There has to be a term for these very specific claims. 30 g in 30 minutes? Give me LD50 numbers.

Taxine alkaloids[0]

  The estimated lethal dose (LDmin) of taxine alkaloids is approximately 3.0 mg/kg body weight for humans.[27][28] Different studies show different toxicities; a major reason is the difficulty of measuring taxine alkaloids.[29]

It goes on to say that rats are ~20mg/kg, which would put a human at somewhere less than 1.4grams.

Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxine_alkaloids

> Which is close enough to, "any exposure at all will kill".

How much is in one seed?

I could only find a few sources saying that you would need to eat about 50g of the needles to reach the LD, and that's... A lot. There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.

Not being a killjoy here, I grew up around yew trees and I was always told to be careful of them, but not with any sense of panic that would suggest "any exposure at all will kill”. I think you'd have a bad time even with low exposure but death seems unlikely by accident.

A child might not need the whole 50g.

Not a good way to go, BTW: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4462509/

> There's no way a child would accidentally manage that, for example (even assuming LD for a child is much lower). But I couldn't find specific numbers for seeds.

My partner was worried when we moved into our current house that our then-18-month-old son would eat the poisonous cotoneaster berries on the bush in the garden.

But it turns out the LD50 is something like 50g/kg which means that even for a 12kg child they'd be eating huge heaping bowlfuls of them before anything happened.

As it turns out, he did eat one of the cotoneaster berries, spat it out, and went looking for some of the far nicer tasting alpine strawberries instead. The cotoneaster berries taste quite particularly horrible, and no-one is going to ever eat even close to the LD50 of them.

This reminds me of the old “bats use sonar and can fly super precisely without crashing into each other in pitch black” and then it turns out that they crash into each other all the time.

You have a source or observation for that? All I can find is the exact opposite, that they do just fine even in challenging conditions.

I often cycle a road with lots of bats hunting and one evening two slammed into my face and upper body (and one only avoided by ducking quickly). It's pretty obvious that they are not perfect navigators.

If you watch them fly it always looks more chaotic than birds.