Discover Top Posts Tagged with #tree shrews

The New Natural History. Written by Richard Lydekker. 1901.

These little guys would share a bag of Takis with you.

“In the Kunming Institute of Zoology, in Yunnan, China, there live about 2,000 long-nosed, inquisitive-faced tree shrews. Tree shrews make good animal models for studying human diseases: They’re more genetically similar to us than, say, a mouse, but they’re also smaller than most of our closest relatives, the primates. So researchers at the Kunming Institute keep a bunch of them around, in order to learn more about their evolutionary history, physiology, and molecular makeup.

“But as these researchers learned recently, even the best models are full of surprises. “[We] were trying to find the favorite food of the tree shrew,” writes Kunming Institute biologist Shilong Yang in an email. As Yang and his colleagues detail in a recent paper in PLOSBiology, they were shocked by the answer: chili peppers...”

“... Just to make sure, the researchers synthesized the particular capsaicinoid found in Piper boehmeriaefolium, and used it to make the shrews some snacks: spicy corn pellets, like a rodent version of Flamin Hot Cheetos. Mice hated the pellets, and barely touched them. But the shrews gobbled them right up. What’s more, adding more capsaicinoids—in other words, upping the hotness—“caused a slight increase in the food intake,” the researchers write.

“What accounts for this flaming of the shrew? As it turns out, in this regard, tree shrews are more like birds than humans. Rather than a rarified taste for pain, they have a mutation in a particular protein, the TRPV1 ion channel, which is colloquially known as the “capsaicin receptor.” This mutation lowers the shrew’s sensitivity to capsaicinoids, allowing them to munch on peppers with abandon....”

the flaming of the shrew

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