Category: Nature

These Plants Can Kill: Deadly Flora

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“Every rose has its thorns”. We all love the sight of a beautiful garden, but sometimes the loveliest appearances hide a deadly nature. 

Jane Percy, the Duchess of Northumberland, decided in 1995 that she wanted to grow a garden exclusively containing harmful plants. She originally thought of a medicinal garden, but she changed her mind after seeing the Medici poison garden in Italy. The Duchess wanted her garden to be something different, something that would interest children beyond just what the plants looked like. Something about the macabre piques our curiosity. For some, it’s more fascinating to find out how something can kill you than how it can save your life. 

The Duchess’s Poison Garden at Alnwick Garden is educational as well as entertaining. The plants it contains include those used to make drugs, aphrodisiacs, and a few surprisingly common species that release toxic fumes. 

The garden is a definite tourist attraction, but it isn’t kidding around when it warns visitors not to smell, touch, or taste any of the plants. Just inhaling the plants’ perfume for too long has caused many visitors to faint. 

With that being said, let’s have a look at some deadly plants!

1.Oleander

These gorgeous flowers are quite common in gardens, and look altogether unassuming. But every part of these plants – leaves, stem, petals and all – are so toxic to humans that you don’t even have to ingest it in order to feel its toxic effects, which can even end in death. Oleander affects the function of the heart, which leads to pain and symptoms in the rest of the body, essentially shutting down your body bit by bit. 

2.Milky Mangrove

Mangrove trees have many beneficial uses. They’re used in medicines and dyes, and are greatly important to the environment. In coastal areas, they protect against natural disasters like cyclones. But the waxy leaf of the milky mangrove is incredibly toxic. Smoke from burning the leaves can cause temporary blindness, earning it the nickname “blind your eye” mangrove. 

3.Gympie-Gympie

Australia is home to many types of nettle and other stinging plants, but the Gympie Gympie stinging tree takes the cake. When touched, the plant’s tiny hairs inject a venom into the skin, causing stings like a wasp attack, then swelling, which can sometimes last for months. 

4.Foxglove

The foxglove is my favourite beautiful-but-deadly flower; they play a part in Welsh mythology as hiding places for the fair folk, and its name in Old English likely translates to “fairy bells”. But although this dazzling, pink-speckled flower is used in many modern medicines, it’s also highly poisonous. Extreme dosages can cause strange side effects like confused vision and a heightened sense of the colours green and yellow. Enough foxglove can even cause death. 

5.Hemlock

Rounding out this list is hemlock, which is one of the most deadly plants outright. Its toxicity was used way back in Ancient Greece to kill convicted prisoners, including the philosopher Socrates. The poison is so potent that people have died from eating animals that have ingested the plant.

Creature Feature: Cuckoo Birds and Brood Parasites

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When we think of parasites, we typically think of unpleasant creepy-crawlies like leeches or ticks. Today I’d like to introduce you to the brood parasite, the most famous of those being the cuckoo bird. You might recognise the cuckoo as the little bird that pops out of old clocks, but it’s really their parenting habits – or lack thereof – which make them truly noteworthy.

Parasitic relationships are those where the parasite is dependent on the host, while also causing them harm. There are six different methods of parasitism, all of them unsettling. Brood parasites don’t feed on their hosts, but these birds do lay their eggs in another’s nest, shunting off the responsibility of raising their children and dumping them onto someone else. 

Cuckoos are the most famous brood parasites, but others include cowbirds, whydahs, and black-headed ducks. Unlike vultures, these birds have earnt their none-too-positive reputations. You might think that the host would recognise their own eggs, or failing that, realise the mistake once the chick had hatched. But brood parasites have developed several strategies to work around this. 

A female cuckoo will wait for the host to leave its nest before laying its own eggs. The common cuckoo even resembles a sparrowhawk so that it can invade the host’s nest without interruption. They’ll even lay every egg in a different nest to improve the chick’s chances of survival. 

Some brood parasites count on their victims not falling for the trap. Certain birds are smart enough to recognise an egg that doesn’t belong. But evolution is an amazing thing; over the years, some eggs have adapted to have harder shells so that the hosts can’t break them; yet others have adapted to resemble the eggs of the host to blend in. 

Once the parasitic egg has hatched, it would be easy for the host to refuse to feed the changeling chick. It’s still not certain why they raise cuckoo birds, but there are some interesting theories. It’s not uncommon for birds to raise the offspring of other species; even entirely different animals! Chickens in particular are known to care for ducklings, rabbits, and even kittens! So it could be that the host bird’s parental instincts are so strong that they just see a hungry mouth, and don’t pay any mind to the fact that it’s much, much bigger than their own young. 

However, this clearly doesn’t apply to every kind of bird. Some hosts are quick to spot an imposter, and will take extra measures to prevent them from hatching. They’ll weave grass and sticks over the egg, or build an entire new nest on top of it. 

But the brood parasites don’t give up that easily. To ensure that their eggs are being properly taken care of, some of them employ a strategy known at the “mafia hypothesis”. The parasite will watch the host’s nest, and if their egg is rejected, the parasite will destroy the nest and injure or kill the host’s offspring. It’s theorised that threat of this scares the host into complying. 

These brood parasites and their hosts are great examples of an evolutionary arms race; as the parasites adapt to make their eggs harder to reject, the hosts become more able to recognise an intruder. It’s really in the host’s best interest to avoid parasitism; the cuckoo chicks pose a real threat for the specie’s survival. The invading chicks take up valuable resources from the host chicks, seeing as they’re typically much larger in size and require more food. They’ll even fight their adoptive siblings for a meal and let them starve. On top of that, cuckoo chicks make an incredibly loud begging call when hungry, sounding like entire brood of chicks. This increases the amount of time the host spends finding food, but it also has the added drawback of attracting predators to the nest. 

If we apply human morality to these birds, it’s a pretty insidious practice. Cuckoos and other brood parasites avoid the responsibility of building a nest and raising a child by making other birds do it for them. No matter how well the poor victims try to escape this forced adoption, the parasites always find a way to sneak their way back into the family. With the host family suffering major disadvantages from taking in a parasite brood’s egg, it seems like an especially malicious way to live. But to these birds, it’s just a matter of survival.

Creature Feature: Flamingos

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Flamingos conjure images of tropical locations, beachside holidays, and quirky lawn decorations. But there’s more to these pretty pink birds than it seems. 

Tickled Pink

You may have heard that flamingos get their colour from eating salmon. It’s true that they turn pink because of their diet, but they don’t eat fish at all! Flamingos are brine feeders, which means they eat things like shrimp, larvae, molluscs, algae and other small animals and plants. Like baleen whales, they trap creatures in their mouths and filter the water out through comb-like plates in their bills. 

The pink colour comes from carotenoids found in blue-green algae, which are the pigments that give colour to carrots, pumpkins, lobsters and salmon. The more carotenoids they consume, the pinker the bird; American flamingos tend to be a richer, darker pink than the paler hues of other species. 

Flamingo Anatomy

Besides this, flamingos seem like pretty simple birds. And given that their brains are smaller than their eyeballs, it’s easy to think that there’s not much going on in their heads! 

Their anatomy is quite fascinating and strange. They can grow up to five feet, and they’re pretty good fliers despite their appearance. They turn their heads upside when they’re filter-feeding, and what we think of as their knee is actually their ankle joint! That’s right – what looks like a sitting flamingo is really just stretching its foot. Their real knees are actually tucked up, hidden under their feathers. They’re also capable of sleeping while standing on one leg – the reason for this has baffled scientists for years, but it’s believed that they actually conserve more energy on one leg than two. Another explanation is that it helps them stay warm so that less heat escapes through their legs.

Flamingo Habitat

Flamingos have some interesting living situations. They make their nests in shallow saltwater out of mud. But some species spend their leisure time in extreme environments. The lesser flamingo in Africa makes its homes in hypersaline lakes – aka extremely salty bodies of water. These lakes are so dangerously salty that no other animal can survive in them. The reason that flamingos can handle the salt burns is that they have incredibly tough skin on their legs. Even baby flamingos are at risk of harm due to the toxic levels of salinity. This is a risky way to raise a family, but it protects the birds from predators such as crocodiles and stops their eggs from being eaten by snakes and other scavengers. The super-salty water has the added bonus of being a breeding ground for the flamingo’s favourite blue-green algae.

So if they live in such hostile waters, some of which can even burn off human skin, what do they drink? That much salt isn’t healthy for anyone, but it’s no problem for flamingos! They have special glands in their head that remove salt and drain it out of their nasal cavavities. Oh, and they can also drink near-boiling water. 

Birds of a Feather

Flamingos are incredibly social birds. The name for a group of them is a “flamboyance” of flamingos, and these can clock in at over a million individuals. They function as a massive community and the law of large numbers protects them from land predators like jackals and hyenas. 

Because they live in such hostile environments, their survival depends on a very fine balance of many factors. Everything in their habitat is fighting against them, so a chick making it into adulthood is a challenging feat. The entire flamingo colony breed at the same time to make raising their chicks easier, in the spirit of “it takes a village to raise a child”. The biological exchange for their low survival rate is their long lifespan – in the wild they can live to around 50 years, and captive flamingos have lived into their 80s! 

I was so delighted to learn that there’s more to flamingos than just being pink. They’re a great example of adapting to the harshest of environments. Every new fact I learn about them is more and more fascinating. Given the size of their brains, it’s likely that they don’t even know how ridiculously extreme their day-to-day lives are. They’re enjoying some leisure time in a hot spring that would seriously injure any other creature, and they’re not even aware of it.

The American “Fearsome Critters” and Other Tall Tales

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I’m an Australian, and playing some good-natured pranks on tourists is a time-honoured tradition. Our most famous of these pranks is probably the Drop Bear, an aggressive relative of the koala that drops from trees onto unsuspecting prey. I was delighted to discover that we are not the only country that does this! It’s a tradition in some places to prank people as part of a “hazing” ritual on hunts for creatures that don’t exist. 

These creatures could fall under the “cryptid” umbrella, but in my mind they’re a little different. These “fearsome critters”, as they’re known in North America, are like a mass inside joke: nearly everyone knows they’re entirely made up (except for Drop Bears, which are 100% real). 

“Snipe hunt” is another term for this sort of creature-related prank. I’d only heard it before from the movie Up, but apparently, in America, it’s a real thing. Snipes are actual birds, but the “snipe hunt” really just involves sending the hapless victim off in the woods until the joke’s over. This is often done as a sort of initiation ritual as a bit of good-natured teasing. The description of the “snipe” isn’t even consistent; sometimes it’s a bird with the neck of a snake, sometimes it’s taller than a human, and so on.

In a similar vein is the French Dahu. They are mountain-dwelling, goat-like creatures where the legs on one side are longer than on the other. This, apparently, allows the dahu to run around the mountain faster, but only in one direction. There are two different sub-species of this creature; one with shorter legs on the left, and the other on the right. A more elaborate version of this prank involves two people; one to hold the bag and catch it, and the other to hide and imitate the noise of the dahu. The dahu will turn at the sudden noise, and tumble down the mountain. 

The Fearsome Critters of North America stem from tall tales around the Great Lakes region. Often these critters are so ridiculous that they’re spoken of with the understanding that they don’t exist, while at the same time being presented as fact. I find this kind of storytelling very charming; there’s no trickery involved, just a fun way to bond around a campfire. We listen, not with the expectation that what we’re hearing is true, but because the sheer act of sharing a story is entertaining.

Some of these fearsome critters include the squonk, which dissolves into tears if anyone sees its ugliness; the spiny cactus cat which gets drunk off of cactus juice; the hoop snake, a snake that bites the end of its tail and rolls down a hill to catch prey; and of course the jackalope, the rabbit with antlers like a deer. There’s usually not a lot of depth to these creatures, so anyone can make up a tall tale about a sighting. Unlike most cryptids, fearsome critters aren’t malevolent; their mere existence is enough of a story.

I really recommend going through the list on the wiki page for fearsome critters! There are some brilliant ones out there, and I’ve just cherry-picked a few of my favourites. Some of them are just simply absurd, like the fur-bearing trout, and some of them are silly explanations for things going missing in the woods (see the axehandle hound that eats unattended axes). I love the fact that even though we know more about the natural world than ever, we continue inventing strange creatures just for the love of imagination. I hope we never stop telling these kinds of stories.

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