It seems that the modern vices of mankind, turned into great social calamities, are rooted in our animal nature. Even not very developed representatives of the fauna seek and find destructive pleasures in nature.
Social disasters are, of course, tobacco smoking, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Assessing these dangerous addictions, they often emphasize their socio-psychological side. Much is said about what pushes people towards unnatural pleasures: difficult living conditions, lack of economic prospects, bad climate, and finally (or vice versa) - bohemian satiety, the search for ways to expand the sphere of pleasure when all the pleasurable benefits are already available.
For humans and mandrills, Iboga is an evergreen shrub of the kutrov family that grows in the tropical forests of West Africa. Its roots contain alkaloids, including ibogaine. In small doses, drugs from iboga have an anesthetic effect, in large doses they cause hallucinations. As a hallucinogen, iboga is used in the mystical rituals of some African tribes, however, animals are not alien to games with altered consciousness. For example, ibogu is eaten by mandrills.
It sometimes seems that it was the civilization built on the basis of the intelligence of Homo sapiens that became the field in which a person who had become divorced from nature suddenly encountered habits and addictions that were not previously characteristic of him. There is no doubt that the living conditions and psychological characteristics of an individual can become important factors pushing her into the arms of intoxicating substances.
But there is another side of the question, which has received close attention only in modern times and which is closely related to progress in the study of the brain and central nervous system. Moreover, it must be said that this time science did not bring us comforting news: the addiction to "substances" is deeply rooted in the evolutionary processes that have taken place in the animal and plant world for millions and millions of years.
The ram is the ram and is
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It's not even about the fact that all kinds of narcotic and intoxicating substances have been familiar to mankind since prehistoric times - for example, people first tried smoking tobacco about 8000 years ago. As you can easily see, even creatures standing on the evolutionary ladder much lower than humans are no less skillful in finding their "high".
Lomehuza is just one of hundreds of myrmecophiles, that is, organisms that receive one or another benefit from a highly organized ant community. But in terms of the destructiveness of the impact, no one can compare with this bug.
Is it worth explaining separately that the word "ram" is often used when they want to figuratively describe a low level of intelligence? It would seem that animals of this type, which do not seem to us too smart, should not look for any "expanders of consciousness." What for? They are doing well anyway.
But the bovine ram living in America looks at things differently. He boldly climbs almost sheer cliffs to find special lichens growing on them, which, as you know, are a symbiosis of fungi and green algae. The intoxicating substance is in the mushrooms, and the horned addict rubs his gums against the lichen, tearing them to blood.
Horses, unlike rams, have always been associated with grace and nobility, but they are not devoid of addictions. In the same North America, plants of the Astragal genus, belonging to the legume family, grow. These plants are poisonous. First, they contain alkaloids, nitrogen-containing compounds that play a large role in addiction.
The mechanics of decay: The fate of an anthill infested with Lomehuza is an excellent illustration of the social dangers that drug addiction brings with it. From a well-functioning highly specialized community, an anthill turns into a company of sluggish individuals, poorly able to interact.
Secondly, some types of astragalus accumulate selenium, a chemical element that in large quantities is a poison like arsenic. Horses initially eat astragalus as normal food, but after several instances of eating it, symptoms of addiction appear.
Horses begin to look for this "herb" and receive in return the effect of neurotoxic poisoning: animals wander aimlessly, their eyesight is disturbed, profuse salivation begins, coordination of movements is impaired, and weight sharply decreases. Other serious consequences also appear: stallions become infertile, mares have miscarriages.
But, as it happens with drug addicts from the human race, despite the threatening signs of deterioration in health, the horses continue to pull towards the astragalus. In this state, the animal should not only be isolated from the dangerous plant, but also forced to take medications that put in order its mental sphere.
Watering cats with valerian is not the most worthy, but very popular entertainment of some cat owners. It is less known that cats themselves are not averse to finding their dose of "high". Catnip, or catnip, is immensely popular with striped tailed beasts and brings these domestic animals into a state that is unmistakably recognized as drunkenness. Big cats also have their own sources of "inspiration".
Jaguars in South America regularly eat the wild liana Banisteriopsis caapi. It may be true that they do this for the same purpose as domestic cats, which eat grass in order to then regurgitate the fur accumulated in the stomach with it. However, the caapi liana is also known in its homeland as the "Vine of Spirits". Local Indians have been making their herb for several thousand years, which causes euphoria and hallucinations in people.
Ant injection
Until now, we have been talking about mammals, but one should not think that living organisms located on evolutionary stages more distant from us do not allow themselves to do this. Let's take birds - direct descendants of dinosaurs. For a long time, a phenomenon known as "myrmecomania" has been known. A bird sits down on an anthill - what a pleasure! - and allows active insects to literally stick around themselves from the tips of their paws to the head.
Ants crawl between the feathers, but this does not bother the bird at all, but, it seems, on the contrary, pleases. Moreover, at the end of the session, the bird usually pecks off the invited aliens with pleasure. Myrmecomania has been known since ancient times, and initially many believed that in this way the birds simply attract ants to clean their feathers - they say, formic acid acts as a strong detergent. However, other researchers are inclined to believe that formic acid interests birds precisely as a psychoactive substance and the passion for ants is in the nature of dependence.
Madness: after eating the fruit of the pistachio shinus (aka Brazilian pepper), the American waxwing rushes and beats through the windows.
In the case of myrmecomania, ants may act as drug donors, but these insects themselves have one extremely destructive addiction. His name is Lomehuza. This small beetle of the rove beetle family penetrates into anthills and lays eggs there, which do not differ in any way from ants. Such a brazen intrusion does not meet any opposition, for the ants, instead of driving out or destroying the stranger, begin to lick special secretions from his little body, after which they fall into a kind of stupor.
Everyone knows how strongly the life of an anthill depends on a clear division of labor and well-coordinated interaction of all individual members of the colony. With the advent of drug addiction in the anthill, everything gradually falls apart. Ants groom and cherish their suppliers of "fool", feed their larvae, forgetting about their own, working activity is sharply inhibited - instead of performing their functions, ants begin to wander sluggishly, aimlessly around the neighborhood. After a while, the anthill may die.
Representatives of other social insects related to ants are also not alien to the desire to "get high" - we are talking about bees that drink fermented nectar, where the familiar ethanol has already formed. The reaction to ethanol in bees is also quite recognizable.
Ancient danger
Examples of the dependence of mammals, birds, insects and even fish on intoxicating substances, mostly of plant origin, can be cited endlessly. But maybe it's time to draw a conclusion: drug addiction has a long evolutionary history, and the predisposition to it is firmly "wired" in the very foundations of the functioning of the nervous system.
What we call our mental and emotional realm has a very ancient biological history and goes back to a time possibly preceding the evolutionary separation of vertebrates and invertebrates. In order to better adapt to changes in the environment, a system of nervous stimulus-signals was born, in which special chemicals began to play - the so-called neurotransmitters, the most famous of which are dopamine and serotonin.
These signals could be both positive and negative. The negative informed about the danger (fear, pain, etc.), the positive, firstly, created motivation (expectation of good), and secondly, they gave them a feeling of reward, satisfaction (oh, how good!). I felt fear - I ran away and escaped, looked at the tree on which a delicious fruit hangs, - I felt a surge of strength: I have to work hard, but then it will be delicious!
I got to the fruit, ate - and here it is, pleasure. All this worked perfectly, until … the sensations created by the nervous system more or less adequately reflected reality. But the evolution of animals with a nervous system did not take place in empty space. Mushrooms and plants evolved nearby, which animals ate and which had their own evolutionary reasons. To protect themselves from being eaten, trees, grasses, and mushrooms produced all sorts of toxic substances.
Gifts of the North: even in the meager nature of the Arctic, the reindeer finds a source of additional pleasure - hallucinogenic mushrooms. They are also used by shamans of local peoples to enter a trance during religious rituals. It looks like people learned from deer.
And sometimes it happened that these same substances suddenly either turned out to be identical in composition and action to neurotransmitters, or somehow influenced the nature of their transmission through the neural channels: in mammals, this channel is the mesolimbic pathway in the brain, otherwise called the "reward" pathway.
For example, nicotine was developed by tobacco not at all for the pleasure of those who love to smoke, but to scare away insects and other herbivores from eating juicy leaves. What do we have now? A billion smokers on the planet! Plant, and at times, animal chemistry, obtained through food, gradually knocked down the tuning of nervous indicators and led to the fact that "good mood" could no longer be connected with the real state of affairs.
What's more, eating food with psychoactive substances has had evolutionary consequences. One example is the appearance of opiate receptors in mammalian nerve cells. The biological foundations of heroin addiction arose, therefore, long before the birth of human civilization with its cult of pleasure.
Can all of the above be considered as an excuse for drug addiction among people? Not at all! Unlike horses and rams, which can only be driven away from lichens and poisonous legumes with a stick, a man armed with intellect created science, and she, in turn, got to the bottom of the mechanisms of addiction. Aware of the ancient roots of danger, we are warned. And that means they are armed.
Oleg Makarov