Did you know that viruses can be food for some unicellular organisms, and owls’ eyes do not rotate in their sockets? An interesting fact about the strange Australian endemic. Plus briefly about “functional necrophilia” in the animal kingdom.
Some sharks have an unusual ability – they are able to turn your stomach inside out through your mouth. Biologists believe that in this way sharks get rid of foreign undigested objects and even parasites.
Spiders of the species Evarcha culicivora prefer to feed on the blood of vertebrates. But the trick of spiders is that blood is obtained in a very unusual way. Spiders Evarcha culicivora specialize in hunting female malarial mosquitoes resting after successful bloodsucking.
In Amazonian frogs Rhinella proboscidea The number of males is 10 times greater than the number of females. During the mating season, males, fighting for females, form rather large balls, due to the mass of which females sometimes drown. This fact does not stop some males – instead of fighting for the living, they extract eggs from the bodies of dead females and fertilize them. Biologists have called this behavior “functional necrophilia.”
butterfly caterpillars Uraba lugens they are in no hurry to get rid of the old cover during molting, accumulating old head capsules on top of the “new head”. By the number of “old heads” you can calculate how many times the caterpillar has molted.
Endemic to Australia Rizantella Gardner entirely dependent on termites. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that the plant spends all life stages underground or in termite mounds. This plant is also pollinated by termites.
Adaptation to a nocturnal lifestyle has provided owls with too large eyes. What’s interesting is that owl eyes are not spherical, but tubular, as a result of which owls are not able to rotate their eyes. Instead, they are able to quickly and almost silently turn their heads at an angle of up to 250 ° -270 °.
It turns out that viruses can serve as food for ciliates. A group of researchers from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln conducted experiments and found that infusoria Halteria not only reduces the amount of virus in solution, but also actively multiplies in the presence of the virus. By the way, not all ciliates are able to feed on viruses.
On the island of Sulawesi, a member of the rodent family was found that does not know how to gnaw. Shrew rat Paucidentomys vermidax as a result of evolutionary selection, she completely lost her molars, and her main diet consists of earthworms.
salps (small chordates) move in the water with the help of jet propulsion.
Sources
Source:
Related links:
Partner news
