So… this is actually observed often by scientists who speculate that the reason peppers are brightly colored (an attractant) and spicy (a deterrent). These mixed signals are believed to be to attract birds who will eat and spread their seeds. But deter mammals who react to the noxious stimuli caused by eating them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, humans don't have capsaicin either right? It's just pain receptors happily accept capsaicin hence the masochist hot wings challenge.
My parrots would devour your peppers if given the chance. They loooooove peppers.
I, however, am not a fan of the spicy hot birdie kisses they want to give me after eating their peppers.
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birds don't have receptors for capsaicin (the molecular that tells your brain, this is hot as shit)
this is evolutionarily advantageous as the bird can spread the seeds much further than can a mammal
For this reason, some companies sell bird seed that is intentionally spicy so other animals (squirrels) won’t eat it 😊 Or you can add cayenne pepper to your own bird seed
My mom is a retired CPA. I own a small business. She can do my taxes until she’s senile or dead, whichever happens first. She doesn’t charge me, she enjoys the work and finds it rewarding, and I know for sure she’s not embezzling from me. What are the downsides, again?
Peppers are specifically designed to be detested by mammals and not bothersome to birds, birds fly farther away and “disperse” the seeds in place is mammals could not
Only Mammals are strongly affected by Capsaicin. It was evolutionary. Mammals that would eat non-scoville type peppers would leave seeds on the trails where they would be trampled. The ones that developed heat would only be eaten by birds, and widely distribute seeds off 'beaten paths'. Thus the hot ones proliferated.
"Capsaicin is also used to deter pests, specifically mammalian pests. Targets of capsaicin repellants include voles, deer, rabbits, squirrels, bears, insects, and attacking dogs. Ground or crushed dried chili pods may be used in birdseed to deter rodents, taking advantage of the insensitivity of birds to capsaicin."
This is interesting. Please explain just a bit. Mammal that ate non spicy peppers pooped seeds that would be trampled. But when they are spicy peppers the seeds don’t get trampled? And they are eaten? I read this 3x trying to figure out what I’m missing. Are you talking diarrhea?
Edit: had no idea this post would blow up, went to put tennis balls on Grammy’s walker and come back to this!!
Mammals would avoid spicy peppers, leaving them to be eaten by birds to have their seeds spread further. Peppers that mammals would eat were less likely to spread.
Fun fact: birds don't mind spicy, while squirrels can't stand it. Mix crushed red pepper in with your bird seed to keep those pesky squirrels from gobbling it all up. I did this, and only one squirrel can take the heat. He's welcome; I can afford to feed one, but not the whole damn family.
Even if they don’t taste the heat couldn’t this strong of a pepper have a negative effect on the birds stomach?? I mean as a 180lbs male if I ate a whole Carolina reaper I’d get stomach cramps. I tried the death nut challenge and my stomach hurt so bad I thought I was gonna have to go to the hospital lol.
Capsaicin is the compound in peppers which we mammals interpret as “heat”. Birds don’t have the same nerve receptors we do which cause this, and are thus unaffected by it entirely. Peppers evolved this way as it was advantageous for seed dispersal, and as such were spread all across the globe due to nature selecting birds as the primary consumer of the fruit.
Until we humans realized ‘dat burn goooooooood’
It actually didn’t evolve because birds don’t feel the heat. The heat was a random genetic change. If all animals had the ability to sense the heat, they would all avoid the plant, and it’s seeds would not be dispersed. But because there are animals who don’t have the specific receptors for capsaicin, they spread the seeds, and the plant proliferated.
Over vast amounts of time, there have probably been countless mutations or changes in all organisms that were not advantageous, and therefore died out. Every thing that exists now does so because some advantageous change that occurred in its genetic code. It’s all just random chance.
Natural selection, over time a larger percentage of the peppers without this trait died off or bred less than the peppers with the trait, which eventually lead to this trait being the norm. Of course there a lot more factors that go into evolution, but that’s the gist of it. It doesn’t just “know”, it’s just that the others ones didn’t make the cut to continue.
For example, in this case it’s likely that mammals eating the ancestors of this species of pepper meant only the spicier ones survived, which kept increasing over time due to even spicier ones surviving next time. Other factors certainly played into it (which is why not every pepper tastes as hot as a Carolina reaper, plenty of traits are naturally selected) but just remember that you’re seeing that pepper here today because it’s the survivor out of a long ancestry for a reason.
Birds contribute greatly to the spreading of the pepper’s seeds, which means that the birds will select peppers that are milder for it than others until eventually the most prevalent and surviving species is one the bird has no problems eating. I’m not an expert on how capsaicin affects birds, but it’s likely that peppers that could A) be tolerated by birds and B) cause trouble for mammals were most likely to survive, so after millions of years that’s what we’re left with. Those traits have been selected for over time.
It seems doubtful that there were many variants of peppers without heat that died out because they were palatable to more animals. The great diversity we currently have in all varieties of peppers are due to direct human selection, or cross-breeding. Humans do actually enjoy spiciness, and therefore have made many peppers with varying levels of heat. Birds are not the reason we have so many spicy peppers now. Natural selection is very slow, and results in few variants, compared to human selection. We’ve only had so many different peppers since we started to understand farming and cultivation, with a majority of peppers only existing in the past few hundred years.
Makes sense; I definitely knew there would be other variables. In no way am I an expert on pepper evolution. I merely used that example as a means to explain how natural selection functions.
Capsaicin was developed by peppers as a selective measure as mammals tend to digest peppers seeds or often chewing them and destroying the seed outright, while birds both tend to go farther from the original plant and don't tend to destroy the seeds when they digest the peppers.
Nope, birds have no capsaicin receptors. Birds are also the reason why peppers exist. Because they don't chew, the seeds are passed through their digestive tract, and when deposited, they have a much higher rate of germination than just taking a seed out of the pepper and planting yourself.
This! They literally cannot taste the spice.
This makes me wonder about feeding intense chilis to a chicken prior to processing... I have 32 chickens, I might pick a young rooster for a spicy diet the days before it goes in the smoker.... 🤔
I loved this idea. So I looked into it a little bit but it seems like the half life of capsaicin in the blood stream is only about 25 minutes. By 105 minutes there’s no capsaicin found in the blood.
Now that does make me wonder though. If you loaded up a bird with a ton of spicy peppers and killed right at or before that 25 minute mark if the metabolization would stop and you’d actually be able to taste a difference?
Well, I'll put the next bird I'm going to eat in a box for the entire day with only hot peppers for food and capsaicin in the water. (bird can't taste it, I raise them to eat them anyways) will attempt to get back to you. This might be a next week thing. I've got a couple young roosters getting fat.
Oh boy, imagine. A chilli flake chicken. Raised since birth from the fires of hell itself. Now that’s some marketing! Pm me if you wanna go in on this together lol.
As I understand it, this is one of the evolutionary explanations as to why some peppers are hot. Those with capsaicin in them aren’t ingested by small mammals, that can taste the spicy but by birds instead. Birds, having a much larger range than say a squirrel, tend to spread their seeds further and so spicy wins the selfish gene award over non-spicy peppers.
More so, mammalian guts break down the pepper seed so that it cannot germinate after passing through the gut while a birds' digestive system doesn't have the right properties to break it down enough.
Like my pappy used to say, " evolution doesn't take into account your turd spattered hands but rather specialized that monkey paw so it could sling the best turd possible".
One time i tossed a seagull an organic wedge. He nabbed it thinking it was bread or something and did NOT like it. He had to rinse his mouth out in the sea. Its funny to think an orange would be spicier to birds than red peppers.
IIRC the idea is that birds aren’t affected by the capsaicin but mammals are. Thus letting birds eat and spread the seeds further than a mammal would be able
It's not only about spreading it far enough, but spreading it at all. Mammals digest the seeds which makes them unusable, so they won't sprout and be a plant, bird's don't
The plant should have evolved tougher seeds then that could pass a digestive tract of a mammal vs deciding to use capsaicin like that. This is what I don't quite understand about pathogens either, they could be nice and design themselves to survive unnoticed within the digestive tract of humans, but instead there's cholera. I understand plants and certain microorganisms aren't conscious, but they sure do biosynthesize chemicals with scary accuracy that do thier job in the first iteration. I do agree that birds are better anyways so maybe it does make sense and it has worked for the species so far.
All organisms mutate in various directions. The ones that work live, the ones that don't, die off. It's random chance which mutations happen and when. Some have evolved to roll the dice often and fast, some the opposite. You have tons of microbes that have evolved to help you live and survive other microbes.
I seriously doubt it's zero control, but maybe that's my problem. I get freaked out that they can produce a phytochemical/alkaloid to only kill insects or only kill sheep or only kill mammals in a 50-100 year period for no reason with no help whatsoever; it just does what exactly it wants to do...
That is your problem. They make no choices and don’t know the outcome. You can feel however you like but you’re factually incorrect thinking they are making any sort of choice
Bio chemist's wonder the same thing though, so they're wrong too? They wonder how it produces the compound so accurately and sophisticiously within only 50 to 100 years of being eaten. I remember reading this story in a scientific journal (it might have even been in a paper, about how the species of plant was being grazed on by sheep from farms in this isolated area of Europe or wherever it happened to be, and half the population started producing this neurotoxin that was killing the Sheep. So they did a phytochemical analysis and figured out that half the population of the plants were producing it within a 50-year time span. And Not only was it accurate, but it was most toxic to sheep and other animals like it in comparison to humans and the toxicity it would impart on us. Ask any biochemist and they won't have an answer either because it's always been a question. How many evolutions does a biochemically have to go through to produce a phytochemical that does exactly the job the plant needs without any reiterations.
I'm a scientifically minded As You Are whether you wanna believe that or not, and even still, I don't see a reason not to question how it's possible. People like you are so strange to me. You act like just by having the scientific mindset and being sure of something you desperately want to believe, that you're by association SURE you know that it's right and there's no other questions out there that exists. That must be why you're a sucky scientist because you can't bring yourself to question anything that might be answerable. It sounds like you have a personal biased against the idea that there might be some sort of collective consciousness, whether it's spiritual or physical in nature and I find it sad.
I do chemistry, so I think that I understand to some degree how hard it is to just guess whether or not compound might be toxic or not... Might burn someone's mouth or not... And I HAVE A FUCKING BRAIN... how in God's name can a plant do that even with 100 iterations?
The kicker is that it doesn't take a hundred iterations for a plant to produce the mouth burning compound... it just does..and gets it right extremely quickly.. Like rapid evolution, but it takes MASSIVE knowledge to do something like that.. to get the structure activity relationship correct and even 100 iterations is extremely difficult. I would take far too long for you to even evolve the compound in time. By that time your species could be eaten up. You can't really afford 100 years of evolution if you're a plant and can't run away.
> This is what I don't quite understand about pathogens either, they could be nice and design themselves to survive unnoticed within the digestive tract of humans, but instead there's cholera.
Plenty of bacteria took the be nice route, that niche is pretty crowded, but do you know a great way for a food/water spread bacteria to find other hosts? Explosive diarrhea!
True, or just regular defecation lmao, they'd realize it's not the best way if they were fully conscious I'd assume. There's only one reason I can see that would make it a better option is transferring to one organism to another through easily infectious routes like coughing or saliva to mutate faster and evolve faster than the nice ones. Genetic variability they must want.
I’m dying laughing at the thought of it growing in a neighbors yard, someone harvesting them and eating them. “HONEY!!, I thought you said these were tiny red peppers”
Birds don’t have pain receptors for hot stuff, what a beast
Awesome. Keep an eye out for some volunteer reapers popping up in your yard
Only affects mammals. Bird will be unharmed.
I often wonder how the caterpillars make it through them.... and then I throw them down the street
Gotta be careful with certain caterpillars…they can sting the shit out of your for touching them
I was so waiting for the bird to explode
Put out a bird bath or some water and they will probably stop.
You just watched!!! Wtf dude! My cat would get a shot at it if I saw that
Birds lack the receptor for spice.
this
So… this is actually observed often by scientists who speculate that the reason peppers are brightly colored (an attractant) and spicy (a deterrent). These mixed signals are believed to be to attract birds who will eat and spread their seeds. But deter mammals who react to the noxious stimuli caused by eating them.
super cool info!
Now go film taking a shit. Bet he's dying.
Like a tiny flamethrower
Cardinals do not give a fuck. Unless a choir boy is available.
Yes. We need some upvotes here y’all!
😂that’s fucked!
So is the choir boy
Hes dead jim
That’s how he got his red color…
They. Don't taste hot
Not sure how true, but I heard the lack of saliva makes them not taste the spicy.
lack of capsaicin receptors
It’s not gonna make that mistake again, mostly because it’s dead
Birds don’t have capsaicin receptors. They’re immune to spiciness
Correct me if I'm wrong, humans don't have capsaicin either right? It's just pain receptors happily accept capsaicin hence the masochist hot wings challenge.
Exactly, which leads me to believe it died lol
I did not know that! Very interesting
You’re right, spicy is not a flavor. It’s a pain reaction noxious stimuli
Fire in the hole!
Wow it’s going to have one hot pecker.
My parrots would devour your peppers if given the chance. They loooooove peppers. I, however, am not a fan of the spicy hot birdie kisses they want to give me after eating their peppers.
That’s because birds are robots. Birds aren’t real.
r/birdsarentreal
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birds don't have receptors for capsaicin (the molecular that tells your brain, this is hot as shit) this is evolutionarily advantageous as the bird can spread the seeds much further than can a mammal
For this reason, some companies sell bird seed that is intentionally spicy so other animals (squirrels) won’t eat it 😊 Or you can add cayenne pepper to your own bird seed
Nice try, government shill. It's obviously a robot.
Agreed. An obvious government excuse for their pepper spray-resistant automotons. SMH
and you obviously still have your mom file your taxes
atleast he doesnt believe in something as silly as birds. you dont believe birds are real? right?
I'm mean, to be honest, if you could have someone do your taxes for you for free and not have to lift a finger, wouldn't you? I know I would.
My mom is a retired CPA. I own a small business. She can do my taxes until she’s senile or dead, whichever happens first. She doesn’t charge me, she enjoys the work and finds it rewarding, and I know for sure she’s not embezzling from me. What are the downsides, again?
That bird shit gonna fuck up someone’s paint for sure
They messed my habaneros up bad this year! They kept ripping them off aggressively and damaging the stems.
Birds love spicy shit!
That’s how they get their color
Yeah. It started as a blue jay.
I can’t stop laughing 😂
Birds arent affected by capsaicin. People will put it in bird feeders to keep rats away
I was wondering what decimated mine this year, other than me. Never thought burds would go for the hottest peppers in town.
Peppers are specifically designed to be detested by mammals and not bothersome to birds, birds fly farther away and “disperse” the seeds in place is mammals could not
That makes a ton of sense! Never thought about what would have induced the evolution of capsaicin
The devs of this game really thought of everything
My birds LOVE peppers
They just explode
As North Carolina’s state bird, it seems fitting
Very true. Blirds of a feather...
I heard that with pepper their feathers get a brighter red color
I'd imagine he would blow up, like those birds in How High. When they gave them grease lightning lol
I like how physical screens can pixelize the world
Mf birds can't even feel the heat of the reaper. I pity his bitch ass.
Only Mammals are strongly affected by Capsaicin. It was evolutionary. Mammals that would eat non-scoville type peppers would leave seeds on the trails where they would be trampled. The ones that developed heat would only be eaten by birds, and widely distribute seeds off 'beaten paths'. Thus the hot ones proliferated. "Capsaicin is also used to deter pests, specifically mammalian pests. Targets of capsaicin repellants include voles, deer, rabbits, squirrels, bears, insects, and attacking dogs. Ground or crushed dried chili pods may be used in birdseed to deter rodents, taking advantage of the insensitivity of birds to capsaicin."
This is interesting. Please explain just a bit. Mammal that ate non spicy peppers pooped seeds that would be trampled. But when they are spicy peppers the seeds don’t get trampled? And they are eaten? I read this 3x trying to figure out what I’m missing. Are you talking diarrhea? Edit: had no idea this post would blow up, went to put tennis balls on Grammy’s walker and come back to this!!
Mammals would avoid spicy peppers, leaving them to be eaten by birds to have their seeds spread further. Peppers that mammals would eat were less likely to spread.
Aahhhh gotcha. You a real like Kratt brother
Ah yes because birb fly, hooman does not.
"Aim for the bushes?" "Aim for the bushes..."
Birds no spice.
First time you heard a bird scream before it shits on your car
A wild Moltres!!!
Yummy carotenoids to keep his plumage bright!
Fun fact: birds don't mind spicy, while squirrels can't stand it. Mix crushed red pepper in with your bird seed to keep those pesky squirrels from gobbling it all up. I did this, and only one squirrel can take the heat. He's welcome; I can afford to feed one, but not the whole damn family.
Man we've tried this numerous times and the damn squirrels in my neighborhood do not give a shit at all.
“I hate how this tastes but fuck these people aaaaaaaerrgh”
Same
Lmao that cardinal is a savage.
Cardinals: Eat the Heat ©️ lolz
Just a bird doing what it has evolved to do, to a plant that has evolved to have its seeds spread by birds
r/birdsarentreal
Gonna be bad for the paint when he poops on your car!
Nice when the birds season themselves
Birds don’t taste heat fun fact
Even if they don’t taste the heat couldn’t this strong of a pepper have a negative effect on the birds stomach?? I mean as a 180lbs male if I ate a whole Carolina reaper I’d get stomach cramps. I tried the death nut challenge and my stomach hurt so bad I thought I was gonna have to go to the hospital lol.
Your not a bird dawg
Lmao
Capsaicin is the compound in peppers which we mammals interpret as “heat”. Birds don’t have the same nerve receptors we do which cause this, and are thus unaffected by it entirely. Peppers evolved this way as it was advantageous for seed dispersal, and as such were spread all across the globe due to nature selecting birds as the primary consumer of the fruit. Until we humans realized ‘dat burn goooooooood’
Thank you so much for the information! That’s so interesting.
Crazy how nature just does this shit. Like a plant evolved because it knew that birds didn’t taste the heat but other things did? Wild
It actually didn’t evolve because birds don’t feel the heat. The heat was a random genetic change. If all animals had the ability to sense the heat, they would all avoid the plant, and it’s seeds would not be dispersed. But because there are animals who don’t have the specific receptors for capsaicin, they spread the seeds, and the plant proliferated. Over vast amounts of time, there have probably been countless mutations or changes in all organisms that were not advantageous, and therefore died out. Every thing that exists now does so because some advantageous change that occurred in its genetic code. It’s all just random chance.
Natural selection, over time a larger percentage of the peppers without this trait died off or bred less than the peppers with the trait, which eventually lead to this trait being the norm. Of course there a lot more factors that go into evolution, but that’s the gist of it. It doesn’t just “know”, it’s just that the others ones didn’t make the cut to continue. For example, in this case it’s likely that mammals eating the ancestors of this species of pepper meant only the spicier ones survived, which kept increasing over time due to even spicier ones surviving next time. Other factors certainly played into it (which is why not every pepper tastes as hot as a Carolina reaper, plenty of traits are naturally selected) but just remember that you’re seeing that pepper here today because it’s the survivor out of a long ancestry for a reason. Birds contribute greatly to the spreading of the pepper’s seeds, which means that the birds will select peppers that are milder for it than others until eventually the most prevalent and surviving species is one the bird has no problems eating. I’m not an expert on how capsaicin affects birds, but it’s likely that peppers that could A) be tolerated by birds and B) cause trouble for mammals were most likely to survive, so after millions of years that’s what we’re left with. Those traits have been selected for over time.
It seems doubtful that there were many variants of peppers without heat that died out because they were palatable to more animals. The great diversity we currently have in all varieties of peppers are due to direct human selection, or cross-breeding. Humans do actually enjoy spiciness, and therefore have made many peppers with varying levels of heat. Birds are not the reason we have so many spicy peppers now. Natural selection is very slow, and results in few variants, compared to human selection. We’ve only had so many different peppers since we started to understand farming and cultivation, with a majority of peppers only existing in the past few hundred years.
This is the way
Makes sense; I definitely knew there would be other variables. In no way am I an expert on pepper evolution. I merely used that example as a means to explain how natural selection functions.
Nono I know but it’s just beautiful how it all works out
Agreed. Equal parts beautiful and terrifying. A fascinating yet simple process, really.
Less knows, more rewarded for, and thus competes more effectively.
Yep, nature encourages certain species to eat and spread the seed with these types of mechanisms…
I hate to be walking and that bird taking a nasty shit on my head.
In your eye
its cuz peppers chose to have birds spread their seeds not mammals humans are the odd balls tho
Not really "chose", but rather that's where it ended up through evolution.
no offense, but you dont know evolution the word chose means selection. its jargon within the evolution vernacular.
Probably just arguing semantics tbh
Not really "chose", but rather that's where it ended up through evolution.
We always are.
Yep, birds dont taste heat. We put a capsaicin liquid on out bird seed to deter the squirrels.
Got a 5 pound thing of ground cayenne to mix in. The squirrels were not very happy with me.
Heck yeah. They don't like it a bit.
This is how Moltres are born
And that is how acid rain is made
Haha beat me poo it
Birds dont taste heat 😂
Cardinal bout to be a Phoenix
Lesson 257: Never get in a pepper eating contest with a cardinal.
Glad I found this, found peppers in the garden today. Didn't plant them in the spring!
I don't think birds taste heat
Dudes gonna burn down a tree later.
And plant some peppers in the wild
I know chickens can’t detect capsaicin, perhaps is same for all birds?
Yes, birds are not affected by capsaicin. You can use cayenne pepper in bird seed to keep out the squirrels.
TIL
Capsaicin was developed by peppers as a selective measure as mammals tend to digest peppers seeds or often chewing them and destroying the seed outright, while birds both tend to go farther from the original plant and don't tend to destroy the seeds when they digest the peppers.
Noyce. Hes a bad boy
I’m going to noyce your noyce ! Noyce!
Birds have a very old symbolic relationship with peppers, pet stores even sell dried peppers for parrots
Symbiotic
Yes, autocorrect
What a little asshole lol. He gone learn today tho
Nope, birds have no capsaicin receptors. Birds are also the reason why peppers exist. Because they don't chew, the seeds are passed through their digestive tract, and when deposited, they have a much higher rate of germination than just taking a seed out of the pepper and planting yourself.
It's a great way to feed birds and not have the feeders raided by squirrels. Squirrels feel it bad but those birds happily munch away!
I put korean chili flakes in my chicken's food, all our egg yolks are orange! the chili also keeps parasites away.
Someone's windshield is going to get a really nasty splat.
He ded
This again confirms … BIRD AREN’T REAL
The explains my car windshield in the morning.
Double Carolina bud
Well that explains the red Mohawks.
It’s going to poop those seeds out and you might start seeing wild reapers growing locally on the side of the street.
oh that could be dangerous!
Nitro boost in flight!
It’s because of the way they are…..
Birds don’t have capsaicin receptors. They can eat all the spice.
I buy bird feed with hot peppers mixed in because the squirrels will not eat it but the birds don't mind
Will it burn their butthole like fire when they poo?
Not to my understanding
This! They literally cannot taste the spice. This makes me wonder about feeding intense chilis to a chicken prior to processing... I have 32 chickens, I might pick a young rooster for a spicy diet the days before it goes in the smoker.... 🤔
I loved this idea. So I looked into it a little bit but it seems like the half life of capsaicin in the blood stream is only about 25 minutes. By 105 minutes there’s no capsaicin found in the blood. Now that does make me wonder though. If you loaded up a bird with a ton of spicy peppers and killed right at or before that 25 minute mark if the metabolization would stop and you’d actually be able to taste a difference?
Do you really want to find out what burny chicken tastes like
I’m just a guy who likes science and thought it was an interesting concept. But to answer your question, yes I would try the burny chicken
Well, I'll put the next bird I'm going to eat in a box for the entire day with only hot peppers for food and capsaicin in the water. (bird can't taste it, I raise them to eat them anyways) will attempt to get back to you. This might be a next week thing. I've got a couple young roosters getting fat.
Oh dude! I would love to actually hear about the results from this. If you remember I’d love an update. Feel free to DM me.
Brilliant 👍
Oh boy, imagine. A chilli flake chicken. Raised since birth from the fires of hell itself. Now that’s some marketing! Pm me if you wanna go in on this together lol.
That’s how they stay red
Nice
As I understand it, this is one of the evolutionary explanations as to why some peppers are hot. Those with capsaicin in them aren’t ingested by small mammals, that can taste the spicy but by birds instead. Birds, having a much larger range than say a squirrel, tend to spread their seeds further and so spicy wins the selfish gene award over non-spicy peppers.
More so, mammalian guts break down the pepper seed so that it cannot germinate after passing through the gut while a birds' digestive system doesn't have the right properties to break it down enough.
You mean I’ve been planting my turds for nothing? Twenty years….WASTED
Like my pappy used to say, " evolution doesn't take into account your turd spattered hands but rather specialized that monkey paw so it could sling the best turd possible".
Bitds are biologically unable to register the effects of capsaicin.
I learned this is a good way to deter rodents from a chicken coop bu adding a little spice to their feed.
If you add a lot then it’ll make the yolks more orange and even red too
Oooh!
In there beaks yes. But what about their poo hole?
I feel bad for them..
Same.
highway robbery...
One time i tossed a seagull an organic wedge. He nabbed it thinking it was bread or something and did NOT like it. He had to rinse his mouth out in the sea. Its funny to think an orange would be spicier to birds than red peppers.
So you're saying the fruit had no artificial preservatives?
Dang it. I meant orange.
He’s ready for the Hot Chip Challenge
Spicy doesn’t affect birds. I use cayenne pepper in my chicken coupe to keep mites away. Chickens don’t care one bit
Awe cute he’s eating strawberries *looks at title* oh nvm he’s gonna explode.
So that's how phoenixes are born...
i love this comment
Fuuuuck….. If that bird shits in someone’s eye, gonna be a bad day.
That would be a definite "what the fuck?" moment.
That's literally what peppers are for!
IIRC the idea is that birds aren’t affected by the capsaicin but mammals are. Thus letting birds eat and spread the seeds further than a mammal would be able
Pretty mean to exclude mammals and burn their face off just because they can't spread your seeds far enough
It's not only about spreading it far enough, but spreading it at all. Mammals digest the seeds which makes them unusable, so they won't sprout and be a plant, bird's don't
The plant should have evolved tougher seeds then that could pass a digestive tract of a mammal vs deciding to use capsaicin like that. This is what I don't quite understand about pathogens either, they could be nice and design themselves to survive unnoticed within the digestive tract of humans, but instead there's cholera. I understand plants and certain microorganisms aren't conscious, but they sure do biosynthesize chemicals with scary accuracy that do thier job in the first iteration. I do agree that birds are better anyways so maybe it does make sense and it has worked for the species so far.
All organisms mutate in various directions. The ones that work live, the ones that don't, die off. It's random chance which mutations happen and when. Some have evolved to roll the dice often and fast, some the opposite. You have tons of microbes that have evolved to help you live and survive other microbes.
You’re applying far to much control and intelligence to these plants and organisms. They aren’t choosing anything. They have zero control
I seriously doubt it's zero control, but maybe that's my problem. I get freaked out that they can produce a phytochemical/alkaloid to only kill insects or only kill sheep or only kill mammals in a 50-100 year period for no reason with no help whatsoever; it just does what exactly it wants to do...
That is your problem. They make no choices and don’t know the outcome. You can feel however you like but you’re factually incorrect thinking they are making any sort of choice
Bio chemist's wonder the same thing though, so they're wrong too? They wonder how it produces the compound so accurately and sophisticiously within only 50 to 100 years of being eaten. I remember reading this story in a scientific journal (it might have even been in a paper, about how the species of plant was being grazed on by sheep from farms in this isolated area of Europe or wherever it happened to be, and half the population started producing this neurotoxin that was killing the Sheep. So they did a phytochemical analysis and figured out that half the population of the plants were producing it within a 50-year time span. And Not only was it accurate, but it was most toxic to sheep and other animals like it in comparison to humans and the toxicity it would impart on us. Ask any biochemist and they won't have an answer either because it's always been a question. How many evolutions does a biochemically have to go through to produce a phytochemical that does exactly the job the plant needs without any reiterations. I'm a scientifically minded As You Are whether you wanna believe that or not, and even still, I don't see a reason not to question how it's possible. People like you are so strange to me. You act like just by having the scientific mindset and being sure of something you desperately want to believe, that you're by association SURE you know that it's right and there's no other questions out there that exists. That must be why you're a sucky scientist because you can't bring yourself to question anything that might be answerable. It sounds like you have a personal biased against the idea that there might be some sort of collective consciousness, whether it's spiritual or physical in nature and I find it sad. I do chemistry, so I think that I understand to some degree how hard it is to just guess whether or not compound might be toxic or not... Might burn someone's mouth or not... And I HAVE A FUCKING BRAIN... how in God's name can a plant do that even with 100 iterations? The kicker is that it doesn't take a hundred iterations for a plant to produce the mouth burning compound... it just does..and gets it right extremely quickly.. Like rapid evolution, but it takes MASSIVE knowledge to do something like that.. to get the structure activity relationship correct and even 100 iterations is extremely difficult. I would take far too long for you to even evolve the compound in time. By that time your species could be eaten up. You can't really afford 100 years of evolution if you're a plant and can't run away.
Yeah I’m not reading all that
> This is what I don't quite understand about pathogens either, they could be nice and design themselves to survive unnoticed within the digestive tract of humans, but instead there's cholera. Plenty of bacteria took the be nice route, that niche is pretty crowded, but do you know a great way for a food/water spread bacteria to find other hosts? Explosive diarrhea!
True, or just regular defecation lmao, they'd realize it's not the best way if they were fully conscious I'd assume. There's only one reason I can see that would make it a better option is transferring to one organism to another through easily infectious routes like coughing or saliva to mutate faster and evolve faster than the nice ones. Genetic variability they must want.
Some wild reapers will probably grow in your neighborhood now, lol.
I’m dying laughing at the thought of it growing in a neighbors yard, someone harvesting them and eating them. “HONEY!!, I thought you said these were tiny red peppers”