By Andrew Durso, August 21, 2012
Scientific American
Can you imagine a circumstance when it would be beneficial to eat something poisonous? Perhaps you could see the benefit if, in low doses, it also acted as a medicine by poisoning parasites, as in the cases of fruit flies (and humans) consuming alcohol or other drugs. Many of our pharmaceuticals are toxic in moderate doses. But under no circumstance would you want adaptations that kept those toxins around in your body, where they could do you harm, right? Turns out, this biological phenomenon is common enough it has a name: sequestration. Specifically, sequestration is the evolved retention of specific compounds, which confers a selective advantage through chemical defense or another function.
Läs mer här: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/21/poisonous-snakes-cant-resist-toxic-toad-tucker-or-can-they/
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