I sat in my garden with a bowl of ice cream in almost total darkness not so long ago. It was immediately after 10 pm, it’s not too late for some standards, except for the standards of a new parent. My two -year -old daughter slept upstairs, but who knew how long or how many times she could wake up. Nevertheless, my desire to testify one of the greatest evolutionary paradoxes on Earth was stronger than the attraction of my bed.
I talked with scientists who study the vision of a common, but rarely observed type of moth: “elephant hawks”. This Motes Not just night vision, it can see the color even on a hoarse night. Large cats, monkeys with bulge and owls have excellent vision to find and catch their night prey, but they are all guided by shades of black and white.
The fact that this insect makes every summer night, once considered impossible. View, Dilefila Elpenorwas the first named Karl Linneo in 1758, but only in 2002 was discovered by his color vision. As Almut Kelber wrote, perhaps with a hint of irritation in our own anthropocentrism – this year in the journal Nature: “People are painted at night, and it was assumed that this is true for all animals.” But her experiments with a halogen light bulb and a number of ultraviolet filters showed that these animals can choose their favorite yellow flowers at the levels of light, akin to DIM Starlight, modeled by a night darker than a sunny day.
In other words, these insects chose their favorite flower without the light of the moon or the sun. They used photons from distant stars. Considering that the nearest star system is located at a distance of more than four light years, this means that the hawks-slots use the lighting source, which is first detected from the distant star long before their great-great-great-grandfathers were born.
Little by little, bird balloons outside, its corner silhouette grows curves.
Based on such few photons for color vision, which means that ElePhant hawks use summation, a process similar to a photograph with a long exhibition. Taking a pause of their photosensitive cells until they are bought in sufficient number of photons, they can create blur, but still an accurate image of colors and their colors. But Eric Warrant, a scientist, a creator from the University of Lunda and a colleague Kelber, told me that even this may not fully explain the night color vision. “I don't think this is the whole picture,” he said.
I wonder if I should finish the whole bath with ice cream and call it at night, I heard a loud rumbling noise over our garden wall. The elephant -jack was pumped among honeysuckle flowers, and I tried to get close enough to decipher any color. I could not. Grabbing my daughter’s crab grid, I wondered if I could catch the insect and look at the flashlight of my phone. But I hesitated. The leadership under the leadership of remote stars and the vision of the color that I could no longer distinguish, made this animal seem almost mythological at that moment. To shut up this, even for a moment, it seemed, akin to the qualifications of a unicorn.
Only the width of my little finger, this insect was part of the story, much more than me, the marriage of millions of years of evolution and nuclear fusion of remote stars. And so I stood, a green mesh in my hand, half an eaten bath with ice cream in the steps, my eyes could barely distinguish the elephant hawks when it flew over the wall into the darkness.
With crowned brown plumage and a long, slightly inverted beak, Godwit dedicated to the tails, this is an unstable shore. Every year he is food for worms and mollusks buried in the mud of the Arctic, and his physique begins to change. Little by little, bird balloons outside, its corner silhouette grows curves. The muscles of the chest suddenly cover the whole body. The bird is metamorphism into the form of softball, only with a beak sticking in front.
However, in fact, he did not become more muscular, since his flight muscles idle for several months. Instead, it became obesity. By the end of the boreal summer, more than 50 percent of its body weight is oily (pathological obesity in people is defined as 40 percent of body weight). To take off, one Arctic researcher told me, birds often need to wait for an upward landing.
And yet, a guest guest tail-universal athlete. While these birds do not travel to some other migrating birds – just between Alaska and New Zealand“They do it all at a time.” A continuous, trans-Tikhoocaan flight that can take eight to nine days. With the support of their huge fat deposits, these birds are essentially “obesity of super athletes” as one researcher He puts it.
I found one water bear in a lump of pillow moss near our kitchen window.
The difference between obesity in people and obesity in the animal kingdom is two. The first and the most famous where the fat is deposited. We store fat around our organs (the so-called visceral fat), which can limit their function, while birds and whales and bear are subtle to store their fat under their skin, which can help protect from the cold. But for athletes with obesity, such as the guest Godwit, fat is stored in 16 places around the body, including around the intestines.
It is exactly how they transport this fat around the body that is so important. In the same way that oil sits on a glass of water, fats cannot flow through (mainly on water) blood flow, as sugar does. They are insoluble. To get around this, migrating birds, such as bodybags, pumps their bodies filled with molecular guides, known as lipoproteins that can attach fats (or lipids), which are released from their storage places, translating them to where they are needed: first of all: lungs and flight muscles.
“And here is where mammals are lagging behind,” says Chris Guglymo, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario, who studies migratory birds. “We are terrible in the transport side [of utilizing fats]The field even when we run MarathonsWe must rely on glycogen and glucose … We do not rely on fat very well. ”
First view under a microscope in the 1770sWater bears have long scientists and enthusiasts. How can a soft, charming animal less than a millimeter survive Boiling, freezing to almost absolute zero temperatures and radiation explosions that kill a person in seconds?
In recent years, scientists working on two types Tardigrad–Gypsibian template And Ramazttyus Barneratus– I found that their endurance comes from two sources: they produce extraordinary levels repair Squirrels to correct their internal mechanism and have another protein unique to them, which primarily contains destruction, successfully named Suppression of damageField
The conversation about Tardigrad should be suffocated from an excellent degree. They have such indestructibility, usually intended for comic book heroes. It is easy to forget that these creatures are real, that they live on this earth, that they are our neighbors and distant relatives in the kingdom of Animalia. And what are they in abundance: wherever the water is, you will probably find water bears, from Prigwater pockets in Greenland glaciers to the moss growing on the wall outside your house. With a microscope for $ 10, I found one in a lump pillow of a moss near our kitchen window.
Two laboratory favorite –Hypsibius And Rammazoti– Representatives of the Big and Ancient Philos, which includes 1380 famous species. Tardigrade taxonomists think at least twice as much as the number exists. While those species living on land were most closely studied and selected, water also inhabit sea ecosystems, especially in sand grains on the seabed. While most ground species have claws at the ends of the legs, sea species have, similar to suction disks that allow them to fall along the seabed.
And then there are aptly named Tanarctus BubulubThe field discovered on the seabed by the coast of the Faroe Islands, this marine type of water bear has from 16 to 20 cylinder organs attached to its rear, complex structures that the animal uses as buoyancy in water and sediments. Swimming through the depths, this water bear looks forever ready to celebrate a birthday party. Indeed, just knowing that T. Bubulubus It falls somewhere there, in the middle of the ocean, it seems a fact worthy of celebration.
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Leading Image: Imogen Warren / Shutterstock
