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发帖数: 3978 | 1 http://www.farnorthscience.com/2007/09/10/ak-sci-forum/squirrel
Squirrels and toxic mushrooms; aspens and leaf miners
By Ned Rozell
Amanita muscaria
Source: Wikipedia Commons
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute,
University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research
community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
Fairbanks reader Darleen Masiak recently saw a red squirrel carrying an
Amanita mushroom across her deck, presumably to stash it in its midden for
the winter. She wanted to know how such a small mammal could survive after
eating a mushroom that is toxic in large doses.
Fungus expert Gary Laursen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks confirmed
that forest squirrels, both red and flying, cache Amanita mushrooms as well
as other “psychoactive” mushrooms that affect the central nervous system.
Science Forum Archive
He has dug into squirrel middens in the boreal forest and has found many
samples of the mushrooms. He said a biologist recently contacted him and
told he’d seen grouse digging up and eating mushrooms that would be toxic
in large doses to humans.
“Many animals are known to go after the psychoactive ’shrooms,” Laursen
said.
An Alaska mushroom, Amanita muscaria,
sometimes cached and eaten by squirrels.
Photo by Tohru Saito
Brian Barnes, a physiologist and the director of the Institute of Arctic
Biology, said a squirrel’s liver might be able to detoxify the active
agents in the mushrooms, but he knows of no evidence for this. Barnes
studies arctic ground squirrels on Alaska’s North Slope. He thinks young
male ground squirrels might be eating lots of fungi, including potent ones,
as they stir in their dens from hibernation. The squirrels often emerge from
hibernation fatter than when they went in.
“I wonder if, while in their cold and completely dark hibernaculum, arctic
ground squirrels are eating psychoactive mushrooms and whether they respond
by experiencing hallucinations, feelings of well being, and laughing fits,
as do humans (or so I’m told),” Barnes wrote in an email. |
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