Sunday 14 August 2022

I Have Heard Of Lots Of Poisonous Creatures,

snakes, lizards, frogs, spiders and fish to name a few groups,


photograph Benjamin Freeman/Wikimedia Commons but a poisonous bird? and here it is, the first and only scientifically-confirmed poisonous bird in the world, the hooded pitohui, (Pitohui dichrous), in1990, ornithologist Jack Dumbacher was on the Pacific island looking for birds of paradise, untangling a pitohui from the net he used to capture birds one scratched him, putting his finger in his mouth, almost immediately, Dumbacher felt his lips and tongue go numb. They then started to burn and did so for hours. Later, suspecting that the symptoms were caused by the bird, he took a pitohui feather and put it in his mouth. The numbness and ensuing pain quickly returned. He had unknowingly discovered the world’s first poisonous bird, 

this video charts what actually happened, narrated by Jack Dumbacher, a sample of the feathers was sent to John W. Daly at the National Institutes of Health, who was the world’s leading scientist on natural toxins, during the 1960s, he had identified batrachotoxin as the toxin in the poison dart frogs of Colombia, and, as luck would have it, he found the same family of toxins in the feathers of the hooded pitohui, the compounds known as batrachotoxins (BTXs) are neurotoxic steroidal alkaloids that work by interrupting the flow of sodium ions through channels in nerve and muscle membranes, causing numbness and burning in low concentrations, and paralysis, followed by cardiac arrest and death, in higher concentrations. They are recognized as the most toxic compounds by weight in all of nature (250 times more toxic than strychnine), there you have it, the worlds only poisonous bird, but is it, could there be another bird out there that has yet to be discovered that also has poisonous plumage?


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