Discovery Science 🧬

We ourselves made cockroaches invincible: 3 reasons for their total dominance Our eternal war with cockroaches is the very case when humanity itself has created an invincible enemy for itself. Centuries ago, when cockroaches first entered our homes, they were small, slow, careless and could die from any poison, even the weakest. But how did it happen that these practically harmless weaklings turned into seasoned veterans, whom not even any advanced chemistry accepts? There are 3 reasons for this transformation. Reason one: Similar taste habits Having penetrated human homes, cockroaches discovered mountains of delicious food, which is impossible to obtain in such quantities in the wild. After all, cockroaches and I have very similar diets. Both we and they can eat plant and animal foods in many different forms. Well, yes, cockroaches are not able to eat dry cereals, pickled vegetables or smoked meat, but they like garbage and crumbs from the floor, which are uninteresting to us. And thanks to the abundance of food, they got rid of their biggest problem - hunger. Reason two: Natural selection Of course, people did not like uninvited neighbors spreading parasites and eating our food. Therefore, as befits people, we began to exterminate them. And thus we screwed ourselves up. After all, surviving under the thumb of humanity has become a powerful factor spurring their evolution. By destroying the stupidest and slowest insects, we, at the same time, deprived the fast and cautious cockroaches of competition. Over time, we completely exterminated the clean cockroaches, allowing only those who hide from us in the dirt and garbage to leave offspring, albeit at risk to their health. And when people learned to set cunning traps and sprinkle poisons, we thereby spurred their resistance to toxins and their ability to develop this resistance in a short time. Today, cockroaches can develop resistance to a new insecticide in just 1-2 generations! And their generations change very quickly. Reason three: High reproduction rate Already 2 months after birth, the female cockroach is ready to lay the first clutch of 30-40 eggs, and in total there can be up to 10 such clutches in its entire life. And although the cockroach lives no more than 5 months, even this fact is beneficial for the species - the old ones give up the food supply to the younger and more adapted insects. With such a rate of reproduction, cockroaches can afford to lose 95-99% of the population in each generation, and even turn such a frantic mortality rate to their advantage. After all, those who are less fit die, while each newborn baby cockroach is a new combination of genes that may be more effective than the previous one. Or even have a new mutation in your genome that can help cope with the next insecticide. Of course, in most cases this is not the case, but the cockroach mother’s mission will be considered successful if at least 2 children out of 400 survive and leave of

iscent of a family contract than a femme revolution. At the head is the alpha pair - a male and a female. The rest of the clan members are their adult children. They do not claim power, but work regularly for the common good. On average, such a company numbers from 5 to 15 individuals, and there is no squabbling over status. Everything is decided simply: if you want to be in charge, go into the desert, look for your soulmate and build your family. In general, like the wolves we are used to. Brown hyenas also breed without unnecessary drama. The mating season occurs in May-August, when the heat subsides and food becomes a little easier to obtain. After three months of pregnancy, the alpha female gives birth to 1-5 kittens. Raising their offspring is generally a separate level of care. The cubs do not leave the den until they are a year old! All this time, adult members of the clan carry them up to 30 kilograms of food at a time, so that the little ones can grow calmly without the risk of being eaten on the way to lunch. Animals become completely independent only at two years of age. Then some go to create their own clan and explore new corners of the desert, while others stay with their relatives and take over the baton of raising young animals. So, thinking about the infinitely eternal and searching for someone’s remains, whole 20-25 years of the life of brown hyenas pass. Author: Arina Taran Editor: Elizaveta Isaeva 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

Brown Hyena: A little known species. Soaked in carrion and eating things that others can’t even smell Our hero is a creepy freak who wanders around the desert in search of the meaning of life and someone's bones. He does not observe the customs of his family, does not like to hunt and looks like a living denial of everything beautiful and noble. The brown hyena is shaggy, always smelling of something dubious. It frankly does not fit into the glossy picture of wildlife from TV documentaries. But it is precisely this strategy that helps her reign where tough and powerful predators are afraid to even look. The brown hyena is considered one of the largest land scavengers - the shaggy thing grows up to 80 centimeters at the withers and weighs more than 40 kilograms. From a distance, it can be mistaken for a stooping dog: when the hyena is not in a good mood, the 30-centimeter shaggy hairs on its back stand on end without any varnish or ironing. But don’t be fooled: these animals are stocky and strong, with powerful jaws and huge teeth. Even cubs can crush bones with ease! True, this does not make their prey cold or hot: the diet of the brown hyena consists almost entirely of carrion of varying degrees of freshness. Thanks to their phenomenal sense of smell, hyenas find the dead at a distance of up to several kilometers. And it’s not scary if someone has already feasted on the carcass: concentrated gastric juice will help digest even bare bones and skin - something that usually makes all other meat-eaters turn up their noses. Specific gastronomic preferences allowed brown hyenas to squeeze out a huge piece of land in southern Africa. They reign in deserts and semi-deserts, among bare rocks and hot earth. There is no food or water here. But for hyenas this is their home. They replace the water with the remaining moisture from the found carcasses. And so that the merciless sun does not bake the head, the main scavengers of Africa come out mainly at night. For all their dubious reputation, brown hyenas do work, without which the desert would quickly turn into a cemetery. In conditions of extreme heat and dryness, the remains can lie for weeks, or even months. Without sanitation workers, they would accumulate, contaminating the environment. Hyenas destroy everything to the last bone, performing dirty, thankless, but vital work. In places where habitats intersect with other predators, the hyena behaves extremely impudently, completely forgetting about its gentle and misunderstood soul. The beast raises its fur and launches a frontal attack. Using jet propulsion, out of arrogance, dementia and courage, she manages to take prey from wild dogs, cheetahs and even leopards. Animals go out on raids alone, but brown hyenas live in packs. And even here they distinguished themselves. Instead of the matriarchal dictatorship usual for hyenas, everything with browns is much more modest and calm. Their get-together is called a clan and is more remin

Aptocycle: Misunderstanding fish. She's bad at everything! But why did she survive? Aptocycles are probably the strangest, most unsympathetic and at the same time the most unadapted fish that I have ever heard of. No matter how you look at them, they are model losers! See for yourself: to say that the upcycle is slow is to say nothing. Before us is such a sluggish and amorphous creature that there is no talk of any elegance or streamlining here. Its dorsal and anal fins have atrophied and moved directly to a short and weak tail, while the ventral fins have become partly transformed into suckers to help them stay in place. And I wouldn’t say a word if aptocycles lived in rivers or areas with active sea currents - the sucker is very much in the theme there. But fish live in calm regions of the ocean at depths of 300 to 500 meters - they have no problems with sea currents! At the same time, fish spend most of the day searching for food - mollusks, small crustaceans and polychaete worms. This really takes a lot of time, because all their senses are very averagely developed, so they are much inferior to other specialists in bottom hunting! Okay, maybe the suction cup is appropriate because they rely on passive defense? Well, you have already seen their camouflage abilities in the photo - they are close to zero. They also do not have to rely on durable scales and thorns. And the icing on the cake is that Aptocycles are even non-poisonous! They weren't even lucky with people! In Asian countries, uptocycle caviar is in demand, and in Japan they are even actively eaten. But that's another thing - we made them work on our fish farms! In South Korea, aptocycles are placed in cages with salmon so that they eat salmon lice - an eternal headache for fish farms. But they are there only for the first 2 months of their life, because only young aptocycles can feed on salmon lice; adults are too slow and lazy for this. Therefore, overgrown fish are caught and... sent for processing into food for crabs. Well, it’s really not a good idea to let them go free, is it? With such introductory information, it is absolutely incomprehensible how aptocycles even survived to this day. And all thanks to their ability to reproduce. Frogfish mature early, reproduce at a very high rate and lay their eggs in shallow water - in relatively safe areas. In addition, after fertilization, the male remains to protect the clutch from small predators until the fry hatch. He may be weak and vulnerable, but he still weighs up to 4 kilograms, and he can disperse small things with his size alone. Author: Yaroslav Ilyin 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

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A selection of cool photos number 6 1. Newborn panda cubs are born extremely premature. They correspond to a 7 month old human baby in the stomach. But it is easy and painless for a panda to give birth. 2. Teeth of a crabeater seal. A clear example of how evolution creates something close to whalebone. This form is needed to strain plankton in the mouth. 3. Deep-sea octopuses gnaw on the skeleton of a whale. Have fun! 4. The giant armadillo can weigh 80 kg. It tears termite mounds to pieces with its monstrous claws. 5. The sickle-fly has a pattern on its wings in the form of two nasty flies that are picking at some kind of rot or feces. Excellent bird protection! 6. South American hemifractid frogs prefer to brood eggs and even tadpoles directly in their backs. They have a lot of wet pockets there. 7. Grandfather and father...that is, a tiger and a sloth bear fought out of drunkenness (every Friday the same thing!) 8. Kodiak bear. The largest subspecies of brown bears in the world. They easily gain more than 600 kg during the autumn feeding period. 9. Dwarf sperm whale. A very rare creature, it’s probably a calf, but it’s still amazing how small it is compared to ordinary sperm whales! A billion happiness to all our readers 🥰🥰🥰 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

y ages, gets sick or dies, there is no way back for the cells. In Turritopsis, everything is different. When an adult jellyfish is on the verge of death, its body cells behave as if they were at the very beginning of life! At the very, very beginning, when the whole organism is a biomix without any specialization. Thus, thanks to transdifferentiation, an early stage of a jellyfish, a polyp, is formed from an adult jellyfish. It looks like a small palm tree: a tiny stem with tentacles at the top. Having attached itself to the substrate, the baby jellyfish filters the water and accumulates nutrients. And then the expanded polyp is divided into fragments, from which new young jellyfish grow, absolute clones of the original one. The same one who once grew old or fell ill. It turns out that turritopsis not only assembles a new body using the cells of the old one - it also reproduces at the same time. And now we come to the point where biology comes into conflict with philosophy. The original jellyfish and the newly formed clones from the polyp are absolutely identical. Moreover, they are made from the same cells. That is, in fact, the biological life of the organism did not stop, because its cells did not die, but were simply “reassembled”, like Legos. That's why turritopsis is called a biologically immortal organism - if no one eats it, it will reassemble itself ad infinitum. But if you look at this from a philosophical point of view: which of the clones will be the “same” original jellyfish? And will it happen at all, because, in essence, now it’s just a bunch of daughter clones. It is very good that the nervous system of turritopsis is primitive, they are far from our human thoughts. Nobody ate it, we managed to make a bunch of our own kind - success! Author: Arina Taran Editor: Elizaveta Isaeva 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot

Turritopsis Dornia: Immortal creature. This jellyfish cannot die of old age or illness If you were given a chance to live your life over again right now, what would you change? And in general, would you like to return to the beginning one more time, leaving behind age, fatigue and the consequences of the past years, or what? For us, this is rather a philosophical question, but there is a tiny jellyfish in the ocean, for which this is simply a biological mechanism. Meet Turritopsis Dornia, one of the few multicellular creatures known to science for which old age is not the end. These jellyfish are officially immortal. In scientific laboratories and articles on the Internet, Turritopsis is a real star. But in real life everything is much more prosaic. This tiny jellyfish measures just 4-5 millimeters in bell diameter - about the size of a fingernail. It is transparent, thin and completely weightless, because it consists of 95% water. Along the edge of the dome in adult individuals there are up to 90 thread-like tentacles, like an openwork veil. No poison or scary shapes. In the ocean, Turritopsis looks more like a random speck of dust than a creature capable of cheating death itself. These jellyfish were first found in the Mediterranean Sea. Today, their range has expanded a hundredfold - they can be found in the warm and temperate waters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. People helped them capture this huge area: when a large ship sails on the sea, water is sometimes pumped into it for stability. With everything that floats in it. And then, when stability is no longer needed, the water is poured back into the sea. Thus, small jellyfish swam thousands of kilometers and quietly captured new territories. And this is, perhaps, one of the most harmless introductions in the world, because turritopsis are harmless and, even despite their immortality, are unlikely to ever cause an environmental disaster. They feed modestly on plankton, but they are eaten by all and sundry. Turritopsis is considered immortal not because it never dies. If it is eaten by hungry fish, turtles or other sea creatures, life will naturally end. The trick is that the jellyfish does not age in the usual way for all other animals. The life cycle of ordinary creatures goes only in one direction: from youth to old age and, naturally, to death. But not for turritopsis. When an animal is damaged, encounters unfavorable conditions, or simply grows old, it does not die, but simply begins life again. This occurs through a process called transdifferentiation: specialized cells of an adult jellyfish change their function and turn into a different type of cell. To put it simply, usually in animals the cells “know” who they should be. Throughout the life of the organism, they never change their purpose. The muscle cell will help move throughout your life, the nerve cell will help conduct impulses, and the blood cells will carry oxygen. And it doesn’t matter whether the bod