Dr. Ted Stankowich

And of course, platypus, male platypus have spurs on their hind legs that have venom in them that are used in male-male combat.

Those are very painful if they stick you in the skin.

So there are multiple things that are poisonous among mammals.

Very few use toxins or poisons as an anti-predator defense.

I would imagine it would just taste really bad.

Okay.

Yeah, that's usually because you wouldn't want it to happen in the stomach as much because by that point you're dead.

Yeah.

So you want it to just be a really foul taste on your fur and that's what caused them to spit you out.

Yeah.

Yeah, a little garlic aftershave.

It's absolutely a defense mechanism to protect your prey.

And it depends on how you want to define altruism.

If you define altruism as something that puts yourself in more danger in order to help another individual, then yes, it's altruism because you're helping your offspring.

Parents all the time will alarm call,

They'll put themselves in harm's way to help protect their offspring because their offspring are their genes.

That's how you pass down your genes.

Any behavior that helps to spread your genes and make your offspring survive will be favored by natural selection.

However, if your idea of it is that there's no...

benefit to the actor at all then then it would not be an altruistic act but absolutely distraction behaviors as they talked about are a thing that happens in lots of different animals and it would be very favorable to sacrifice yourself to protect your own offspring if there's a good chance those offspring were going to survive and live on and taking into account what are your future reproductive opportunities would you do it to save your very first baby if you thought that you know you're going to live a long life with multiple seasons of mating and reproduction again