🚀 go-pugleaf

I recall someone asking about poisonous mammals a few weeks (?) ago.  This post
is about a bird (how nice, it matches the header info!), but I thought
I'd send it along anyway.

Lili
Rhet in the Blue Linen Labcoat
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Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 09:22:36 EST
From: mgelman@cyclades.ma30.bull.com (Michael A. Gelman)
Message-Id: <9210301422.AA18484@cyclades.ma30.bull.com>
To: lv08+@andrew.cmu.edu, katagug@cumc.cornell.edu
Subject: Licking Poison Birds

In article <toxicbirdU2OT1240pc@clarinet.com>, clarinews@clarinet.com (UPI) writes:
|>
|>      WASHINGTON (UPI) -- A small, smelly, orange-and-black songbird native
|> to New Guinea is the first bird known to have poisonous skin and
|> feathers -- with the same chemical defense as poison-dart frogs of South
|> America, it was reported Thursday.
|>      John Dumbacher of the University of Chicago discovered --
|> unintentionally -- that touching the ``hooded pitohui'' (pronounced PIT-
|> ah-hooey) stings. Dumbacher and his colleagues sustained small cuts when
|> freeing the birds from nets during research in 1990, then licked their
|> wounds to soothe them.
|>      ``But when we did that, our mouths would get all numb and tingly.
|> Everything would taste pretty bad, too,'' said Dumbacher.
|>      In follow-up study, the researchers determined the source of the
|> numbing chemical was the bird itself, not a tree or plant as they first
|> thought.
|>      ``The next summer, the first time we caught one, we licked it. The
|> sensation was immediate,'' Dumbacher said.

While I'm not a biologist, isn't this a stupid thing to do when
investigating toxic chemicals?
(Although, that's how we would test 9-volt batteries in Electronics,
and that's a mighty stupid way of doing that, too.)
--Mike
--
Michael Gelman -- M.Gelman@ma30.bull.com
Bull HN Info Systems -- Advanced Engineering Program
(Any similarity between my opinions and those of Bull, living or dead, are
entirely coincidental.)