The snake/newt article is a genuinely fun read.
Perhaps I shouldn't have paired it with something grim, but I read them together, and they felt related in that they are both about the ways that nature and evolution can be quite flexible but operate under constraints-- and, also, that species are forced to respond to changes that affect their primary prey.
Muir's earlier post about the blue-ringed octopus is also fascinating.
I didn't know that octopusses and newts used tetrodotoxin as well - I assumed it was confined to puffer fish (and of course Rosa Klebb).
The octopus link for anyone who wants it: https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/14/occasional-paper-the-interesting-home-life-of-the-blue-ringed-octopus/
The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at... but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring's bite is deadly. A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes.
But why? The blue-ring is a modest little creature that lives in shallow water, preying on small fish and crustaceans. A bite that can paralyze a 10 gram fish or a 20 gram crab, sure. A bite that can kill a 70 kilogram human dead? What's the point of that?
Well: the good news is, a recent paper has discovered just why the blue-ringed octopus is so deadly. The bad news is... um, it's kind of disturbing.
For a bit of minor but good environmentalist news, Cassandane sent me a link to this article last week. TL;DR: a certain wildlife preservation effort in western Vermont has been scientifically studied and shown to work.
When Cassandane sent me it, she wasn't aware it had any more significance than that. However, it jogged my memory. After reading it, I dug into the box in the basement with the clippings from the newspaper articles I wrote, way back when that was my job, and found an article I wrote almost 18 years ago about the group applying for the grant that ultimately funded that effort or some precursor to it. (I'd provide a link to it, but the paper doesn't have a great web site, at least for non-subscribers.) Now that's a long time for a payoff.
4: there are other cannibal species where the male follows an analogous strategy to survive: Thanatus fabricii is one of several spider species where the male immobilises the female (in the case of T. fabricii, using both venom and web-spinning) to prevent cannibalism. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347220302360
Natilo would probably like to know that these are Israeli spiders.
Or, no, wait, since they're native to the region they must be Palestinian spiders.
7. Thanatus is a great name for a genus. It's simply a Latinisation of the Greek word for Death.
I wonder who Fabricius is/was.
It's a moderately common English surname. I was at school with a guy called Fabricius. But I wondered about this one's relationship to the spider of death. Discoverer? Describer? First known victim?
Anyone, the obvious solution to alarming environmental statistics is to stop collecting statistics and stop being alarmed. I'm glad the US is taking the lead on this innovative approach.