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Comment by jbotz | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about wasabi, but birds in general are completely immune to capsaicin, the substance that makes hot peppers hot. I grow a variety of hot peppers here in Brazil and the sabiá (a Brazilian songbird) particularly likes the pimenta malagueta, a little chili equivalent to the ones used in Thai food... I've seen a single bird consume like 50 of these small and very hot peppers in 10 minutes.

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There's actually an interesting reason for this! Capsaicin evolved primarily* to keep mammals from eating pepper seeds, since mammalian digestive systems destroy the seeds, but birds' systems do not. Birds use a different protein complex for detecting heat than mammals, so capsaicin binds to the mammalian protein complex and activates it, but does not bind to the avian complex.

* excuse the short hand anthropomorphizing of evolution here - I know.

Good to know, thanks.

I thought about this too, but I never seen this reaction from them, so I thought, maybe it was all about the spicyness. Who knows, anyway, since they are not stupid, they won't come back for more if it was somehow detrimental for them.

> little chili equivalent to the ones used in Thai food

Birds-eye chillies, you mean?

Bonnie's Plants and others sell them as "Thai Hot Chilies" the colloqueal name for this particular subspecies varies wildly by region. I've also seen "thai pepper". Generally referring to long thin, thin-walled peppers full of seeds. I've never (personally) seen "birds-eye chilie" used in the wild.

In Singapore and Malaysia, they’re called chilli padi

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