SLEEPY KOALA
Don't you think koala videos are the new dog videos? They are adorable, period.
But the only difference is they don’t seem as active as dogs. You will always see them taking naps. Isn’t it?
Do you know why?
That is because they lack energy throughout the day. Their main diet contains eucalyptus leaves which are very fibrous and low in nutrition, and to most animals, they are extremely poisonous. To cope with this unique diet, nature has equipped Koalas with specialized adaptations.
The Koalas digestive system is specially adapted to detoxify the poisonous chemicals in the leaves. The toxins are thought to be produced by the gum trees as a protection against leaf-eating animals like insects.
A very slow metabolic rate allows Koalas to retain food in their digestive system for a long period of time. This maximizes the amount of energy to be extracted. At the same time, the slow metabolic rate minimizes energy requirements. This makes Koalas sleep somewhere between 18 and 22 hours each day in order to conserve energy.
It's sad right?
SUPER INTELLIGENT GLASS EELS
Glass Eels form a magnetic memory of their estuaries’ currents in order to migrate.
Transparent European eel (Anguilla Anguilla) larvae called glass eels have an internal magnetic compass that helps them migrate.
After hatching, they travel from the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to estuaries throughout Europe, where they live for most of their adult life before returning to the Sargasso to spawn and die.
The research is done in the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research along with Allesandro Cresci, a graduate student of the University of Miami.
The scientists placed the eels into tanks with rotated magnetic fields and found that the animals swam in the magnetic direction of the tidal current from where they were collected, even though the tanks did not have water flowing in any specific direction. This shows that the eels formed a memory of the magnetic direction of their estuary’s flow and used that to orient themselves, even when removed from their habitat.
A. Cresci et al., “Glass eels (Anguilla Anguilla) imprint the magnetic direction of tidal currents from their juvenile estuaries,” Commun Biol, doi:10.1038/s42003-019-0619-8, 2019.
YOUR OLDEST FRIENDS: TARDIGRADES
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, or moss piglets are water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals. They have been found everywhere: from mountaintops to the deep sea and mud volcanoes from tropical rain forests to the Antarctic.
Tardigrades are among the most resilient known animals. They can survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly other life forms, such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation.
These little creatures are found to be survived even complete global mass extinction events, astrophysical events, such as gamma-ray bursts, or large meteorite impacts. Even some of them can withstand extremely cold temperatures down to 1 K! Can you believe it?! 🤔
A study found the reason behind their toughness, a high expression of novel Tardigrade-unique proteins, especially Damage suppressor (Dsup) protein, which protects them against DNA damage from X-ray radiation.
Scientists applied the Dsup protein to human cultured cells and found that it suppressed X-ray damage to the human cells by ~40%. These little buddies are prevalent in mosses and lichens and feed on plant cells, algae, and small invertebrates.
SHIELDING THE THREAT
Warning: This post is about death. If it triggers you, you might wanna go back.
Death is an evolutionary truth, as well as the enemy of one’s self. We, humans, the most conscious being on this planet go through this dilemma of linking one’s own death by avoiding it or by tagging it as the most unfortunate event. The research is originally done at Bar-Ilan University, Israel where scientists found out about the crucial dilemma. They have found out by flashing the faces of strangers with their own faces randomly onto a screen and on the next screen, death-related words like “burial”, “funeral” etc. They have found out that, if the person's face flashes next to the deathly words, their brains' prediction system shuts down, refusing to link the self with death without any surprise signals.
This briefly suggests that our brain shields us from the existential threat which translates into “someday we are going to die” be it connecting death with the other person sitting next to you but not ourselves.