Wild Things: Life as We Know It
Flamingos, T. rex Tails, Burmese monkeys and more...
- By Amanda Bensen, T.A. Frail, Megan Gambino, Jess Righthand and Sarah Zielinski
- Smithsonian magazine, January 2011
Religious festival of the Zoque people (Mona Lisa Productions)
Name: Atlantic molly (Poecilia mexicana), a freshwater fish in caves in southern Mexico.
Party: For a religious feast, the Zoque people added poisonous barbasco plant roots to the water and ate fish that floated to the surface.
Hearty: Over centuries, a new study says, fish developed tolerance to the poison
and passed the trait to offspring, leading to resistant populations. Michael Tobler from Oklahoma State University says "the fish responded to [the ritual] evolutionarily."
Lights Out: The festival has been discontinued to protect the cave.
Learn more about the Atlantic molly at the Encyclopedia of Life.
Additional Sources
"Greater flamingos Phoenicopterus roseus use uropygial secretions as make-up," Juan A. Amat et al., Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, October 23, 2010
"An indigenous religious ritual selects for resistance to a toxicant in a livebearing fish," M. Tobler et al., Biology Letters, September 8, 2010
"Mutualistic mycorrhiza-like symbiosis in the most ancient group of land plants," Claire P. Humphreys et al., Nature Communications, November 2, 2010
"A New Species of Snub-Nosed Monkey, Genus Rhinopithecus Milne-Edwards, 1872 (Primates, Colobinae), From Northern Kachin State, Northeastern Myanmar," Thomas Geissmann et al., American Journal of Primatology, October 27, 2010
"The Tail of Tyrannosaurus: Reassessing the Size and Locomotive Importance of the M. caudofemoralis in Non-Avian Theropods," W. Scott Persons IV and Philip J. Currie, The Anatomical Record, November 12, 2010
Comments (1)
It's interesting how this can happen so fast.
Posted by Connerd on February 7,2011 | 06:35 PM