Es ist so ein schöner Newletter über wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse, daß ich den mit euch teilen möchte:
Sometimes in life, it can seem tempting to retreat from all social activity and hole up in a cave alone for the rest of your mortal existence. I wouldn’t recommend this path for a human, given that social isolation is as deadly to us as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But solitary life has worked out very well for the Mexican tetra (Astyanax mexicanus), also known as the blind cave fish, which split off from its more gregarious relatives about 20,000 years ago by opting for a quiet life alone in pitch-black underwater caves.
Delightfully disgusting diets? Insatiably ravenous? Shunning all light? Truly, these are the fish versions of Dracula. And as the chef’s kiss (performed with guano-tinged fingers), it turns out that the mechanism that drives their eyes to atrophy is named the sonic hedgehog (Shh) gene. What more could you want? The next time you feel like you need some time to yourself, this is the spirit animal to channel.
Most living things would prefer not to be struck by lightning. It is, after all, an efficient way to become a dead thing. But it turns out there’s an exception to even this rule: The large rainforest tree Dipteryx oleifera, also known as the eboe, choibá, Tonka Bean or almendro tree, which may have actually evolved to be living lightning rods.
Reaching heights of 130 feet, these trees are not only robust enough to survive direct lightning strikes, they can actually benefit as the bolts kill off competitors and lianas (a type of vine) that infest the trees.
“Lightning strikes are exceptionally powerful phenomena that kill hundreds of millions of trees annually,” said researchers led by Evan Gora of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. “Here, we use data from a unique lightning location system to show that some individual trees counterintuitively benefit from being struck by lightning.”
Hier die voher nachher Bilder.