At 09:42 AM 8/15/96 -0800, Dennis Paulson wrote:

>Jeff Skriletz of the WDFW just told me a story of receiving 3 dead juvenile
>Pied-billed Grebes this week. They were given to his department to
>necropsy, as they were suspected of being poisoned (heavy music in the
>background). Indeed they were--each one had an adult rough-skinned newt in
>its stomach!

Jeff came in got me on Tuesday when the necropsy of the unfortunate grebes
was in-progress. I was fascinated to see a single whole newt, somewhat
digested, come out of each bird's stomach. I sent a message to Edmund
Brodie Jr. who has studied the toxicity of our newts. In his response, he
described the acute toxicity of Tetradotoxin, a poison found in both
roughskin newts and deep-sea puffer fish. Only one vertebrate has been
found to be resistant to the poison, a subspecies of the common garter snake
(the red-sided garter snake). Dr. Brodie and his son (Ed Brodie III) are
studying the geographic distribution of garter snakes with resistance to the
poison. They are finding that there are geographic regions where red-sided
garter snakes are not resistant to the poison, like Vancouver Isand, for
instance.

I am currently quite curious about bona fide cases of human death from
ingesting newts. Bob Pyle, in the book Wintergreen, described two cases from
southwest Washington. If I remember correctly, one guy swallowed one on a
bet (in a bar of course) and the other was a lone camper found dead by his
campfire with a coffee pot containing a single boiled newt nearby.

For those three little pied-bills, the bright orange "warning coloration" of
the newt's underbelly wasn't any help at all. It didn't do those three
newts any good either, they are all very dead. What is so adaptive about
such a potent toxin? Is such a compound any more adaptive than a noxious
compound that makes a predator very sick?

Kelly McAllister
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
Wildlife Diversity Division