Deer And Sassafras In Their Diet. Is the Plant Smarter Than We Think.

 Who eats sassafras, what parts, and what does the sassafras do in return.
Does enhanced toxicity result in labs using the same test plants over and over?


Anthropo-plantism

Here, look at deer and rodents who eat part of the sassafras (for some leaves are toxic, for others, roots are toxic, for others bark is toxic, etc.  What does the plant do to defend itself against being totally consumed. This research suggests that some plants become more toxic to the eater, the more it is eaten.

Apply that to the lab setting. Suppose somebody brought in a sassafras shrub, to use as food to test for tumors. Same shrub, over and over, strip off parts to feed to the poor critters in the cages.  What does the sassafras do to protect itself? Become even more toxic?  And what does that do to the lab results.  More tumors than would ordinarily occur.  Question Asked But Un-Answered. Yet.  Also note in the New York Times, Tuesday October 27, 2009, at D2, article by Nicholas Wade"

"Mice are very prone to cancer; in some strains, 90 percent of them die of tumors.  People have stronger defenses against cancer, as is necessary for a long-lived animal; the disease accounts for 23 percent of human mortality.  But the mole rat has taken its anticancer defenses even further: it seems not to get the disease at all."

What if they were fed sassafras? The mole rats seem to have a double immune system, says the article.  We should study that, instead of why the lab test mice get the tumors so fast.

I. DEER

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A.  What do deer eat, and why do they eat what they do. 

Deer do eat sassafras. If safrole in sassafras is so toxic to mammals, why don't deer get sick.

Sassafras, summer low grove

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Herbivores. Deer are classified as Cervidae, which means that they eat vegetation, and, incidentally, also shed their antlers each year. As herbivores, they have "compound stomachs" - see://www.oswego.edu/wscp/DEER.htm/- as do moose, and elk.

The compound stomachs enable the deer to eat woody things - like sassafras in the winter, spring, summer (not fall, when they have to fatten up), for those who do eat it -  that other creatures would find indigestible. See http://www.agfc.com/pdfs/free/whatdeereat_bro.pdf/. The stomachs have great scrabble names: learn them. "rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum." See ://www.oswego.edu/wscp/DEER.htm/

The rumen breaks down the browse first. The microflora there start a fermentation process. So, its food cannot exude something that will inhibit the fermentation - act like an antibacterial agent. Is that an issue with some woody things? Yes. Woody things or needles from some evergreens have high essential oil content, and essential oils are difficult to digest (Douglas fir, Juniper). So, deer don't pig out on those, but eat lots of things lightly, when they can.
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Moose Crossing, Quebec

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B.  Their stomachs can break the plant components down.  

 The chemical "building blocks" of the browse:  These also are important to the diet. More names here: lignin and cellulose (both hard to digest), hemicellulose, carbohydrates and proteins (easier). Some of those are unfamiliar, but too much of the lignin in the diet, for example, can cause weight loss and death. Some tolerated well, lots not.

So, an animal's diet also reflects what it is able to digest. Go far afield from that, and the animal is in trouble.  Nature doesn't need labs to tell us what to eat, necessarily. Would we not limit ourselves to so much root beer a day?

C.  They limit what they eat perhaps because of an anti-herbivore defense:

Some plants develop toxins, so that the preferred foods are not necessarily the most nutritious, but the least toxic. Here is the process:  http://www.tulane.edu/~ldyer/classes/406/koricheva.pdf/  See also ://www.oswego.edu/wscp/DEER.htm/ again,   Good site.  Browsing itself can cause the regrowth to be more toxic than the first growth. Deer like tips best. Browsing nips growth in the bud, literally, so helps keep the food supply coming - it the tree gets too high (over 10 feet, say) then the deer can't reach it.

Deer are not just "browsing herbivores", however; they also eat corn and soybeans and acorns and crabapples and other "grazer-browser" foods. They like variety. See ://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/sasalb/all.html/.  Animal wisdom.

Deer are like us. Look at the categories of foods they eat. There is a chart at the DEER site showing what they eat as to the following:

Food Categories

1. Preferred (roast chicken)
2. Staple (potatoes)
3. Emergency (tofu)
4. Stuffing (no, not Doritos. This category is what you stuff with when you are starving, so, say gruel and more gruel, like Oliver )
5. Pastime (peanut butter)

So:  Deer do eat sassafras. 

White-tailed New York State deer (as opposed to other areas, or the mule deer variety) prefer mountain sassafras. Massachusetts white-tails will eat it but do not prefer it. You can tell whether a deer ate a twig and not a rabbit, because the deer's stubby end will be left raggy, and the rabbit's stubby end will be clean-cut. See ://www.oswego.edu/wscp/DEER.htm

Does mere indigestibility explain why they do not eat more, or is it a search for balance in the enzymes, or is there a natural toxicity as well. Something can be indigestible without being poisonous or toxic.

See your living room in a new way. Plants do supposedly develop defenses against

• those who clip or threaten it, see ://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001034.htm/ ; 
• or eat it, see Madagascar and its plants' anachronistic tactics against birds, that continue even though the birds are extinct, at ://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2275176/. 
• threats to come, by means of plant gossip (isn't this fun?), see ://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.php?DocID=168/ - passing on early warnings so the fellows downwind can rev up the chemical defenses for the future disaster
•   or at least reaction to "pain" - urban legend? A little too much anthropoplantism? See ://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum//thread318914/pg1.

You have to love it. Why be a "professional" when you could be a plantsperson.

But none who eat sassafras overdo it on their own, even when starving. It is not a "stuffer" browse.

Even in good times, some animals eat some parts of the sassafras - this one is a leaf guy, that one a twig guy, the other one a root kind of guy, some others, but nobody pigs out. For animals, none seem to eat sassafras so much as to be important. See ://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/sasalb/all.html/ Animal wisdom.

So:  The Safrole Connection.  We are branching out to deer, because safrole oil overdosed in rats brought on tumors, we are told. http://www.heart-disease-bypass-surgery.com/data/articles/104.htm/. Do animals just monitor their own intake of diet matter? Why can't we as well?

We wouldn't overdo root beer. Perhaps that is because it does develop a toxicity if it is overdone? Or the animal itself, like us, prefers variety and would never eat nothing but.

Why don't they eat more?  It is all around.

Is the deer diet a self-imposed limit because the plant itself has put up more defenses than we realize.  Some plants defend against being eaten by becoming more toxic under siege.

We did find that the deer eat evergreens - rhododendron, kinds of needley things.  And this idea came up. Scientists know that some plants that are being eaten up, like the needley things in winter when the deer are going at them, will increase in toxicity.  The stuff that is not good for the deer gets stronger when the plant is being repeatedly nibbled. They tested by also doing snipping on their own - the woodsmen.  Then testing the result.  Sure enough.  The toxicity increased - a kind of defense against being eaten to death.

See ://www.oswego.edu/wscp/DEER.htm/:

Heavy continuous browsing on plant twigs can retard vegetative growth or even kill the plants.  Browsing may also cause subsequent re-growth to contain higher levels of toxic compounds.

Sassafras has another attraction for deer over rodents. The teeth of deer do not keep growing, as do rodent teeth, requiring constant gnawing.  No wonder deer are less "fended off" than rodents, if that is so.  Deer can eat the softer plants without dental problems. See  ://www.americazoo.com/goto/index/mammals/rodentia.htm/ Note the comments on the love-hate relationship between people and rodents. Damage done, but so cute.

So, if the sassafras also defends against being eaten, by becoming "more bad" for the animal that eats it, wouldn't that also be true in the lab.

Has anyone looked into that?  Deer like the end shoots, but the more they browse on them, and the plant gets threatened with death by ingestion, the more toxic and indigestible become the shoots. So the deer back off, and the plant can continue up, until it is taller than the browse line. Plant saved.

If plants respond to being nipped back time and again by becoming more toxic, does that happen in the lab where gnome technicians somewhere use the same sassafras plants over and over to get at the safrole oil from which they then overdose the rats? Do they do that? Go back to the same plants? If so, please check the toxicity of the oil. Does it get worse. If so, that would affect lab results. Their safrole is worse than the field safrole. Is that so? Perhaps. Nice theory.

Interesting. I recall some article about attaching electrodes to philodendron, measuring the mellow happy plant leaves, then loudly approaching with shears, clack clack and snip whack! The plant waves went nuts. Philodendron reacts to threat with fear. Is that so?

Would that plant under siege time and again react as did the evergreen - put up an additional defense to being eaten by becoming more toxic than ordinary nature. And wouldn't that skew the test results.  The animals were being given a far stronger dose than even a natural strong dose.

If so, that is another reason to toss the testing.

So, of course, noone will look into it.  Finding that the plant has outsmarted the FDA may cast doubt on the FDA.  It may help establish that we not only give substances that are not in the lab animal's diet, making it sick just because of that:  particularly rodents who need to keep gnawing and whose digestion surely reflects its need to gnaw and the juices thereof.  We also use plants that defend up.

And our stomachs may not rebel at all.  Someone needs to test whether sassafras in the field is the same degree of safrole strength as sassafras in the lab yard.  Shouldn't be hard.

Shall we use other than rats? 

Shall we test other animals for safrole?  That is also silly. No animal eats all of the sassafras. The species we looked up are selective. Even other rodents eat some parts of it, and know better than to eat what doesn't suit it.  No animal we find aims for the safrole and eats only that.

Try deer.  Deer eat parts of sassafras, some more, some less, but they also have compound stomachs for processing the woodsy things, the forage and the graze.  Wide variety.  Keep the variety, and the deer is healthy.  Overdose on something, provide too much with too little else, and it gets sick and even dies.  Surprise.  Same as the mice, same as us.

The main event is whether the sassafras itself, in addition to being allelopathic and discouraging other plants from growing around it, is also defensive in getting more toxic the more it is nibbled, or browsed.  That is the reaction of some evergreen species - the shoots and needles may well become more toxic the more the plant is under attack.  See below.  So, the plant defends itself against being eaten to death by becoming more bad for the animal.  Have some madeira, m'dear?

So:  what follows is the detail from looking this up.  Interesting to us, but the point is that we need to test the plants own capabilities and qualities and its own defenses; before we just feed stuff to animals willy nilly.
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Sassafras. At dusk.

Stress and other living things.

If plants like evergreen varieties and deciduous react to stressors in measurable ways, by becoming more toxic in the case of the shoots being eaten; or the waves from the philodendron under attack; why do we test animals in the worst stress conditions known to man - torture, overcrowding, solitary confinement, rotten diet, and then act surprised when we concoct illness and pathology. We know anxiety and fear bring on illness in us as well as stressed out, tortured lab animals - so does that environment also skew the results.

DETAILS:

1.  Natural diets.  Pay attention. A natural diet produces a healthy animal. Animals get sick on bad diets, like we do.  So should we be surprised when test animals get sick.  

2. Defenses, so the animal keeps its diet in balance.  Other plants have been found to increase in toxicity under siege, when being nibbled frequently:  Does it create in itself more toxicity, than there was before all the nibbling, as a kind of defense to being eaten to death. If so, and if the labs use the same sassafras all the time to snip snip and grind up and inject the oil, are the labs themselves creating more toxicity than out in the field over there.

3.  Is there a people connection necessarily.  Or is animal testing just another industry perpetuating itself regardless. We questioned whether that means the same bad stuff will result in people, who have different variety needs, digestive systems (that is, one stomach) and teeth (that is, do not keep growing so you don't have to gnaw all the time).

4.  We have no idea.  The FDA ban on safrole was based on its animal studies on the rats, and supposedly buttressed by human case "reports" - see ://www.answers.com/topic/sassafras/ -  in the culinary section there. Read "reports" as just that - Somebody said so.  He said that she said that he had halitosis. Gossip, that is; anecdotes, claims from Aunt Hessie who got it from Luke, or from Addie down the lane who never told what was so anyway.

5.  Stomachy ruminators. That brought us to how deer, white-tail and mule; and moose; use sassafras.  All of these have compound stomachs to break down and ferment forage and grazing products. The stomachs in multiple make it possible to ultimately digest the woodsy things, as well as eat graze, and stay healthy as long as the diet is varied, and not too much of one thing. See details about the deer, their multiple stomachs, which of them prefer sassafras shoots, which will just eat them if they are around, and more that do not seem to eat it at all.  FN 1

7.  Chewy rodents. And from there we went back to other types of rodents, and all seem to have have simple stomachs. But the rodent digestive makeup includes processing a diet consistent with gnawing - if they don't gnaw, some of their front teeth just keep growing down or down and around. Not pretty.  So their stomachs have to tolerate whatever gets in there from the gnawing process.   See details about them, this time including rabbits, groundhogs, beavers, squirrels, chipmunks etc. at FN 2.  Some eat leaves of sassafras, some cut the branches (beavers, for dams), some eat the fruit, but nobody aims directly for the safrole, apparently.
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 8.  Either type - the stomachy ruminators; or the chewy rodents; have serious differences from human makeup, and what diets are good for them.  Why should testing on them, when they need to process weird enzymes  (is there a Bambi lab?); or saw down their incisors as they eat, be valid as to illness in us, when we don't eat the same things for the same reasons. This makes no sense.  The only thing that makes sense is that no wonder we cure so little, and only suppress symptoms.

OTHER ANIMALS, AND SASSAFRAS

Do deer eat more sassafras than rats because the rats, gnawing all the time, would be more of a threat to sassafras survival?  Rats would get at the littlest shoots, and nip them right off. That could be. See ://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/4h/Sassafras/sassafra.htm/.

Groundhogs: These eat sassafras, but  not the whole plant. See ://www.answers.com/topic/sassafras/ Add to our list of sassafras eaters these new ones: black bear, and marsh rabbits. There seems to be no toxicity, aversion.

Rabbit. Very still.

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The groundhogs and marsh rabbits also have some teeth that keep on growing, see them at ://www.hoghaven.com/study.html/, but maybe the soft sassafras is not enough to keep the teeth in check, so they do not bother. Click on the topics there.

Groundhogs do not have compound stomachs, as do deer; so they are more made for the tender parts than the woodies.  But they hibernate, which makes their systems different from mice, we understand.  But they are diffecan but they hibernate. We don't. Rabbits in winter eat the bark, however, and beavers cut the stems.

Do these differences increase or decrease the likelihood that overdosing them reflects something about us.

 Is there any animal enough like us to warrant our using their lives for ourselves? Listen to one react to that at ://www.hoghaven.com/sounds/ghs1c.wav/ Shall we test on black bears?

Generalize. Skip what you see before your eyes.

Rats and beavers and rodents, oh, my.

Beavers, chipmunks, squirrels, gophers, porcupines, gerbils, jerboas, and, Alice's favorites, rabbits and dormice. See ://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Rodentia.html/  We know that sassafras developed a defense against rodents - is that because the rodents have to gnaw, so the rodents really endanger the plant year-round? Is that so? These are indeed more like us in that they have single stomachs. But they are hugely different in that they have to keep gnawing not just for food, but to wear their teeth down so the teeth don't keep going.

Which of these mammals is most like us so that animal testing on that animal is relevant? We are neither gnawers nor browsers except on Doritos. So, pick: The compound stomach type, or the dentition going on forever type? Is our testing purely convenience of the tester and the rapid reproduction capability in tiny cages? What if that fact of perpetual tooth growth makes a difference in the animal's reaction to substances fed it for testing.

Sassafras: Three leaf variations, same branch, lower story

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How to conclude reasonably, that sassafras is bad for us in usual eating or drinking doses, because it is bad for rats for whom it is toxic anyway and in huge doses; and for deer (in those places where the deer eat it as preferred or tolerated food) but who react adversely any time only one food source is provided. Their diet needs variety, light browse here and graze there. That sounds more like us than the gnawers.

SASSAFRAS: A SURVIVAL POWERHOUSE

Sassafras can tolerate a great deal of encroachment by those eating it, and grows fast. It is useful as one of the first species to show up in abandoned fields, and refreshes depleted soil. Sassafras enriches it right up with its underground runners, lots of branching bushes in the understory, and big leaves.