We analyze the redshift evolution of the mass-metallicity relation in a sample of 110 Damped Ly \alpha absorbers spanning the redshift range z = 0.11 - 5.06 and find that the zero-point of the correlation changes significantly with redshift .
The evolution is such that the zero-point is constant at the early phases of galaxy growth ( i.e .
no evolution ) but then features a sharp break at z = 2.6 \pm 0.2 with a rapid incline towards lower redshifts such that damped absorbers of identical masses are more metal rich at later times than earlier .
The slope of this mass metallicity correlation evolution is 0.35 \pm 0.07 dex per unit redshift .

We compare this result to similar studies of the redshift evolution of emission selected galaxy samples and find a remarkable agreement with the slope of the evolution of galaxies of stellar mass log ( M _ { * } / M _ { \odot } ) \approx 8.5 .
This allows us to form an observational tie between damped absorbers and galaxies seen in emission .

We use results from simulations to infer the virial mass of the dark matter halo of a typical DLA galaxy and find a ratio ( M _ { vir } / M _ { * } ) \approx 30 .

We compare our results to those of several other studies that have reported strong transition-like events at redshifts around z = 2.5 - 2.6 and argue that all those observations can be understood as the consequence of a transition from a situation where galaxies were fed more unprocessed infalling gas than they could easily consume to one where they suddenly become infall starved and turn to mainly processing , or re-processing , of previously acquired gas .