Post #14371

Fronima: This cancer eats the victim from the inside and makes a strange house out of her body Did you know that the alien alien from the series of films of the same name was not invented from scratch? Yes, this evil extraterrestrial creature has a very real earthly prototype! Moreover, the scriptwriters even smoothed out the corners a little - in reality everything is even worse. Meet the fronima sedentaria - first it eats its victim from the inside, and then climbs inside and lives there, as if in a spaceship. And he also raises children inside. Are you ready to get to know the monster better? Then you will have to arm yourself with a magnifying glass, and you can put the flamethrower aside for now. Humanity is incredibly lucky, because phronims grow to a maximum of 5 centimeters - for us they are absolutely safe, despite their terrifying appearance. The same cannot be said about the harmless salps, from which mini-monsters make their shelters. But let's take things in order. Who are they anyway? Phronims are tiny crustaceans from the family Amphipods and the class of higher crayfish. Unlike tens of thousands of its microscopic planktonic relatives, phronima can be seen with the naked eye and even picked up. They live alone, without flocking into large flocks. And also, unlike most other crayfish, these creepy creatures do not have a carapace shell, which usually protects the body. Despite its monstrous appearance - two pairs of eyes, an elongated head, like that alien from the screens, five pairs of legs with claws and spikes, this chthon cannot fend for itself in open waters. So it turns out: its size, helplessness and solitary lifestyle make the phronima an easy prey for anyone in the ocean. But I don’t want to die. So, you need shelter - but where to get it? Phronims live right in open waters - that is, they hang out somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Oceans, to be more precise: crustaceans settled in the temperate and tropical waters of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific, plus they populated the Mediterranean Sea. Pebbles, rocks, algae, reefs - there is absolutely nothing in the water column where you can hide from voracious predators. But salps swim in open waters. Salps are primitive translucent creatures that look like living plastic bottles. They spend their entire lives drifting and filtering tiny edible particles from the water. It would seem that the most boring animal in the world. But they have one very cool feature - at the dawn of their evolution, salps somehow acquired genes that are now only found in plants. Scientists say it was horizontal gene transfer from bacteria. Thanks to this, salps are able to produce tunicin, a substance similar to plant cellulose. This is practically not the case in animals: all hard parts of the body are usually made of either collagen and bones, like ours, or chitin, like insects and crustaceans. And salps build their tough outer shell from tunicin, like plants. Have you alre