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Living with Poison

2022.01.09

How do you feel when you hear the word "poison"? You will probably feel scared, or you might remember scenes from some detective movies or TV programs. Obviously, the term does not have any positive connotations.

 

Despite the impression we receive from the word, poison sometimes plays an essential role in our lives. For example, professor Funayama at Nihon Pharmaceutical University explains that there is basically no distinction between "poison" and "medicine". According to him, we distinguish the words only by whether the element is beneficial to the human body. We call it “poison” when it does harm to our bodies. Medicine, on the other hand, does good for our bodies. Both have in common that they have a particular influence on our bodies. We, in a sense, live with poison.

 

A lot of creatures live with the poison as well. For example, some animals risk their mobility to eat poison, and others intake it to protect themselves from predators. You often see sleeping koalas when you visit a zoo. They often spend their days sleeping most of the time. This is because they cannot survive without eating eucalyptus leaves, a plant which is poisonous to their body. They sleep to digest the harmful substances in the leaves.

 

Some frogs and snakes intake poison from their food and utilize it to protect themselves. Toads, for example, have a potent poison called bufotoxin in their body. Dogs and cats sometimes, unfortunately, lose their lives when they eat the frog while they are taking a walk. The tiger keelback, yamakagashi in Japanese, are bold enough to eat the poisonous toads, and they use the toad-derived poison as a weapon against their predators. Poison dart frogs, toxic frogs, save poison in their body using the same method. Wild poison dart frogs eat some ants and millipedes (yasude in Japanese) with poison and keep the poison in their skins. Interestingly, captive-bred poison frogs lose their toxicity because they don't have the chance to capture such food.

 

"Poison" might sound scary, but the substance with the label can be a blessing to animals, including us. It will be interesting to see how other creatures make use of poison.

 

 

Photo Credit: Doug Brown@pexels.com

 

 

Blog Quiz

Q1. According to professor Funayama, how are poison and medicine different?

Q2. What can happen when dogs eat a toad?

Q3. What do tiger keelbacks and wild poison dart frogs have in common?

 

Scroll down for the answers to the quiz.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quiz Answers

Q1. A substance is called poison when it has a negative influence on the human body. Medicine refers to a substance with a positive effect on the human body.

Q2. It can lead to a deadly accident for the pet.

Q3. They both capture poisonous creatures and save the poison in their body.

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