I’m so fascinated by the unisex Ambystoma and y’all should be too!!
The Unisexual Ambystoma is an all female group of salamanders native to the Great Lakes and the North Eastern United States. They are most commonly a triploid species (but they can have multiple variations of polyploidy). But what is SO COOL about them is they steal genomes from males of 5 other species (A. laterale, A. barbouri, A. tigrinum, A. texanum, A. jeffersonianum)!!
The unisexuals pick up and use genomes of sexual species every time they breed, but those genomes do not pass onto the next generation. The genes they “steal” are adapted to the conditions of the local sexual males. They’re like the ninjas of the world of herpetology!!
Imagine that! A lineage made up of only women that, generation after generation, collect genetic material from males of other species that they can distribute to their offspring in pretty much any configuration. Science still doesn’t know how the mother “chooses” the genes she gives to her daughter, and that is FASCINATING!
And this has been going on for millions of years! It is hypothesized that the Unisexual Ambystoma comes from a cross between A. laterale and A. barbouri.
But those two no longer have the same geographical range. This means that the production of new Unisexual Ambystoma populations is not ongoing. This group of female salamanders have been surviving solely by stealing genes from other species!! That’s so freaking cool!!!!!!
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.”
Its like for a second at the beginning they forget they have 2 heads on one body
I looked on the instagram of the op and apparently he had to feed them both a small mouse instead of feeding one or the other a standard sized mouse because they’d fight if only one head got food
they’re so precious omg
It almost looks like they alternate between who’s in charge of the body. Some two-headed animals have one head jutting off at a weird angle and that head can’t really affect anything else, but that’s an even fork.
Left: A fish-scaled Geckolepis megalepis rests on a branch. Right: G. megalepis after losing its scales. Photo courtesy of Frank Glaw.
If you tried to grab a Geckolepis megolepis gecko, it would likely slip from your hand — leaving only its scales in your grasp.
Geckolepis megolepis is the newest and largest-known member of the world’s fish-scaled geckos, according to a formal description published Tuesday in PeerJ. Like other lizards or salamanders, these geckos can drop their tails after being caught by predators, but they can also escape capture thanks to break-away skin.
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