Move Over Honey Badger, The Grasshopper Mouse Doesn’t Give A Bigger Sh!t

This image from National Geographic shows a grasshopper mouse about to devour a poisonous bark scorpion. Not only can the grasshopper mouse withstand the stings from the scorpion, it actually converts the venom into a painkiller.

Randall may have turned the non shit giving, nasty ass, crazy honey badger into an internet phenomenon through his ingeniously comedic YouTube video voice over … but the crown may now have a new head to sit upon as the grasshopper mouse proves it doesn’t give a bigger shit than that old nasty honey badger.

So, sure, it IS true that the Honey Badger is pretty bad-ass. He eats bee larvae while getting stung, he catches rodents without a second thought, and he goes after cobras like Whitney Houston looking for a crack pipe on a Sunday morning. And yes, the Honey Badger can take a hit from a set of poisonous cobra fangs, take a little nap, and then wake up and continue eating said cobra. It’s all right here, take a look for yourself.

Pretty impressive … until of course you take a look at what the grasshopper mouse can do, and you realize their just might be an even more bad ass animal out there. One that can take multiple stings from a poisonous scorpion, stay conscious, oh and turn the venom into a freaking pain-killer inside its body.

That’s right my friend, the grasshopper mouse literally turns scorpion venom into extra strength Tylenol or something. Take a look at the mouse in action and then I’ll dazzle you with some statistics. Because everyone loves statistics.

The discovery was covered in an article from MSUToday:

Ashlee Rowe, lead author of the paper, previously discovered that grasshopper mice, which are native to the southwestern United States, are generally resistant to the bark scorpion toxin, which can kill other animals.

It is still unknown why the toxin is not lethal to the mice.

“This venom kills other mammals of similar size,” said Rowe, Michigan State University assistant professor of neuroscience and zoology. “The grasshopper mouse has developed the evolutionary equivalent of martial arts to use the scorpions’ greatest strength against them.”

Rowe, who conducted the research while at the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagues ventured into the desert and collected scorpions and mice for their experiments.

To test whether the grasshopper mice felt pain from the toxin, the scientists injected small amounts of scorpion venom or nontoxic saline solution in the mice’s paws. Surprisingly, the mice licked their paws (a typical toxin response) much less when injected with the scorpion toxin than when injected with a nontoxic saline solution.

“This seemed completely ridiculous,” said Harold Zakon, UT Austin professor of neuroscience. “One would think that the venom would at least cause a little more pain than the saline solution. This would mean that perhaps the toxin plays a role as an analgesic. This seemed very far out, but we wanted to test it anyway.”

So to the meat-eating, spider snacking, scorpion slamming, grasshopper mouse, I say congratulations good sir, you are now officially the most bad-ass, non shit giving creature in the wild and I salute you. And in case all of this wasn’t enough to impress you, this little bastard howls like a wolf to keep other punks off his lawn.

It’s ridiculous what this mouse can do!