are familiar too. Some tiddly monkeys get aggressive, some get flirty, others
think everything's funny and some just get grumpy.
The monkeys are the descendants of animals introduced as pets in the 17th century. They later lived
wild, but people who wanted to eat the monkeys discovered they could trap them by leaving out
sweetened rum in coconut shells - often a monkey would come along and drink itself into a stupor.
Today the monkeys occasionally raid local bars in search of rum.
Scientists hope genetic studies of the monkeys could help pinpoint genes that make some of us prone
to alcoholism.
3 Feline frenzy
Cats are crazy about the plant catmint or catnip, Nepeta cataria, a member of the mint family. It
makes domestic cats - and even some wild cats like cougars, lions and lynx - go berserk. They
sniff, lick and chew it, shaking their heads, rolling around and drooling, and generally going nuts
for about 15 minutes. Then the effect wears off. Cats seem to "reset" after a couple of hours, then
it happens again.
The volatile chemical in the herb that causes the reaction is nepetalactone, a member of the
terpene group that also includes turpentine. No one knows precisely what effect nepetalactone has
on a cat's brain, but it may stimulate the regions that control sex, appetite and mood. A third of
domestic cats don't react to catnip at all, however: to sense the chemical, they need to have a
certain gene that gives them a nepetalactone receptor in their vomeronasal organ, a structure found
above the feline palate that detects pheromones.
Cats in Japan like a different drug, the leaves of the matatabi plant, which contains compounds
similar to nepetalactone. But it causes a different behaviour, making them lie on their backs with
their paws in the air.
In people, catnip can act as a mild stimulant or as a mild sedative. Some people swear that catnip
tea helps them sleep, while catnip supplements are marketed as remedies for migraines. However, one
possible side effect is...a headache.
4 Jungle juice
Amazonian tribal people say that jaguars love to chew the bark of the tropical vine Banisteriopsis
caapi, which contains potent hallucinogens. To our knowledge, though, there have been no scientific
studies of this. Who'd want to stalk a drug-crazed jaguar?
But it would make sense if it were true, according to Eloy Rodriguez, a physical chemist from
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the University of Miami in Florida. He says jaguars may
chew the plant not because it makes them trip, but because it also purges them of gut parasites.
The plant contains beta-carboline alkaloids, which give people hallucinations because the chemicals
have similar structures to the neurotransmitter serotonin and compete with serotonin for receptor
sites in the brain. Likewise, the alkaloids sabotage the nervous systems of parasitic worms - which
also require serotonin - and paralyse, dislodge and kill the worms.
Rodriguez suspects this antiparasitic effect is one reason why Amazonian tribes themselves use the
drug. They boil the Banisteriopsis plant with others to make a hallucinogenic drink called
ayahuasca, also known as yagé, which local plant doctors prescribe for intestinal disease and to
confer the ability to communicate with spirits and solve crimes.
Rodriguez sampled ayahuasca during a trip to Colombia in the 1970s. "It was pretty ghastly," he
says. "It made me throw up and I experienced some visual distortion, then I basically passed out.
But when I got up in the morning, I felt like an incredible purging had taken place."
5 Trunk and disorderly
Elephants have long been notorious for their passion for alcohol. African elephants can become
extremely excitable and aggressive when they eat the fermenting fruit of several types of palm
tree. And their Asian cousins are even more raucous, regularly killing people and destroying homes
in drunken stampedes.
In December last year, for instance, elephants stumbled across casks of home-made rice beer after
destroying granaries in search of food in the north-eastern state of Assam. They broke the casks,
downed the beer then trampled at least six people to death. The problem seems to be getting worse
because the numbers of elephants have increased in the region since the Assam government put a ban
on hunting around 20 years ago. At the same time, the elephants' habitat has been shrinking due to
deforestation and development.
6 Out of their trees
Don't drink and fly is the moral of this tale. Every winter, conservation groups hear reports of
drunken birds slamming into windows or plummeting to their deaths from buildings and trees. The
drunks are most commonly robins, followed by cedar waxwings.
Scott Fitzgerald of Michigan State University in East Lansing investigated the case of a woman who
was alarmed by waxwings falling to their deaths from the roof of her house. "They were flying
erratically, like they were drunk, and they were diving onto the ground," he says. His team did
post-mortems on two birds. Their crops contained fermented hawthorn berries, and sure enough, liver
alcohol levels were high enough to make the birds completely sloshed.
Another study has suggested that some waxwings eat so many boozy berries that they develop
alcoholic liver disease. The birds are vulnerable because berries are their main food source. In
the winter and spring, berries that have frozen on trees start to thaw and ferment.
But while reports of sozzled birds are common, they are largely anecdotal, says Fitzgerald. He'd
like to see more scientific studies. "I don't know if the birds are attracted to the alcohol, like
some people are attracted to drinking booze," he says. "But drunken birds seem to be a real
problem."
7 Legless lemurs?
Don't try this at home. Black lemurs in Madagascar get their kicks from the toxic chemicals exuded
by millipedes to defend themselves from insect attack. The stuff seems to drive the lemurs wild
with ecstasy.
Christopher Birkinshaw, a botanist from Missouri Botanical Gardens in Madagascar who studies seed
dispersal, spotted this happening when he tracked groups of black lemurs. Sometimes a lemur would
see a large millipede on a branch, pick it up and bite it several times. "Then they start frothing
at the mouth, and they wipe the saliva-covered millipede over their bodies, making a grimacing
gesture," says Birkinshaw. "Their eyelids droop and they look like cats with catmint - they go all
kind of sexy."
It's possible that the lemurs are enjoying some kind of narcotic effect, yet it doesn't seem to
last more than a few minutes. More likely, says Birkinshaw, their strange expressions mean they're
wincing at the horrible taste. The real reason they rub the millipedes on their fur could be that
the cocktail of arthropod toxins, which includes terpenes and cyanides, kills off parasites.
Birkinshaw says this fits with the fact that he's seen a pet lemur do the same with cigarettes. The
lemur steals a cigarette, drools over it then rubs it over its fur. Nicotine in the tobacco could
also ward off parasites.
How would biting millipedes affect people? We don't know - we like to think no one has tried it.
8 Chilled-out koalas
One of the few things many people seem to believe about koalas is that they spend all the time
stoned because their staple diet - eucalyptus leaves - contains all sorts of exotic narcotics. That
would explain why they always look so dozy.
But sadly that's just a myth, according to Ben Moore, a koala ecologist at the Australian National
University in Canberra. They're sluggish animals because their eucalyptus diet is a poor source of
nutrition and they have to preserve their energy, sleeping most of the time. "When they're not
asleep, they're resting or eating," says Moore. "Believe me, this is not the most exciting species
to do extended behavioural observations on."
Eucalyptus leaves contain lots of toxins that would make most animals ill, but koalas have evolved
efficient ways of breaking them down. There's no evidence, anyway, that anything in eucalyptus
leaves has a mind-altering effect. If it did, the koala might not need much to get stoned - it has
one of the smallest known brains for a mammal of its size. Moore thinks the only tipple that might
persuade koalas to get in the party spirit would be Eucalittino - a eucalyptus liqueur made by
Trappist monks in Rome.
Eucalyptus oil is sold as a treatment for colds and sinus problems, hay fever and asthma, among
other things. Overdoses can cause slurred speech and muscle weakness, and even leave you
unconscious. But not in a nice way.
9 Rudolph's red nose
Did reindeer in Lapland ever guzzle hallucinogenic mushrooms? It's hard to know, says Ian Darwin
Edwards of Scotland's Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, who researches the use of plants by the
Sami people of Lapland, the last remaining indigenous tribal group in Europe.
Edwards says there is good historical evidence that shamans of northern European tribes used
mushrooms to induce hallucinations as part of rituals and healing. Their fungus of choice was
probably the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria. This is the red mushroom with white spots that
often appears in fairy-tale books, and it is common in northern birch forests.
Some reports suggest that people fed the mushrooms to reindeer and collected their urine. The
shaman would drink it, then other people would drink his urine. "And we know for a fact that the
hallucinogenic drugs in fly agaric can be passed on through urine in a more refined form," says
Edwards.
Other legends suggest that people ate the mushrooms, then reindeer ate the snow where they peed.
However, the hallucinogens may break down at the sub-zero temperatures of snow, so it is not clear
how much of this is true. "A lot of this is folklore and not science," says Edwards, who has found
no scientific evidence that reindeer actually eat magic mushrooms in any shape or form. "Flying
through the air is a common experience of people taking any hallucinogens. So people find all this
amusing, because they link the mushrooms to why reindeer can fly and why they might have red
noses," says Edwards.
Eating fly agaric mushrooms is extremely dangerous and can be fatal - so don't try it. The
mushrooms contain the toxin muscimol, which is structurally similar to the neurotransmitter
gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and competes with it for binding sites in the brain. Muscimol
induces hallucinations, but the mushroom also causes stomach cramps and violent vomiting.
A 38-year-old web designer we talked to ate a fly agaric mushroom omelette when she was 21 after a
friend recommended it to her. She told New Scientist what happened that night:
"I was on a train going to west London and at one point as the train gathered speed, its noise
became deafening. I looked out the window to see where we were, and to my horror I found I was on a
plane, taking off. But I didn't know where I was going, nor could I remember checking in."
Santa Claus would have understood.
Hazel Muir |
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| Dare |
| Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2003 6:02 pm |
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"Frederick" <mmcneill@fuzzysys.com> wrote
5.800
Quote: New Scientist vol 180 issue 2426 - 20 December 2003, page 56
When cattle munch locoweed - the collective name
for many species of Astragalus and Oxytropis - they
start to lose their marbles after a couple of weeks.
First of all, they become loners, avoiding their herd.
Then they develop an odd, uncertain gait....
They also become belligerent and charge
furiously at anyone who goes into their field.
You've just described me to a T ..... Holy Cow! :-)
Quote: Cats in Japan like a different drug.....
it causes a different behaviour, making them
lie on their backs with their paws in the air.
Uh-oh....that sounds awfully familiar, too...
certainly gives one paws...er, pause.
Buzzed Bovines and crocked cats...
seems seeking intoxication is a "natural" behavior.
Does that make what it means to be "I" somewhat arbitrary?
If the gases in our atmosphere were slightly different
we might be "high" all the time...then who would we be?
Or maybe we're already constantly stoned, thanks
to ma nature...that would explain a lot. :-)
Well, my drug of choice is still coffee....Zoom!
(I mean, one can only stare at ones paws for so long)
Thanks,
Dare |
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| Sir Frederick |
| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2003 10:45 pm |
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Dare wrote:
Quote:
"Frederick" <mmcneill@fuzzysys.com> wrote
Party animals
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=3&id=mg1802426
5.800
New Scientist vol 180 issue 2426 - 20 December 2003, page 56
When cattle munch locoweed - the collective name
for many species of Astragalus and Oxytropis - they
start to lose their marbles after a couple of weeks.
First of all, they become loners, avoiding their herd.
Then they develop an odd, uncertain gait....
They also become belligerent and charge
furiously at anyone who goes into their field.
You've just described me to a T ..... Holy Cow! :-)
Cats in Japan like a different drug.....
it causes a different behaviour, making them
lie on their backs with their paws in the air.
Uh-oh....that sounds awfully familiar, too...
certainly gives one paws...er, pause.
Buzzed Bovines and crocked cats...
seems seeking intoxication is a "natural" behavior.
Does that make what it means to be "I" somewhat arbitrary?
If the gases in our atmosphere were slightly different
we might be "high" all the time...then who would we be?
Or maybe we're already constantly stoned, thanks
to ma nature...that would explain a lot. :-)
Well, my drug of choice is still coffee....Zoom!
(I mean, one can only stare at ones paws for so long)
Thanks,
Dare
Yes, dorking with your brain is bad. Even coffee scares me,
though I use it with limits. I don't consider myself a druggy,
but actually I am with my two espressos a day.
The stronger drugs are just worse. We primates did not evolve
with drugs readily available, thus we have little defenses to them.
They play on basic neuron chemistry, so again there is no defense.
Our anachronisms and finitenesses are real. This despite our folk lore
burdened virtual reality self.
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcneill@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
http://members.cox.net/fmmcneill/
*************************
Phrase of the week :
"Time travel is not only enjoyed by the Scottish nation.
May I bring to the attention of the world that we (the Swansea
Valley Welsh) quite often address tasks "Now, in a minute"
or "I'll do that tomorrow now". Case proven."
-- Stuart Martinson, Swansea, UK
 )))Snort!)
************************* |
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| Dare |
| Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2004 9:02 am |
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"Sir Frederick" <mmcneill@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message news:3FF397E8.14411B9A@fuzzysys.com...
Quote: Dare wrote:
Well, my drug of choice is still coffee....Zoom!
Yes, dorking with your brain is bad. Even coffee scares me,
though I use it with limits. I don't consider myself a druggy,
but actually I am with my two espressos a day.
The stronger drugs are just worse. We primates did not evolve
with drugs readily available, thus we have little defenses to them.
They play on basic neuron chemistry, so again there is no defense.
This post seems particularly appropriate today...
the "morning after" New Year's Eve.
I expect more than a few people are feeling some
of the reasons why dorking with your brain is bad.
Guess we usually recover with time though.
I had never considered the fact that we have a fairly
efficient immune response to defend most of our
body's systems...except brain neurons.
Quote: Our anachronisms and finitenesses are real.
This despite our folk lore burdened virtual reality self.
Understanding that can cause some anxiety...
which, I suppose, could lead to more self-medication.
I often toy with the idea of "doing better" ...
as in making some healthier life-style choices.
It's an amusing game.
I used to make New Year's Resolutions, but I can't
recall ever keeping a single one so I gave it up.
Just do the best I can each day....usually.
This folk lore burdened virtual reality self
appreciates having had the opportunity to
interact with your virtual self this past year...
and looks forward to more interesting discussions
in the year to come.
Thank You, Sir Frederick!
I welcome the return of the Sir.
Dare
Happy New Year to All! |
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