Why would a monkey be able to eat something a pig and a human cannot? :dubious: Cite?
Though many places you are far more likely to find pigs than monkeys. Of course, if you find either pigs or monkeys, you probably don’t need to worry about what they are eating - eat them!
Except both will be much more difficult to eat than a nice piece of fruit. I mean, a pig or a monkey normally won’t just lie there and let you pick it up and chew off a mouthful. And unless you are marooned with a a firearm or are very good at devising and using other lethal methods, you might starve to death trying to catch one.
That is why I am going to catch a fish, when I am marooned on a desert island. I am very good at catching fish, with a variety of means, and there are very few that are poisonous (but stay away from the puffers).
By the way, Chronos beat me to it on the cashews. But the fruit part is not that bad. You can handle the skin on the domestic ones without getting a reaction, unless you are remarkably sensitive, and some people can even eat skin and all without problems. I have. But NEVER, NEVER, try to bite into the leathery husk surrounding the cashew itself. The result will be a spray of liquid that can literally take substantial parts of the skin off your face. Seen it in more than one Peace Corps volunteer that did not get the message.
By the way, I think mangos might have more urushiol in the skin than cashews. Cashews have way more, of course, surrounding the nut, but mango skin can be a lot more problematic than cashew apples, in my opinion. My wife can’t touch or eat mango because of it.
I’d be weary of following the lead of small rodents: after all the rats are still with us and not for the want of trying to poison them out of existance.
The local herbivores would have time and motivation to develop resistance, so they are out as well (apart from veggie monkeys). OTOH, carnivores are generally more sensitive to plant toxins then us, but the survival value of following a tiger to check which grasses it munches on might be questionable.
That’s no so much a lack of susceptibility to poisons as it is the fecundity of rodents.
You’ve been lucky. I suspect that you also live in the northern temperate regions, where most plants are weeds due to evolutionary and climatic reasons. Try that trick outside of the northern temperate regions and you stand a very, very good chance of dying.
That is so far from being true that it is almost criminally dangerous to even suggest such a thing. Birds and grazing mammals will both happily eat a huge variety of fruits that will kill a human stone dead in under 12 hours.
At the most extreme, macropods will eat plants loaded with fluroacetate, a substance so acutely toxic and so irrversible that it has been banned for use as rat poison. Parrots go one better. They will eat *Eythrophleum *leaves, a food os poisonous that just a few grams will kill a full grown horse stone dead. yet a 10 gram parrot will eat a quarter of its body weight of the leaves in one day.
I can only repeat what Cecil said and hope that it sinks in: the digestion of other species isn’t the same as our own. For the most part, if another vertebrate animal eats it it’s about as likely to poison you as a plant which it doesn’t eat.
No. it isn’t.
As others have noted, it’s in the plant’s interest for some, often only one, animal to eat the fruit. If humans arent; that animal then you are dead.
Want to try eating somelucscious looking grapes? How about a luscious looking cherry? How about these luscious, fleshy berries with a wonderfully textured nut kernel inside?
Those are just three plants growing within 3 miles of where I am now sitting. I will tell you that all produce brightly coloured fleshy fruit and all are commonly eaten by vertebrate animals. Want to try guessing which are toxic and which aren’t, and what the effects will be if you are wrong? If you can’t answer this question you will hopefully begin to see how dangerous it is to claim that for the most part it’s safe to eat fruit that other animals eat, or that brightly coloured, fleshy fruits are designed to be eaten by all animals. In fact many brightly coloured, fleshy fruits are deadly poisonous. And some are worse.
Actually you are probably better off eating the reproductive parts of the plant. Plants put so much energy into producing fruit, they are available for such a short period and they are targeted by so many species that the most potent defences are usually found in the fruits. In contrast so few animals eat vegetative organs and they are available for so long that the toxins are usually relatively mild, result in chronic poisoning and are often physical or irritant in nature rather than physiological.
IOW my educated guess is that fruits are probably the absolutely the worst bet if one is in dire need.
Not in any way that I can understand, nor in my experience. The most widespread and common plants are those that are dispersed readily. That is why so many weeds have highly edible fruit. If a fruit is eaten widely then it will be dispersed widely and the pant will become more common. If a pant is scarce because it is frequently eaten then it is because something is eating vegetative parts or the flowers. That tells you nothing at all about the edibility of the fruit. Most legumes are scarce because they are frequently eaten, but there fruit is deadly poisonous.
That I can agree with. Big difference between “If the locals eat it, you can too” and “If the locals avoid it you should too”.
I’d have to see a reference before I would believe that. It just isn’t true in my experience. Birds and mammals eat fruits of all sizes with about the same frequency in my experience. A mynah will eat a mango or a banana just as readily as a monkey or a possum. A bear will eat a blueberry or a rasberry just as readily as a starling.
I really can’t see any factual basis to a claim that fruits eaten by mammals are larger or with more bitter seeds than those eaten by birds.
Many malls can indeed see red.
Can you please provide some evidence for this claim? Which large fruit can birds not eat? Which large fruits don’t birds eat? Jackfruit, bananas and mangoes are among the larger fruits that spring to mind, and all are regularly eaten by birds. I honestly can not think of a single large fruit that birds don’t eat but that mammals do.
Ahhh, no. Many plant toxins take days or even months to show symptoms. The enzyme and vitamin inhibitors are the classic example of this. A great many legumes are absolutely lethal, but you won’t show any symptoms at all for weeks. Many of the neurotoxins and carcinogens also won’t exhibit symptoms for a long time after ingestion.
More hideously dangerous advice. Pigs commonly eat cycad fruit which are lethal to humans. If a pig can safely eat it, it can still kill a human within days.
Blake said:
My point was not to eat what you see other animals eating, my point was that it does not do you much good to starve to death looking for raspberries because you know you can eat them if everything else eats them, too, and gets there first. If something is scarce, it is probably not worth your effort to find out if you can safely eat it. If you are going to go through the 3 day process to test something, test something that you have a chance of finding enough of to keep you alive.
I’m still waiting on a cite that humans’ digestion is closer to pigs’ than to monkeys’.
