#toxicodendron

[prinnay]

Angel + Poison Oak

[snarp]

Companies committed to providing consumers with a wide range of potentially-urushiol-contaminated products:

Homeopathy scammers and LUSH.

The "None Of Your Beeswax Lip Balm" did test positive for urushiol via GC/MS, so they are definitely using actual Toxicodendron plant materials in their products.

CosDNA results for products containing "Rhus succedanea" and "Hydrogenated Japan wax" are nearly all LUSH... Did they make a deal with some lacquer company to buy up their byproducts for cheap? Their website has a page for "Japan wax" that carefully avoids mentioning how toxic the plant is:

Japan Wax Rhus succedanea

Benefits: Natural

We use Japan wax as an emollient, skin-conditioning ingredient in products like Self-Preserving Ocean Salt. In Dirty Hair Cream, it helps to keep hair in place.

Japan wax is a substance obtained from the berries and stems of the Rhus succedanea tree, a native of East Asia. It's an emollient, plant-based cosmetic wax.

It's always "Rhus," never "Toxicodendron". You start the ingredient name with "toxic," people might think to look up what it actually is.

Some other items LUSH is currently selling that have "Japan wax" near the top of the ingredients list:

Punkawalop Hair Styling Cream (2nd ingredient)

Eyes Right Mascara (3rd ingredient)

Ocean Salt Self-Preserving and Alcohol-Free Face and Body Scrub (3rd ingredient)

Dirty and Wig Hair Styling Creams (3rd ingredient)

[seabeck]

Pacific poison oak, toxicodendron x lobadiodes, western poison ivy

[cedar-glade]

Mudstone conglomerate Pt1 Little Miami River

Thalictrum dioicum, Toxicodendron radicans, Sedum ternatum, Dolomedes albineus, and a very large amount of Dermatocarpon muhlenbergii.

I fully expect all of these plants/ spider/ and lichen to be common on rock features like this since it's perfect stable rocky habitat that experiences fairly wet conditions seasonally or rather gets sprayed occasionally, The level of disturbance is some what high in many cases but is variable with each one of these species. Poison ivy for example favors dryness and so does the early meadow rue growing with it but occasional removal of shade species near it is beneficial, Ide say the woodland stone crop prefers similar habit, and is most likely caused by missing these three species some how but flooding around them. The fishing spider cavity was actually near the high water mark on that rock and the rock was littered with them, this was just the only one with it's legs exposed. As for Muhlenberg's stipple back it loves spray and seasonally submerged systems of stable rocky habitat, where as sandstone stippleback/brook is a semi submerged obligate that needs near constant spraying and the white stipple back needs dry rocky habit only.

[wonder-rooms]

Toxicodendron sp. (c. 1777-1786) - Robert Jacob Gordon

[peripapaya]

Making new friends! 

This is Ariel (my dnd main) and Toxicodendron, a gourd leshy from an all-druid Pathfinder one shot I played earlier this year. They’ve never met in game, but I doodled them together during one of the session (right around when our characters were freeing wolf puppies from jail, it was v cute) and inked and colored it the next day. This was the first time I had pulled out my microns for traditional inking in a while, I really need to do that more often! This was colored as an experiment in a mobile app on my phone and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, and I always intended to touch up the rough edges in CSP some time but never got around to it. Oh well! Maybe someday, but for now it gets to live on tumblr.

Tl;dr Pathfinder Leshy are the cutest! Squee!

(Jan 5, 2021)

[bax16]

It always amuses me that poison ivy ain't actually poisonous

That is, not in the usual sense. Plenty of plants've evolved toxins targeted towards herbivores, parasites, competitors, or some combination of all three. But poison ivy ain't one of em. For one thing, its terrible blisterin effect is not a result of urushiol havin a direct metabolic action. It's because it dissolves into your flesh and binds to your cells' surface antigens, changin em just enough to make your immune system think that those cells're foreign pathogens and initiatin an attack. Hence the horrific meltin and bubblin of flesh. It's an induced auto-immune reaction.

Thing is, this only affects primates. Not any other animals. Not even mammals. Deer will happily munch on poison ivy with absolutely zero ill effects. Dogs can frolic in it without sufferin any consequences. Birds will absolutely relish the milky white berries.

Now you might be wonderin. What gives? Why primates??? There ain't even all that many herbivorous primates around, much less in North America. And you'd be right. While poison ivy was evolvin in North America, there were no primates. Humans certainly ain't been around long enough to cause the genus Toxicodendron to evolve chemical defenses against us.

And the answer to this conundrum? It was an accident! :D

!!! :D

!!!!!!!! :DDDDDDD

Poison ivy ain't horrible to deal with because it hates us! It's just very good at makin us miserable purely by coincidence! And that's fuckin HILARIOUS!

[dendroica]

White-throated Sparrow, Zonotrichia albicollis, eating Poison Ivy berries (by me)