I love what fleas look like from above vs. from the side
I didn’t realize this was surprising to so many people!
This lateral flattening allows the flea to “swim like a fish” through fur, aided by the many backwards-facing barbs and hairs along their sides.
If you’ve ever tried to pick them off a dog or cat you’ve seen this in action, it really is like they’re gliding through a liquid environment and amazingly fast, hardly even using their legs to do it.
This is also why they don’t have wings, which would get in the way of this trick, but they compensated with incredible jumping ability that may as well be flight.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, though, fleas couldn’t jump and they were flattened top-down:
This is because fleas were originally parasites of dinosaurs, and while dinosaurs often had feathers, feathers have a different density and the “fur swimming” wouldn’t have worked yet.
The first fleas similar to today’s fleas probably began evolving towards the end of the dinosaur’s run, adapting to the increasing number of our ancestral mammals. Dinosaurs shrank into modern birds so rapidly, it seems, that their original fleas vanished entirely.
So basically whenever you get bit by a flea, you caught that from a dinosaur.
I was thinking about this again earlier and do that many people also know that a sperm whale’s mouth has the same flatness?
every single cartoon and game assumes they have this huge wide gaping maw because I guess you usually see a side view and just assume there’s more of a third dimension
ALSO IMPORTANT:
They have only lower teeth, no upper teeth, and a teeny tiny throat. This set up is for slurping up squids like pasta and nothing else.
Basically no big whale exists on our planet at all with the giant, open toothy mouth of Monstro.
Well, not any more. There used to be a considerably toothier sperm whale with a considerably less absurd and more terrifying face.
Maybe some of you have heard about that awesome sea slug that contains algae chloroplasts and can actually photosynthesize like a plant, right?
Well, it also seems that its ability to utilize chloroplasts was a mutation induced by a virus.
The virus continues to operate in the maintenance of this process.
100% of the species is infected.
……And after they lay their eggs, 100% of them are killed by that virus. Not by “aging” or some other natural life cycle trigger. They just stop being necessary now that they’ve made a new generation and the virus re-activates what were probably its original deadly symptoms when the two first met millions of years ago.
hi what the FUCK
I’ve only read the abstract but
a) this makes it the second animal clade I know of to have a symbiotic relationship with a virus, Ichneumons and their ilk being the first
b) Synchronized mass die-offs, what the hell, why isn’t that selected against AF
It’s not selected against because the virus-induced mutation provides such a big advantage that the infected slugs produced more successful offspring in greater numbers than the uninfected ones. Now there aren’t any uninfected ones to select against the infected ones. I’d suspect the virus kills the adults in order to ensure the new generation has enough food, but I don’t have anything to confirm that.
Thrips are tiny
insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half
that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’
egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.
That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale.
Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp
– complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is
actually smaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a
millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive* and a miracle
of miniaturisation.
The wasp has several adaptations for life
at such a small scale. But the most impressive one of all has just been
discovered by Alexey Polilov from Lomonosov Moscow State University,
who has spent many years studying the world’s tiniest insects.
Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest
nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For
comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has
850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly,
search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.
On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s
neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a
cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache
of DNA. Without it, the neurons shouldn’t be able to replenish their
vital supply of proteins. They shouldn’t work. Until now, intact neurons
without a nucleus have never been described in the wild.
And yet, M.mymaripenne has thousands of them. As it changes
from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural
nuclei until just a few hundred are left. The rest burst apart, saving
space inside the adult’s crowded head. But the wasp doesn’t seem to
suffer for this loss. As an adult, it lives for around five days, which
is actually longer than many other bigger wasps. As Zen Faulkes writes,
“It’s possible that the adult life span is short enough that the
nucleus can make all the proteins the neuron needs to function for five
days during the pupal stage.”
I do feel bad for plants in general. Like, I know they are often as vicious as animals in many ways, just slower. But, I mean, they just show up and they’re like, “I Think I Will Evolve To Eat The Sun And Also Make Oxygen And How Now Is All This.” And, like, everything fucking dies at first (totally not plants fault, btw. okay maybe it was but they didn’t mean to) but then new things evolve. And they’re like, “Fuck it, eating each other suuuucks. Let’s eat the plants which give us life.” And so we start doing that. And plants are all, “Oh Dear No, I Do Not Care At All For Being Eaten. I Will Make Myself Into Poison Sometimes.” But, y’know, stuff kept eating plants anyway so plants, ever the bro, came up with a new idea. “I Have Made A Decision About Being Eaten And You May Eat Me Friends And Here Is An Especially Tasty Bit Packed All Full of Delicious Sugars Which I Have Produced At Great Cost (What They Do Not Know Is That My Seeds Are Within And Shall Be Propagated Near And Far By Their Dung)“ But that’s not good enough for animals, no, not at all. We love the fuck out of some pomegranates but also alliums which are like, “I Have Not Decided To Go In For This Being Eaten Business. I Shall Be Very Foul Tasting And Also A Poison.” But no, sorry, onions, you fucked up. You accidentally wound up with a species that just doesn’t give up or fully comprehend the idea of things tasting “”‘bad’“’ or other concepts like not eating poison. (Sorry, plants, later we turn some of you who are not poison into a poison we consume recreationally. We really enjoy eating poison.) Legit, alliums are deadly to, like, every other species. And we call them aromatics and throw them in everything. Peppers are the best, though. They completely got on the being eaten train. BUT ONLY BIRDS Peppers are like, “You May Eat Me, Fair Avian, For You Are Sure To Spread Me A Great Distance. But, Mammal, Take HEED. Should You Eat Me Then I Will Burn You Most Terribly.” And we were all about that. “The FUCK, burning? I love pain,” said humans, presumably. “You know, peppers, you and evolution have done a good job at burning us but I am pretty sure we could make your chemical agony even more potent. Come hang with us,” humans added to a very confused pepper just before creating the ghost chili.
A truly massive amount of biodiversity was lost in this event, with 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species disappearing. Some marine ecosystems seemed to rebound fairly quickly, but overall it may have taken at least 5-10 million years for anything close to full recovery. Terrestrial vertebrates may even have taken up to 30 million years to regain previous levels of diversity.
Or it might have been a result of multiple causes at once, events that wouldn’t have been so severe individually but became disastrous in combination. This is known as the “Murder on the Orient Express Model”: maybe they all did it.
But there’s also a secondary element to today’s mystery. In the aftermath of the Great Dying, a small dicynodont synapsid briefly took over the world. For the first few million years of the Triassic, around 95% of the Earth’s population of terrestrial vertebrates were all Lystrosaurus – no other genus or species of animal has ever dominated to such a degree.
Why did these squat little dog-sized animals survive and thrive when everything else was struggling? They might have been opportunistic generalists able to deal with changing conditions better than other groups, the extinction of most large predators may have allowed their population to explode, or it might simply have been a matter of luck.
It’s weird how cats vary in sizes and colors but still look pretty similar and then there are dogs who can range from “this fuckin close to being a bear” all the way down to “small angry potato”
it’s cause dogs have “slippery genomes” which in short means they mutate easier and different individuals of the same species can look vastly different while most feline species look roughly the same
Fun fact: snakes belong to the lizard family (Squamata), and evolved from what can be scientifically called lizards. So by all means, they are legless lizards – one of many lizard groups that lost their legs, in fact.
Tuataras on the other hand may look a lot like lizards, but they’re not. They’re Rhynchocephalians, an ancient group of reptiles that appeared even before lizards evolved and experienced great diversity, but now are represented only by the two species of tuatara surviving in New Zealand.
The smallest mammal that ever lived could be sitting right on your shoulder, and you’d hardly know it. Batodonoides vanhouteni (model pictured) lived about 50 million years ago in what is now Wyoming, and was so small that it could climb up a pencil. It also weighed as little as a dollar bill! Several slightly larger species of these mini-mammals lived between 55 and 42 million years ago, but they are now all extinct. Its closest living relatives are modern-day shrews and moles. Photo: randychiu
I love this Model! It’s in the California Academy of Sciences and it’s part of a display of the largest and smallest land mammals! Here’s the whole display, with Batodonides in the case labeled “Smallest”:
The Big Boi with him is a
Paraceratherium
, which lived in most of what is now Asia some 30-16 MYA, and was the largest land mammal ever to live, weighing in around 33,000-44,000 lbs.
I really love this display, becuase there is so much love and attention paid to these models, and that every kid that comes up them marvels over how each contains a heart and lungs and brain just like they do. It’s really lovely.
Kangaroos are animals that seem like they should be cryptids but it’s an entire species.
A kangaroo standing straight up is so deeply unsettling. It’s like you’re a furry who wished for anthropomorphic animals to be real and then it happened and you’re like NO DO NOT LIKE.
Kangaroos are dumb cause females only breed with the ones with the most muscles/testosterone so the entire species is roid raging itself to extinction
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