A cliche honorable warrior race ala the klingons, except replace “warfare” with “cooking”. Still gruff and argumentative and quick to throw down, except their idea of throwing down requires them and their opponent to step into a kitchen and make the best goddamn pies they can as if their lives depend on it.
“Shepard, your pie crust is bland and tasteless. Only the krogans truly know the meaning of honor.”
Random worldbuilding time!
Their homeplanet of [SPECIES] is a world where nearly everything is incredibly toxic.
This is the result of an unusual accident of evolution, their homeworld was the sight of two separate lasting abiogenesis events. Both forms of life have biochemistries often highly toxic to the other. Somehow, this did not prevent endosymbiosis much like that which happened on Earth from occurring, and the symbiotes managed to tailor their processes and products to avoid poisoning each other. All complex life on their world is the result of this union.
However, this means that evolution has a ready made arsenal of toxins to deploy against other organisms by making slight alterations. Sometimes by selective pressure to avoid predation, sometimes by coincidence, most native lifeforms are toxic to most other native lifeforms. Consumers are highly specific to certain kinds of food, and as such tend to have very restricted ranges where they can live.
But not the [SPECIES], who as intelligent tool using beings, became nomads when they overpopulated their native range.
But their was a problem- there was little that they could eat in their new homes without careful preparation. A lot of trial and error went into food preparation, as not all toxins could be burned or washed or filtered away easily, and many were sacrificed for the “good of the tribe”. Chefs, those who prepared the food, became the most elite and celebrated members of the tribe, with advanced skill and knowledge of tricky detoxification methods. It was expected that most members of the tribe have some ability in this area, and it became a norm that everyone must be the first to try their own food. Poisoning was a relatively common cause of death.
“Cooking duels” to the death became a thing, where chefs fight for their honor by attempting to prepare some especially dangerous rare delicacy- which they must be the first to taste.
Over time more knowledge and technology made food production much simpler and less dangerous, but the traditions remained as [SPECIES] entered the industrial age and, eventually, traveled between stars for the first time.
And so: a society of angry, obsessive chefs IN SPACE.
…
(I have no idea how plausible or coherent this is I was bored)
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #food #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #(this post didn’t especially bother me) #(but I thought people who were familiar with my tagging system and had similar issues might be blacklisting that tag) #death tw
If poison reaches its expiry date, will it become more poisonous or less poisonous?
probably the expiry date indicates when it will lose its effectiveness as a poison, unless the expiry date was for something unrelated to its poisonous properties, which I’m having trouble coming up with a potential example of
Medication comes to mind. There are meds where the definition of a “toxically high dose” broadens if the dose in question is very old.
A lot of dog owners give their dogs peanut butter. It’s great as a treat given in small quantities and most dogs love the stuff. But PLEASE check the ingredients before giving it to your dog. There is a sweetener called XYLITOL, often found in chewing gum, dental hygiene products and it can also be purchased as a sweetener itself, and now they’ve started putting it in some peanut butters. It is EXTREMELY TOXIC to dogs and can be potentially fatal if not dealt with immediately when ingested by a dog. Check the ingredients, if XYLITOL is mentioned then PLEASE DO NOT FEED IT TO YOUR DOG! If you suspect your dog has ingested XYLITOL, which can often happen through dogs finding chewing gum in bags (they like the smell of mint), or if they do happen to have peanut butter containing it, call your vet straight away. I’m a dog trainer, I see lots of goods, but I also see the bads, and the last thing I want to see is dogs coming to harm because people are unaware of this so please if there’s one thing you do then reblog this or at least tell people about it. Thank you so much!
THIS IS 100% LEGIT. Xylitol can cause a HUGE surge of insulin in dogs and in higher doses is toxic to their livers. Three grams of xylitol can kill a 65lb dog.
#death tw #dog #the more you know #we gave our dog an empty peanut butter jar to lick the remnants out of yesterday #luckily Wegmans regular peanut butter doesn’t have xylitol #(no we don’t have Wegmans in Canada) #(Wegmans peanut butter is cheaper and tastier than No Name so we buy a bunch whenever we go to America)
There are really only four known groups of spiders with medically significant venom- the rest can’t do much worse than a bee sting. (Of course, some individuals can have allergic reactions to spider venom, just like bee stings.)
These four groups are: the widows (Latrodectus sp.), the brown spiders (Loxosceles sp.), the Australian funnel web spiders (Atraxus sp.), and the Brazilian wandering spiders (Phoneutria sp.).
Black widows are found across the U.S. and in parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Despite their reputation, most black widow bites are harmless. Many are dry, with no venom injected, and about 75% of those that do contain venom only produce localized pain with no other symptoms.
Occasionally, more severe symptoms do develop in the form of latrodectism. This can cause symptoms such as generalized pain, headache, nausea, sweating, and racing heart. Most of these symptoms resolve within a week and for more severe cases, an antivenom is available. There has only been one death recorded from a black widow bite in US in the last 50 years, and it was an elderly man. Several thousand people in the US get bitten by black widows every year without suffering any major ill effects.
The brown spiders include the brown recluse spider, famed for its necrotizing bite. However, as with the black widow, the deadliness of this spider has been greatly exaggerated. Like the black widow, brown spiders are found worldwide. Also like the black widow, their bites are often venom-free, and even envenomated bites produce nothing more than mild irritation.
Here’s a map of where brown spiders are found in the US:
The brown recluse is very rare in Ohio specifically, so you don’t have much to worry about.
Bites with high concentrations of brown recluse venom can produce a necrotic skin lesion that is slow to heal. About 66% of these lesions heal on their own without complications. Those that do not may require skin grafts or corrective surgery. A systemic response, which is the response that may become fatal, occurs in about 1% of bite victims. In the last decade there have been two recorded fatalities from brown recluse bites, and both were young children. And as a matter of fact, there are no confirmed reports of a necrotizing bite leading to amputation.
Interestingly enough, there are lots of reports of brown recluse “bites” from states where there are no brown recluse spiders. Spiders often get blamed for symptoms that come from everything from lyme disease to lymphoma. My state is not within the brown recluse range and I’ve still heard stories from a number of people who insist they were bitten by the spider.
Australian funnel web spiders are found, obviously, in Australia- specifically along the eastern coast. While it is suggested that these spiders are more likely to give “wet” bites than the others on this list, there have been no recorded fatalities from their bites in Australia since 1981!
Brazilian wandering spiders are found in parts of Central and South America and are the most venomous spider on this list. This venom, among other things, may give you a lasting erection, which is why some pharmaceutical companies are researching it for use in erectile dysfunction drugs. These spiders are the famed “banana spiders” because they have been found on shipments of bananas outside of South/Central America; however, there are only seven actual recorded cases of this happening. Only about 2.3% of wandering spider bites are medically significant, and again, there have been very few deaths attributed to them.
Spiders, by and large, do not pose a threat to you anywhere in the world.
Rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) are kind of ugly and hella poisonous.
They produce tetrodotoxin, which makes it a really tragically bad idea to eat them. Unless you’re a garter snake, anyway. Garter snakes are currently locked in an arms race with them where the newts get more and more poisonous, and the snakes get more and more resistant to it, and eventually we’re going to have snakes that you just can’t poison and newts that can take their poison and shoot a concentrated beam straight out of their eyes.
And they do, as far as we can tell, produce it. It’s not like with poison dart frogs where they get it from something they eat, and frogs raised in captivity aren’t toxic. The newts remain poisonous as hell no matter how long you keep them in an aquarium, and at least one study has demonstrated that a well-kept rough-skinned newt will get more poisonous over time rather than less. That’s just how they roll.
Females pass the tetrodotoxin along to their egg clutches, which keeps most things from eating them. It actually attracts certain predators, like caddisflies, though.
Above: Those dicks.
They eat the eggs and sequester the toxin for use in their own defenses in a maneuver not unlike caterpillars loading up on alkaloids intended to keep herbivores off of the plants that produce them in order to keep predators off the caterpillars instead. Also (we think) not unlike the fucking garter snakes that feed on them.
No, for real.
Basically, when a garter snake’s liver is dealing with the tetrodotoxin it’s ingested, it winds up with this effective half-life of like eight days in the snake’s system. So it takes two months for the poison from one newt to fully metabolize out of the snake’s body. The poison functions in most animals by jacking up the sodium channels in cells. In garter snakes with a particular mutation, there’s no receptors for the poison to sneak in and bind to and fuck everything up. So they get a little fucked up on the poison for a few hours, but after that it’s no real thing.
But while the poison hanging out in the snake’s system isn’t hurting the snake, it makes no promises if you stuff the snake in your face and attempt to digest it. And if the snake’s making a pretty steady living eating newts, it’s packing enough poison in its body that anything that tries to prey on it’s going to wind up sick as hell and quite possibly dead.
These guys basically fear nothing as a result. Their response to being threatened to is poison harder and do a little yoga lift.
Above: You thought I was fucking kidding, didn’t you?
That pose is called the unken reflex. It’s used primarily by animals that engage in some sort of crypsis most of the time but are in fact ready to fucking fight you if you mess with them and have some aposematic surprises to show off. Animals that are venomous, poisonous, or just generally possessed of some nasty defense mechanisms love this one.
So, certain snakes and certain flies will eat them. What about humans? Yes, humans will also eat them. We are, in fact, the only mammal that will voluntarily ingest these little bastards, almost always following the phrase “As the result of a drunken dare…”. And yes, for the record, one newt contains enough poison to off an adult male human. We know this because a fucking dude fucking ate one and then fucking died from it after going to the fucking hospital. (Another, earlier dude ate one and then barfed it up in a reasonable amount of time. He was fine after a lengthy and unpleasant bout of medical intervention.)
In conclusion: Do not make drunken bets involving eating these newts, Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you, they taste terrible and will kill you. Unless you’re a garter snake, in which case where did you even get that booze, snake? Does your mother know you’re drinking? You’re not driving anywhere after this, are you?
Brinens and Things 