Post #14881

<b>Spanish dancer: 2 kg of toxic biomass. What is it? </b> When some predator approaches the Spanish dancer, he turns from a sluggish and slow, but very bright overgrown pancake into a magnificent dancer from whom it is impossible to take his eyes off! With its appearance alone, it attracts the attention of all the fish in the area. One thing is not clear: does this really help you survive? Yes, and how! There is a very ancient and unspoken rule in nature: if an animal looks deliberately bright, then it is poisonous. And the more attention it attracts, the more inedible it becomes. By this logic, the Spanish dancer must be the most poisonous creature on the planet! Only he's lying a little. The Spanish Dancer does not produce any form of poison, but it does feed on poisonous sea sponges, to whose toxins it is immune. This poison is deposited in all its organs and tissues. But there is a nuance - the sponges themselves use it to drive away small invertebrates and fish. Therefore, purely theoretically, large fish and crustaceans can dine on a half-meter pancake weighing up to 2 kilograms. But they don't do this. After all, the dancer tastes so disgusting that even a person with his outstanding ability to eat inedible things could not figure out how to make a flat mollusk at least edible. There are only two predators that can eat the dancer - the wrasse and the hermit crab - but even they choose any other alternative to the toxic bright sniffle. The Spanish dancer, as you understand, is completely satisfied with such conditions. Millions of years ago, he populated all the coral reefs of the western regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where he simply enjoys his moral and physical superiority over predators. And he doesn’t notice that someone else is using it... Emperor shrimps - bright red crustaceans up to 3 centimeters long - often live on the backs of Spanish dancers, where they sit among the protruding gills of the mollusk and rest calmly. The shrimp are not poisonous and stand out with their red shell even against the backdrop of colorful coral reefs, but it is almost impossible to see them on the back of a dancer. And even if they see it, what will you do with them? The dancers’ eggs, by the way, are also bright red, and the clutch also looks like a beautiful flower that catches the eye. And the logic here is the same: The poison from the “mother’s” body seeps into the eggs, turning a potential delicacy into a completely inedible dish. By the way, the eggs will hatch into amazingly funny little eared creatures - veliger larvae. I’m sure most of you noticed that I put the word “mother” in quotation marks. And it was not just like that. All dancers are hermaphrodites, males and females in one bottle, therefore, when they meet, they fertilize each other and both individuals lay eggs. Which is very convenient if all representatives of your species are slow bottom pancakes! Author: Yaroslav Ilyin <b>🏀 Hit the hoop and get an