Lyf Tree Seeker

A wild donkey in the Arizona desert will dig a well six feet deep with its front hooves, and for half a century the United States government has been shooting it as a threat to the desert. August on a dry wash in the Sonoran. The creek has been gone since May. The sand is hot enough to cook on and every animal for miles is standing in what shade it can find, waiting for a rain that is not coming. A burro walks down the wash, stops at a bend for no reason anyone else can see, puts its head down and smells. Then it starts digging. Front feet, one after the other, like a dog after a bone, until it is in up to its shoulders and the bottom of the hole goes dark and wet. It drinks and walks off. Within the hour there is a queue. Mule deer. Javelina. A bobcat. A scrub jay standing on the rim. In 2021 a biologist called Erick Lundgren published the count in Science: 59 species of vertebrate drinking at donkey wells, 64% more species than at the dry stretches of the same streams, and in the driest months the donkeys were raising the amount of open water in the desert by 300% on average and by up to 1,450%. When the wells were abandoned, cottonwood and willow seedlings came up in them. The donkey had been planting the riverbank. Asked about his methodology, the donkey had another drink and left. When a beaver builds a pond, a film crew is sent. When a donkey digs a well, the Park Service sends a marksman. The burros came up from Mexico with the Spanish and the prospectors, carried the ore out of every mine in the West, and were turned loose when the mines closed. Then they were reclassified. In 1979 the National Park Service planned to shoot all 577 in the Grand Canyon. A writer called Cleveland Amory raised more than $500,000 and lifted 582 of them out by helicopter, slung underneath, the most expensive taxi ride a donkey has ever taken. Death Valley shot 400 between 1987 and 1994. Lundgren said that when he started, people did not think a donkey digging a hole was worthy of scientific attention. The animal was listed as a threat to the desert's water. It was the one bringing the water up. Fifty-nine species knew. The ones with the rifles had never sat by the hole.

A fatty liver is very often a liver that cannot get its fat back out, and the part it needs to do the shipping is in the egg yolk you were told to throw away. Your liver is not meant to store fat. It packages it into particles called VLDL and sends them out into the blood to be used. Every one of those particles needs a coat, and the coat is made of phosphatidylcholine. No choline, no coat. No coat, no shipping. The fat stays where it is. This is not a theory. It is how researchers give a laboratory animal a fatty liver on purpose: they take the choline out of its feed. In 2007 a team at the University of North Carolina did it to people, under supervision. Fifty-seven healthy adults, ten days on a normal choline intake, then up to six weeks on almost none. 77% of the men developed fatty liver or muscle damage. So did 80% of the postmenopausal women. Among women who had not yet reached the menopause, it was 44%. The difference is oestrogen. It switches on a gene called PEMT that lets the liver make some of its own choline. The menopause switches it off, and from then on a woman needs it from her food, exactly as a man does. When the choline went back in, the livers recovered. The richest everyday source is egg yolk, about 147mg each, with liver and beef behind it. Plants carry a fraction of that. Around 9 in 10 Americans eat less than the adequate intake. For thirty years the advice was two or three eggs a week, and the whites rather than the yolks, and the people who took it most seriously were the middle-aged worried about their cholesterol. A great many of them were women past the menopause. Fatty liver disease now runs at around a quarter of adults worldwide, and in women it climbs after the menopause. The advice took the yolk off the plate of the one group whose own supply had just been switched off.