When it comes to eating spicy food, humans are not the "light of mammals"!

When it comes to eating spicy food, humans are not the "light of mammals"!

The Yunnan tree shrew Tupaia belangeri chinensis is probably the only mammal, other than some humans, that can smell the aroma of chili sauce.

Capsaicin is a substance used by plants for defense. Almost all mammals are afraid of chili peppers. In some places, chili oil is applied to fences to drive away elephants that steal crops. In the capsaicin receptor TRPV1 of tree shrews, an amino acid mutation occurs, which reduces the sensitivity of their tongue and throat to capsaicin, so they can eat chili peppers without worrying about it.

However, peppers are native to America, and tree shrews have not seen this for most of their evolutionary history. The "opponent" that allowed them to evolve the ability to fight capsaicin is not peppers. Scientists are more optimistic about Piper boehmeriifolium, a plant of the genus Piper that exists in the same region as tree shrews and can produce a substance similar to capsaicin, Cap2.

- END -

The illustrations in this article are not scientific illustrations but have undergone certain artistic processing.

Comic Script: The Red Queen

Scientific review: Species Calendar Team

Painting: Chen Pupu

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

If you need to reprint, please contact [email protected]

<<:  The portrait of Kepler you have seen is not actually Kepler

>>:  A frog draws for a week: Get to know the "magic brush Ma Liang" in the Institute of Biology

Recommend

Fed up with Windows? Eight reasons to choose LXDE as your Linux desktop

At the end of last year, I upgraded to Fedora 25, ...

Top 10 keywords for breaking through brand traffic in 2021!

As the consumption environment evolves, how can n...

Sleeping less than 6 hours a day may even lead to crime?!

Source: Higher-end humans This article has been a...

Can you not help yourself when you hear others laughing? Maybe it’s because…

When your friend breaks up with his lover, you ge...

Baoneng emerges as buyer of Pangda in crisis

Following Evergrande's 14.5 billion yuan inve...

How to promote Xiaohongshu? 2 steps!

In fact, most of the Xiaohongshu merchants are mo...

Why is ChatGPT like a "100,000 Whys" answering machine?

Recently, the artificial intelligence ChatGPT has...