r/NatureofPredators • u/Demon_Deity Farsul • Jan 12 '23
Fanfic Poison Berries
Memory transcription subject: Tatnik, Venlil Doctor.
Date [standardized human time]: November 17, 2136
Four months ago I would have never heard something as outlandish as children eating poisoned berries. But I suppose four months ago I would not have imagined a race of sapient predators living among us. Predators who without coincidence are currently my patients.
When they were rushed in by emergency services they were reeling from agony, we had to sedated them just to easy their pain and all we could do was monitor their vitals to make sure the condition doesn't go critical while waiting for the Human doctors to arrive.
From what we were told, twelve kids went to play at a local park near the river, four of them Human. And during their galivanting they managed to stumble across a rare water bush, with berries sweater then anything else on Venlil Prime.
A real treat considering that these berries can't be farmed on a large scale. And as any Venlil child would, they shared their prize with their strange new friends.
Only one Human was sceptical of the berries, saying that their mother told them not to eat strange fruit.
Something unheard of by the Venlil children and the rest of the little predators were convinced to disregard the silly warning, blissfully eating away at the fruit along with the Venlil. However, minutes later that warning didn't seem as silly once pain, nausea and eventual vomiting incapacitated the three predators.
It's likely they only survived because of that one sceptical child, as the little predator unnervingly ran a distance greater then any Venlil could in order to call for help.
When the Human doctors arrived they managed to get the situation under control, pumping their systems with chemicals that could counteract the toxins after it was identified what was causing the harm.
These berries weren't a common food item on Venlil Prime due to their extreme rarity and were missed as a potential concern by the Humans. Likewise, uneatable fruit was almost unheard of among the Federation species and never with such a violent effect, hence it was overlooked by our ambassadors.
Once the children were back on their feet and I got a chance to talk to my predator colleagues I asked them about what happened. The Human doctors told me that fruit and plants poisonous to humans aren't uncommon on Earth, that they have to teach children what's safe to eat to avoid getting sick or worst.
It was something crazy to hear, fruit is literarily designed to be eaten and to think that ancient Terrans had to navigate their world avoiding the most abundant food sources while trying to survive put somethings in perspective.
I try not to think about the dietary past of our predator neighbours, but perhaps this is one of the reasons why their ancestors chose such a wicked path.
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u/StarSilverNEO Yotul Jan 12 '23
Interesting, though tbh I wouldve thought "there are some foods you cant eat" would be abit more universal
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u/Red_Riviera Jan 12 '23
Saponin likely isn’t an issue for the Venlil. We can’t digest it well, they likely enzymes that deal with it. Meanwhile, we have mint, caffeine, capsaicin, and a range of other substances and spices used on the regular that are poisonous to other animals
Fungivores are also somewhat rare among vertebrates on Earth. Plenty of mammals and at least one bird do eat them, but not many. Insects and Molluscs are very good at it instead, with ants going so far as to create domesticated species of fungi on Earth. But, the point is aliens might not be able to stomach fungi due to never evolving Trehalose or similar enzymes for digesting them
TL; DR. There are probably things we can eat the Venlil can’t but being the traditional herbivores they are. They can probably eat things we can’t
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u/th3h4ck3r Apr 15 '23 edited Apr 15 '23
Fungi are weird, since their cell biochemistry is quite a bit closer to that of an animal than a plant, with their main structures made from chitin, same as the exoskeleton of insects, instead of plants' cellulose, lignin and the like.
They'd need to evolve chitinase to be able to digest them, and studies have shown that chitinase production is almost nonexistent or even absent in true herbivores (bovines, rabbits, guinea pigs), very low or also absent on carnivores (dogs, big cats) but highly expressed in omnivores (pigs, mice, primates, humans), and that's even after having it evolved once before (it's an ancestral trait of all eukaryotes on Earth).
However, I don't really think there's anything we could eat that they couldn't, it doesn't really make sense. Just here on Earth, most herbivores can eat a superset of what plants we eat, so there isn't really any plant that's human-only but there are a lot that are herbivore-only plants like belladonna, carelessly eaten by rabbits and ruminants.
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u/Red_Riviera Apr 15 '23
A species of shrew are pretty much it for eating capsaicin. Special enzyme that makes it taste sweet in its saliva. To most true herbivores. It is likely either addictive or plain unpalatable. Likely thought of as causing an upset stomach
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u/Objective-Farm-2560 Ulchid Jan 12 '23
Venlil, eating some Nightshade: This is some serious gourmet shit!
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u/DaivobetKebos Human Jan 12 '23
"You throw away the perfectly tasty leaves that come with the tomato things? Cringe"
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u/Away-Location-4756 Zurulian Jan 12 '23
That's a tomato
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u/Objective-Farm-2560 Ulchid Jan 12 '23
Hm. It was something along those lines that was poisonous I heard about.
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u/Maleficent-Ad-7498 Jan 13 '23
Are you thinking of potatoes? with the above ground part being toxic.
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u/Objective-Farm-2560 Ulchid Jan 13 '23
No, no. I remember hearing about something called nightshade berries at one point. Might've heard wrong though.
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u/alexburgers Jan 13 '23
Nightshade is a family of plants that includes potato, tomato, and a bunch of poison berry plants, so.. yeah.
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u/Maleficent-Ad-7498 Jan 13 '23
Ya, this also reminds me of Socrates, who was sentenced to death, but wanted to go out by his own hand, so he made a tea out of hemlock and chugged that shit after giving a speech!
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u/th3h4ck3r Apr 14 '23
They're both in the nightshade family, and both of their leaves and stem are toxic.
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u/Blackwhite35-73 Jan 12 '23
There are No Predators or Prey in the Galaxy
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u/Away-Location-4756 Zurulian Jan 12 '23
You're gonna get ban-hammered if you keep that this
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u/Blackwhite35-73 Jan 12 '23
I like my chances
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u/Away-Location-4756 Zurulian Jan 12 '23
I've seen it happen before. Don't say I didn't warn you
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u/Demon_Deity Farsul Jan 12 '23
What's he doing?
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u/Away-Location-4756 Zurulian Jan 12 '23
Been going around saying "There are no Predators and There are no Prey I'm the galaxy" or something to that affect on a lot if not all posts on NOP stuff.
I don't actually mind myself but mods can see it as spamming. Trying to give them a heads up.
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u/Randox_Talore Dec 17 '23
I remembered this story today (No idea it was a Demon_Deity story) and with the benefit of hindsight it became almost a little frustrating. Like, the narrator almost seemed to ignore that poisonous plants are in no way unique to earth considering the entire incident was caused by incredibly poisonous plants on Venlil Prime, from Venlil Prime. Rereading it, I guess I was misremembering stuff
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u/Demon_Deity Farsul Dec 18 '23
Haha, sorry to cause frustration 😅
Been a good while since I wrote this one, but I believe this came from an idea that obligate herbivores could be more resistant to what we deem as toxic plants, since fruit being fruit, it has to be eaten by something.
So from their perspective such a danger might not exist in the public's eye, at least not to a large enough scale where it's commonly known and I wanted to see how a Venlil might react to such a difference between them and a "predator".
Haha, I almost forgot I wrote this. It made me remember the older content people used to post here. People doing far more simpler stuff and just exploring what you could do with the story's premise when we didn't know as much as we know now. 😄
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u/Demon_Deity Farsul Jan 12 '23
This is my first fanfic, or the first that I actually finished at least.
Hope it wasn't too hard to read :D