[ad_1]
Why everyone eats food that makes them cry is still hotly debated among the scientific ensemble. But now we know why the shrew eats hot peppers, thanks to the Chinese Academy of Sciences: it's a mutant.
Most mammals are significantly repelled by painful sensations. Give a monkey a spice and it will not take you any other, or anything else. But the tree shrew gorges happily on brightly colored fruits, even if they do not live near where the peppers grow.
"Researchers accidentally observed shrews directly and actively consumed chili peppers despite the deep geographical isolation between animal and food," writes Professor Lai Ren of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. as well as researchers from Zhejiang University in PLOS Biology.
Tree shrews, also known as banxrings by them as may say this word, are not shrews. They look just a little like shrews, hence the misleading nomenclature. In fact, their closest relatives are primates, which means that they are much closer to you than your dog.
Tree shrews live in the forests of Southeast Asia and are best known for having giant brains, compared to their smaller bodies, that is to say. There are many species of so-called shrews and all do not live in trees. Now it has been observed that those known to science as Tupaia belangeri chinensis like to eat peppers, which do not grow in trees where these kind animals hang.
The genetic sequencing of the Tupaia shrew was enlightening. Chinese scientists have concluded that the thermosensitive proto-primate has a mutated version of the TRPV1 gene, which means "transient potential of the type 1 vanilloid receptor".
It's just a mutation at one point in a gene, but this may have been the case, lowering the sensitivity of the animal to the capsaicinoids, the active chemical in the peppers that you feel coming in and out. By the way, peppers do not cause any physical damage. It looks like they're burning you to death.
Glory of the morning
Since chilies do not grow where shrews grow, how could mutation become predominant across generations of shrews?
Scientists suspect that it was born from the proximity of Piper boehmeriaefolium, a spicy plant that geographically overlaps the shrew and produces Cap2, an badogue of capsaicin, they explain.
They hypothesize that the tree shrew adapted to eat P. boehmeriaefolium spiced by positive selection.
Where does the red pepper come from? Scientists are still following the development of the genus Capsicum, which belongs to a botanical family called the nightshades, or Solenales. This family includes a wide range of plants ranging from tomatoes to tobacco to petunia and spicy red pepper that makes us cry.
Originally thought to have begun to evolve in South America, this year a 57 million-year-old fossil much resembling morning glory, a parent of sweet potato was found at Meghalaya, northeast of India. Now, the thought is that the morning glories came from the supercontinent Gondwana that collapsed and would become Asia.
And perhaps, as mammals proliferated after the disappearance of most dinosaurs, they ate freely fruit around them, and some mutated in order to eat that pretty brightly colored fruit, full good things like vitamins
Bats living in the Negev were discovered to feast on scorpions, even if they were absolutely bitten and it would hurt them all. But then what choice do they have?
We and shrews have choices. So, why do people eat chilli for at least 9,000 years? Jason Goldman writes in Scientific American and delivers a remarkable list of synonyms for peppers (from "Bread is good" to "mother pucker") and points out that healthy ones do not stab themselves in eyeballs. So we do not know. The best guess is "benign masochism".
[ad_2]
Source link
