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Amazing animals

Discussion in 'Environmental Discussion' started by tochatihu, Oct 7, 2015.

  1. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    All are amazing to my eye, but there is no reason to start discussions here without some group interest. I favor:

    Dinosaurs, who got so very bird like before their fall,
    Mammals, who went to sea and developed such diversity including whacking large whales,
    Primates, of which the most human-like species all got snuffed out (Did we kill them? Oh dear.).

    Any other animals deemed by you to be amazing are fair game as well.

    While photosynthesis pumps out the goodies, animals 'show up' and consume in ever more inventive ways. What a planet we have here, I'm tellin' ya.
     
  2. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Deep sea vent communities:

    . . . Relative to the majority of the deep sea, the areas around submarine hydrothermal vents are biologically more productive, often hosting complex communities fueled by the chemicals dissolved in the vent fluids. Chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea form the base of the food chain, supporting diverse organisms, including giant tube worms, clams, limpets and shrimp. . . .
    Source: Hydrothermal vent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Bob Wilson
     
  3. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Those smokers are the 'most different' thing we know of on earth (so far). Some are temporary and far apart, raising a question how the critters arrive at new ones. There is some evidence that sunk driftwood act as bridges. Dead wood - the gift that keeps giving.

    Whale falls may also play a role. See floor must have been quite a different place between the time of giant marine dinosaurs, until mammals went back to sea and turned into whales.
     
  4. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    We normally think of the rise of great seafaring nations in terms of what happened on the surface. But from the sea-floor perspective it must have been like "hey, look at all this food!" (A large fraction of wooden ships eventually sink).

    Confess to never having given a thought to whether current marine commerce (based on 40-foot steel boxes) compares in terms of sea-floor resource inputs.
     
  5. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    The great age of whaling may have reduced whale carcass falls a lot, depending on whether they took the entire animals home, or made local dumps. If the former it was compensated by sunk ships (and the meat thereupon) to some extent.

    All pretty amazing stuff when you give it a thought. Abyssal sea floor represents about 50% of earth's surface and we know diddly about it.
     
  6. ftl

    ftl Explicator

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    The parts of the seabed we know the most about are the routes of communications cables. These have been sounded and sampled for the last 160 years.
     
  7. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    With horror I note that wikipedia does not have a 'focal page' on transoceanic cables. Fascinating topic - ftl, please rise to the challenge.
     
  8. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

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    my favorite critter is yeast. Not an animal though, a single cell fungus. Probably necessary for the birth of civilization.

    Gekko is a pretty cool animal as is the salimander.
     
  9. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Fungi were the first animals, though not all accept such a broad definition. Yeast go just far enough in organic matter oxidation to merit a great deal of human attention. Maybe for 5000 years already?

    Some fungi will please you much less:

    Soil-Dwelling Fungus Rode Joplin Tornado to Unexpected Human Home - The Artful Amoeba - Scientific American Blog Network

    Lid-lifters. Sheesh.

    An important barrier to slam-bang antifungal medicines is that (other animals) share so many metabolic pathways. They kinda kill us too.
     
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  10. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Fungi are presently pressing very hard on both amphibians and bats. The former have been around for a very long time and survived hard times before. The latter are much more recent ad less 'battle-tested'. So I would happily bet in favor of frogs etc. to persist. Maybe not bats.

    Would be a shame to see bats wink out. Except for the fact they are such good disease vectors!

    Ecology is a primitive science, in part because it cannot yet value pollination vs. disease spread. Don't any of youse guys have kids who want to help sort all that out? Earth's future is not just humans/fossil fuels/climate. It is everything.
     
  11. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Do the kids have a choice? <grins>

    Bob Wilson
     
  12. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Raising this still having hope in raising your interest.

    Some of the most amazing animals ever are no longer with us. Mass extinctions seem to hit the largest hardest. So it was, 60ish million years ago that a very long planetary dominance by large reptiles ended. All we got is fossils and some very creative reconstructions.

    It might be more conservative, then, to focus on small ones. Among them the mantis shrimp offers much, even beyond the new stuff here

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160803111750.htm
     
  13. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  14. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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  15. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Spiders deserve nomination for so many reasons. Silk! Ballooning! All those eyes! Unpaired leg muscles!

    That means, they have flexors but not extensors. It is an 'hydraulic' kludge. Body fluid under slight positive pressure is 'valved' into leg(s) for extension. Don't know of other groups doing that.

    Maybe we should not even get into reproduction. Boys offer their genes to girls in a stunning variety of ways. Now, tarantulas are 'in season' in Joshua Tree:

    Mating Season For Tarantulas Commences At Joshua Tree National Park &laquo; CBS Los Angeles

    Mr. T. is always active there, but more visibly now. So go have a look if you're curious, but don't be squishing them. Less spiders means more food for (small) snakes and I presume you don't want more of those.

    Takes me back to SE New Mexico, sampling biology above what is now WIPP. WIPP that remains idled for a poor choice of kitty litter. Anyway, we walked a dry stream channel that was lined with tarantulas, just sitting 'on the porch', every meter or so. It was a very nice thing to see; insight into lives much more varied than ours. A gift.

    Anyway, spiders are pure predators with no other way of doing business besides injecting enzymes and sucking up resultant juices. They can't eat you (too big) and if forced to make the effort are simply wasting resources. So be nice to spiders, even if you cannot imagine them as worthy co-inhabitants.

    They cannot imagine you as worthy co-inhabitants, having too few neurons. There we have the edge.
     
  16. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    In Marine Infantry Training, we had night training with blanks. Part of the company was in prepared positions and another platoon was the attackers. Well it seems another class used a different tactic.

    Starting at the base of the hill, they were firing their blanks at the ground. They were hearding tarantulas up the hill ... then the spiders jumped in the foxholes. The spiders won.

    Bob Wilson
     
    #17 bwilson4web, Sep 4, 2016
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2016
  17. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    In another sense the spiders lost. Being intensely territorial, they'd not be able to sort things out after Marines left.

    Tarantulas (and huntsmen, same thing close enough) represent best that can be done with 'old-school' body plan at 21% [O2]. Educational relics and important features of current food web, both at the same time.
     
  18. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Spider and many other animals' venoms are large complicated molecules. Some others are very small and simple. Understanding how the latter work is worth just a bit of effort.

    All complicated animals (e.g. humans, fish) consist of cells surrounded by some sort of juice. Differing chemically from juice within cells. Hugely important. These chemical differences are maintained by 'pumps' extending across cell membranes. These pumps are proteins (enzymes of a sort) that pump ions. Those that 'ought to be' inside are pumped in, and vice versa. Skipping a lot of details here, but that is a general picture.

    For reasons that remain unclear these pumps can be turned off by particular, short polypeptides. Also a very simple thing (I promise). Y'all now what amino acids are (more or less) and that there are ~20 of them of major biological significance. A long chain of amino acids makes a protein, with significance far beyond this chat. A short chain is a polypeptide.

    Fine, now I introduce today's animal. Geography cone. If you like to explore shallow, warm seas, you should know the look

    Conus geographus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Because among predators-by-venom, it may have no equal.

    Their venoms are short polypeptides. Ten (20 or 30) totally harmless (nutritionally necessary) amino acids, linked together just so, can kill you. And I mean right now, and in tiny quantities. These various polypeptides shut off your cell-membrane pumps, just as well as those of fishes (which are more to the point for cones).

    One more fact about amino acids is required. Cysteine is one of them, unusual for having a dangly sulfur atom. Two cysteines' danglies can make a disulfide bridge. This polypeptide is then not a straight chain, but something like a ball.

    Again, it is not clear why those balls can turn off the pumps, but they do. And being a ball makes them inaccessible to enyzmes (everywhere) that break polypeptides.

    Fascinating on all these levels. The cones' genetics are such that they are always inventing new versions of the balls, so fish have great difficulty in evolving resistance.

    All of that would just be 'gee whiz', except that one company, in its search to understand better how cell-membrane pumps work, extracts these magical polypeptides and makes new ones. Their website (which I choose not to link), offers to send you free samples!

    Highly effective, undetectable poisons, shipped to your door, for free. That cones exist in the first place is amazing enough, but this latter? Man o man.

    A case could be made that humans are the most amazing animals of all.
     
  19. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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