Dont Try This At HOME! (seriously) Pt.1 Worlds Deadliest NEWT! TRAVELERS JOURNAL EP#064 w/ @bambam808 & @brandybb !!

bambam808 (70)in #photography • 6 years ago (edited)

I will say it again as I said in my TITLE. THIS IS Extremely DANGEROUS, and SHOULD NOT BE COPIED.
So, we as travelers and outdoors people went to our secret river hangout down in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. It is always a blessed time and beautiful relaxing day.
While down there, I had always seen "salamanders" (From hawaii, a newt and salamander dont exist, So I couldnt tell if it was a newt of salamander.) So I caught it, took a few epic pictures (the first one being this one.) Put the little guy down after some inspection, and went on with my day.
It gets INTERESTING when I GET HOME to research the critter. And this is WHERE the WARNING LABEL COMES IN!
Here is an excerpt from a recent article regarding this little creature known as the ROUGH SKINNED NEWT!
"Toxic, it turns out, doesn’t do the newts justice. They are little death machines. The newts produce a chemical in their skin called tetrodotoxin, or TTX for short, that’s made by other poisonous animals like pufferfish. Locking onto sodium channels on the surface of neurons, TTX blocks signals in the nervous system, leading to a quick death. In fact, TTX is 10,000 times deadlier than cyanide. While we may never know for sure what killed those three Oregon hunters, we do know that a single rough-skinned newt could have easily produced enough TTX to kill them, and have plenty of poison left over to kill dozens more."
"The average adult Rough-skinned newt has enough toxins in its skin to kill 13 healthy adult humans. Only one animal (the common garter) is resistant to its toxin."
One very interesting thing about T. granulosa's toxicity is that it varies widely over its range. Newts found in the Willamette Valley have the most toxic concentration.
So... Beauty can be DANGEROUS! I actually ate lunch bare handed right after handling this thing... call me stupid, but I had no idea of its toxicity. EITHER WAY! Superhuman, or immune to TTX, I am here this morning to blog about it. this Pushed me to do alot more research on the wildlife around me!