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All-Corn Diet Turns Hamsters Into Cannibals
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
A new paper outlines the efforts of scientists at the University of Strasbourg to determine why the European hamster has been dying off at an alarming rate... Previously, the rodent's diet consisted of grains, roots and insects. But the regions in which its numbers were dropping have been taken over by the industrial farming of corn... Researchers in France have discovered that a monotonous diet of corn causes hamsters to exhibit some unusual behavior -- cannibalism.
âoeImproperly cooked maize-based diets have been associated with higher rates of homicide, suicide and cannibalism in humans," the researchers point out, and they believe it's the absence of vitamin B3 which is affecting the hamsters' nervous system and triggering dementia-like behavior. Hamsters are already an endangered species in Western Europe, so this is being heavily-researched. And they obviously won't improve their chances of survival with cannibalism.
âoeImproperly cooked maize-based diets have been associated with higher rates of homicide, suicide and cannibalism in humans," the researchers point out, and they believe it's the absence of vitamin B3 which is affecting the hamsters' nervous system and triggering dementia-like behavior. Hamsters are already an endangered species in Western Europe, so this is being heavily-researched. And they obviously won't improve their chances of survival with cannibalism.
I misread Cannibals as Cannabis and thought - that's quite a magic trick.
And they obviously won't improve their chances of survival with cannibalism.
It's tempting to accept this statement at face value, but an instance of cannibalism involves the death of an individual, not the death of a species. Cannibalism is just another variant of natural selection, and it's fairly easy to construct a scenario where it in fact leads to better overall survival rates (e.g. only the sick are eaten, or the challenge of evading being eaten leads to the accelerated development of intelligence/swiftness/whatever). Whether it turns out that way in this case remains to be seen.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
... thousands of /.ers around the World stop to stare blankly at their bowl of Corn Flakes (or whatever breakfast cereal) ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Well, not so much the cannibalism part, but the dementia part.
Corn cell walls separated mostly by Hemicellulose, and breaking down this tough molecule is necessary to access the nutritional compounds found within, including niacin. Humans can't do it very easily. Mesoamericans figured out the way a long, long time ago how to break apart hemicellulose by mixing a little ash into the water used to boil the maize kernels, breaking apart the hemicellulose and freeing up the niacin, a process called nixtamalization.
When Europeans landed in the 15th and 16th centuries, they took corn back to Europe, but not the nixtamalization process. As a sort of crude justice for all the pain and suffering Europeans inflicted on the natives, the European cultures that adopted corn as their cereal crop suffered greatly from pellagra, a disease brought about from the absence of niacin. A disease which includes among its symptoms dementia.
What's happening with these hamsters sounds eerily similar.
An all-corn diet has virtually no protein... The body will eventually rebel against such a diet, and force a change in nutrient availability. I was born and raised in Iowa, so I love the taste of corn, but even I know that a man cannot live on corn alone... nor a rat.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Is this a property of corn or a monotonous diet?
From TFS, researchers think it's possibly a lack of vitamin B3 (aka Niacin) from a corn-only diet. So yes, it could be due to a monotonous diet, but not the monotony of the diet.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Per Twain:
"When a child turns 12, he should be kept in a barrel and fed through the bung hole, until he reaches 16at which time you plug the bung hole"
Humans trying to live on unpreocessed corn get pellagra -- a chronic vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency -- the symptoms of which include emotional disturbance and aggressiveness. Corn is naturally rich in B3, but it's not bioavailable. So living on corn is a bad idea unless you're a ruminant.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hamsters of the Corn.
Hamsters are no group animals. If you have them in a group, they either fuck or bite each other or fuck and then the female bites the male until it leaves. Dead animals are eaten, as hamsters do eat meat, if they get some and they care to get rid of dead corpses to avoid attracting enemies.
This hasn't anything to do with a corn diet, which is common for golden hamsters as pets.
Has no one else tried to click on the second link in the summary? It directs to "https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/01/29/068214/gizmodo.com/all-corn-diet-turns-hamsters-into-cannibals-who-eat-the-1791736449" - shouldn't Slashdot editors know how to set up a URL (in addition to preview/edit)? : \