Comment by comrade1234
5 days ago
I climb a lot around the forests where I live in Switzerland. In one area there are a lot of yew trees - deadly to mammals. Just 30 grams of the needles will stop your heart. The bright red berry tastes very nice and isn't poisonous but the seed, if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes. German kings have used it to kill themselves after being defeated by Roman armies so that they don't have to surrender.
Anyway, there's an animal here, I assume marmots, that swallows the berries whole and shits them out as a half-digested diarrhea onto the tops of rocks, logs, anywhere high enough to mark their territory. Probably better than shitting out a charcoal briquette that you hope won't roll over... but they seem to know not to chew and crack the seeds.
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
I’ve heard a different reason for their presence in graveyards: because yew kills grazing mammals that eat it, it was cut down everywhere that people grazed animals, which excluded graveyards
My understanding is that churches were built next to yew trees, not yew trees planted next to churches.
Pre-Christian religions had many associations with yew trees (they live for a long time, give off mildly hallucinogenic gasses on hot days, discourage animals), and so built their holy sites around them. When Christianity came to Britain, churches were deliberately built on pagan holy sites to overrun the old religions, in the same way that early Christianity took over roman holy days (Saturnalia -> Christmas, Lemuria -> All Saint's Day). This led to churches being built next to sites with copious yew trees.
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I hear Yew is uniquely poisonous to horses (I mean, they are especially susceptible to it)
The more I learn about horses the more they seem like a creature that’s continually trying to die - and humans get to try and stop them succeeding.
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Horses are especially susceptible to *everything*.
Millenia of selective breeding to try for the healthiest strongest animals we can, and they're still shit.
They'll get ill if they breathe wrong. They'll get ill if they eat a mouthful too much or too little of grass that's ever so slightly too green. They'll get ill if it's too rainy or not rainy enough.
How the hell did they even evolve?
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Here in the US the most common large wild grazing animals are deer, which can quite happily eat yew.
If they die within 30 minutes, you would never see the scat of those who crack the seeds.
This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.
You have a source or observation for that? All I can find is the exact opposite, that they do just fine even in challenging conditions.
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There has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.
Taxine alkaloids[0]
It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams.
Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids
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We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
> if just one seed has a crack in it and you swallow it it will stop your heart in about thirty minutes.
That is complete bullshit and you shouldn't be posting it this confidently.
Those seeds are very poisonous, yes, but not in that cartoonish way. It's not cyanide.
even cyanide isn't cartoonish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6hOVhQQ9hI
substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
There Is No Safe Dose of Prions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3156228/
> substance itself is not what kills you - it's the dose
Doesn’t that apply to every single thing that exists?
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Most plants evolved to have their fruit eaten whole and seeds simply pooped out because of the fertilizing effects of animal feces and the fact that the seeds end up dropped far away from the parent plant. That includes large fruit with massive seeds like mangos.
There was a yew bush on my walk to primary school. When berries were in season, I used to pick and squish the berry between my fingers because the shape was unique (berry with a seed that sticks out‽) ands its slimy feel. Thank goodness it never amounted to anything more, even through transdermal absorption.
Oh wow I think we had these on the way to school when I was a kid too. Everyone told us not to eat them so we used to put the berries in our mouth and spit them out to show how tough we were. Wow we were very very stupid kids.
I think one of the problems is people thinking kids are more stupid than they are, and blanket "don't do that" statements without explanations don't really work for kids.
If they had told you they were highly poisonous instead of just telling you "not to eat them" you might have taken them more seriously. And if they had given you a taste of the red berry around it (which is sweet but not that special either, and the texture is not great) you might just have thought it was not necessary to play with them at all.
But that requires education at all levels, around here (Belgium) I sometimes see parents who seem deadly afraid of anything nature, I tell my kids to eat blackberries and they softly tell their kids next to us not to do that. You end up with generations who just don't know anything about what's around them and will eventually do stupid things.
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The amount of childhood survival that comes down to "thankfully I only poked it and didn't eat it" is kind of alarming in retrospect
It’s probably selected for. We’re pokers by natural selection.
We had them in our yard growing up, I recall regularly playing with the berries for the exact same reason. Funny enough my dad did warn me not to eat it, but based on this post eating the berry itself would have been one of the few ways it’s not toxic. Had no idea about the rest of the plant being so toxic until today.
The fact that the inviting red part is mostly fine but the plant around it is deadly is very on-brand for nature
I don’t care if it is poison. Never gonna give yew up.
Yew gonna eat that?