Category: Biology

Axolotl – A Walking Fish That can Regenerate Limbs

By Anupum Pant

If you are looking at an Axolotl for the first time, it will confuse you. With an oddly shaped body that resembles both a catfish and a salamander, you’ll wonder if it lives in water or on land. [Image]

What is it?

A fish? Axolotl, commonly known as the Mexican Walking Fish, isn’t actually a fish. It is an amphibian, which means it has both lungs and gills. They almost never come out of water, hold their breath and take in oxygen using their gills (those three pairs of parts coming out at the back of its head are the gills). They can hold their breath for a year, beat that Mr. David Blaine.

Or Salamanders? They are closely related to salamanders and interestingly the adult Axolotls look like baby Salamanders. They have long abandoned the usual amphibian-transformation from a larva stage to an adult. Unlike Salamanders, they don’t transform into adults that can live outside water. They stay in water and walk around on the water-bed.

However, strange species of Axolotl was once delivered to a zoologist Auguste Duméril, which had somehow transformed like salamanders and would happily come out of water. But this transformation (metamorphosis) shortened their life span. Later it was found that this process can be artificially triggered by injecting iodine. (Do NOT try this at home)

As pets: Today, these animals are fairly common and are used as exotic pets all around the world. Especially in Japan, people love to have them in their aquariums.

Side note: Like several other Pokémon based on real animals, Whooper and Mudkip were actually based on Axolotls.

Regenerative Powers

Besides having the ability to walk underwater and its unusual appearance, there is something that is much more interesting about them. Unlike, almost any other vertebrate, they have the power to regenerate various cells. Not just cells, Axolotls can regenerate complete body parts – limbs, gills, eyes, kidneys, even large portions of its liver and its heart muscle. Even portions of its spine and brain can be regenerated. They are able to grow back a severed limb in span of few months. This is the reason scientists love these creatures and conduct a number of studies on them every year.

Tardigrades – Toughest Creatures on Earth

By Anupum Pant

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So, if you think elephants or cockroaches are tough, that could be because you probably haven’t heard about these amazing creatures called Tardigrades (picture).

What are Tardigrades?

Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets or waterbears, are oddly cute little animals that live in water and feed on moss. Their size ranges from 0.1 mm to 1.5 mm and they have eight legs (they walk like bears). The most extreme thing about these extremophiles is that they can survive almost anything (actually, they kind of die for a while with an option to come back to life later). Here is a list of things Tardigrades can survive. They can:

  • Survive without water and food for 10 years.
  • Waddle away in the vacuüm of space (for 10 days & get exposed UV radiation), come back and walk around as if nothing happened.
  • Survive 1000 times more radiation that would kill an elephant.
  • Live through extremely low temperatures (almost absolute zero) or high temperatures (~150 degree Centigrade)
  • Repair their own DNA after getting exposed to lethal amounts of radiation.
  • Survive pressures of about 300 Jumbo jets stacked on a person. (6 times more than the deepest ocean trenches)

Scientists love them

People at NASA and the European Space Agency love doing tests on them because they think, Tardigrades can help them understand the origin of life on earth (probably by supporting Panspermia). Also, scientists want to find out more about their extreme capabilities. If you ask them, if these things are aliens, they’ll tell you – “Probably not”

[Learn more about Tardigrades]

Why Do Bad Eggs Float?

By Anupum Pant

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Instead of cracking up an egg which has been stored for a long time, to end up disgusted by the ‘rotten egg smell’, or the smell of a gas called Hydrogen Sulfide, a simple and a fairly well known way to check if an egg has gone bad, is to drop it in a glass of water and see if it floats. I found out about this first, from an article written at Frugal Living, and spent some time to confirm its claims – Bad eggs float.
If you take my word for it (you should!), it really does work. The article describes this three-point test to find out if an egg is good to eat.

  1. If the egg sinks and lies on its side, it is a fresh one. It is good enough to be eaten.
  2. If it sinks and stands up on a point, or is at an angle, it is good enough. You can still use it up for making hard-cooked eggs or bake it.
  3. But, if an egg floats, it needs to be discarded.

Why does this happen?

To understand, you’ll have to think of a chick – a young chicken.

Poor Chicks: Before chickens come out of the egg, they develop lungs and need oxygen to breath. Sitting inside a sealed egg, with no cords attached, for the chick to survive, oxygen has to come in from somewhere. For that, let us look inside.

Egg Science: The outer shell of an egg has two membranes under it. When an egg is laid, it is warm and starts cooling which contracts the inner part of the egg more than the shell and pulls the two membranes apart. As a result, air gets trapped in between the membranes (not enough air initially for it to float).

How does the air come in? The shell of an egg isn’t as simple as it looks. It has about 7000 tiny pores in that shell which let the air pass in and let the carbon dioxide pass out of it. This is how the chick breathes. And the reason, eggs boiled in colored water during Easter, get colored from the inside.

So, as there are pores present in the shell, bacteria enter the egg and start decaying the biological matter inside. This produces a smelly gas (and other gases too), Hydrogen Sulfide (also present in smelly farts). The gases from this decomposition, and the air from outside, keep increasing in volume as time passes.

Corollary: This is exactly what explains these floating bad eggs – Greater the amount of gas inside, older is the egg and the better it floats in water.

Side note: Egg shells and the two membranes inside have the ability to stop the invasion of micro-organisms and bacteria, but over time bacteria manage to enter.

Things You Should Know About Farts

by Anupum Pant

Flatulence, an expulsion of intestinal gas, commonly known as fart, is something no one likes to talk about because it is considered a taboo, almost everywhere in the world. To top it all, some might even sideline this article by tagging it as a vulgar one. In my defense, that is exactly the purpose of my blog – To talk about things no one will talk to you at school (or anywhere else). Our inclination here is to learn.

Avoid shaming others for it.
Firstly, it is important to know that, irrespective or gender, race or nationality, farting is an invariable result of digestion and everyone does it about ten times a day. Even dead people fart. So, by shaming someone for letting it out in an accidentally loud way, is hypocritical on your part; it [shaming others] can be avoided. As Eric Auld says, it is okay to fart.

Do not hold it.
Secondly, it is not okay to hold flatulence to avoid embarrassment. Doing this, has the potential to cause a life threatening condition called diverticulitis. This disease is prevalent among the urban people for obvious reasons. Urban people have a greater societal pressure to hold it, than a free-living farmer. To give you an idea, 30 million Americans are currently suffering from it (old data).

What is it?

Principally, it is a mixture of gases taken in through mouth with food and gases which are produced while digesting food. The composition of ‘gas’ varies with, people, the kind of bacteria in their stomach and the kinds of food they eat. Oftentimes, people don’t hate their own smell; at the same time, detest the gases coming out from others. A fart is comprised of gases like Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon dioxide, Oxygen and Methane. It smells bad due to the presence of Hydrogen Sulfide, Mercaptans and Ammonia. And the presence of inflammable gases like Hydrogen and Methane makes them inflammable.

Farts in a humid environment can seem worse because during such conditions, our sense of smell is enhanced. This is the reason why farts smell worse in a shower.

Minimizing the effect

Although, there is no way you can end this trouble from your life, you can adjust your diet a bit to prevent this from happening in excess. Beans, cauliflower, corn, eggs etc are some foods which are notorious for producing gas in your body. These foods release a relatively greater amount of gas than other foods while getting digested in the intestines. Cutting their intake can help (of course consult your doctor first).

Another way to lower the problem is to prevent the odor from troubling others. This can be done by using products like “odor-proof undies”.

Coughing or suddenly moving your chair could help you to mask the sound.

 

A Bat’s Inverted Sleep Position

by Anupum Pant

I have written about sloths in the past. In that post, we appreciated the way their bodies are engineered to stay inverted for most of their lives. It turns out, a bat’s body is designed (rather evolved) in a similar way, which enables them to relax and sleep upside down. In this post, I would like to discuss – why did they evolve this way and how do they do it?

If you are interested to know more about bats, you will definitely like this post from the archives. [Bats can See]

How can bats manage to sleep like this?

Humans sleep in a horizontal position, cows sleep with their eyes open, horses sleep in a standing position, and of course, bats sleep in an inverted position. What makes an animal sleep in the position they do, is basically their anatomy – the way their bodies are designed. While sleeping upside down might seem as an anomalous behavior to us, it is a normal position for the bat’s body. Like we don’t exert energy when we are lying down, bats’ bodies don’t consume extra energy for hanging down like that.

Firstly, a bat’s claw is like a hook. A better way to understand why this helps is, to look at a converse behavior – the way a human hand works. We use up energy to contract tens of muscles and make up a hook with our fingers; this is not a normal state of our hand. Also, our relaxed hands are open where we don’t exert any energy and we sleep with our hands in that position. A bat’s claws are designed in a completely inverse fashion; they are hooked in the normal position. They don’t take up energy to make them into hooks, they are like that. And they sleep like that – which enables them to hang without using energy.
So, unlike our hands, a bats’ closed fist is their relaxed position. They have to contract tendons and use energy to open them up. This anomalous talon design allows them to hang in a relaxed position.

Bat's Talons - Normal position

Secondly, unlike every other bird, a bat can’t take off from an upright position, or from the ground. They have to be inverted to start flying. This is because they have relatively weaker wings which can’t make them fly from a stationary position. Think of an X-51A Waverider, which has to be carried on a B-52 plane and dropped down to start a flight. They drop down for a very small amount of time and beat their wings vigorously to start a flight. Since, they have to wake up inverted to go flying and catch a meal, they go to sleep like that.

Why did they evolve this way?

They’ve evolved this way to simply stay away from the predators:

  1. By hiding up in a place where not many predators would look – under a bridge, roof of the cave and dark tree canopies. Also, at places like these, they don’t have to compete with other birds for a place.
  2. And by escaping quickly in case of an attack by attaining instant flight [see above].

Bats Can See

by Anupum Pant

While every teacher around the world is busy teaching their kids that bats are blind, the contrary is actually true. Bats aren’t really blind and they can see pretty darn well even in low light. In fact, their eyes work better than our eyes do in a dimly lit environment (eg. Moon light).

None of the bats’ 1100 species are completely blind. Although, there are a few which depend heavily on a technique called echolocation to navigate around objects which are near, they still have to use eyes to see objects which are far away. Additionally, most bats like to hunt in complete darkness (to avoid competition from other birds), so they use echolocation during such times [because eyes need at least some amount of light to be present]. The daylight hours spent by them to groom or sleep don’t demand much of their visual skills, but that doesn’t make them blind.

One way in which bat’s vision is poorer than our visual ability, is that they can’t see colors like we do. Everything they see is in black and white. This disability, if you may call it one, is compensated by their ability to detect light waves whose frequencies lie beyond the human visible spectrum. Flying foxes, however, which are actually bigger bats, can see colors.

So, simply put, bats can see, but they don’t have to use their eyes to hunt or move around. This makes your teacher wrong when he/she says chides you with the phrase – “Blind as a bat”

Bonus Bat Facts

  1. Bats don’t carry rabies. However, like humans, the disease affects some bats.
  2. Apart from vampire bats found in Mexico, Central America and South America, no other bats suck blood.
  3. Bats hunt insects above your head, they aren’t interested in your hair or your eyes.
  4. Bats can catch insects with their tail or wing membranes.
  5. Fruit bats are also known as flying foxes, they eat fruits.
  6. Bats collectively eat tonnes of insects and protect our crops.
  7. Some bats eat fish and frogs.
  8. Bats’ dung, is rich in nutrients. It is mined from caves, bagged, and used by farmers to fertilize their crops.

Echolocation: A bat echolocates by sending out streams of high-pitched sounds through its mouth or nose. These signals then bounce off nearby objects and send back echoes. By “reading” these echoes with its super-sensitive ears, the bat can determine the location, distance, size, texture and shape of an object in its environment. In some cases, a bat can even use echoes to tell insects that are edible apart from those that aren’t. – [Source]

 

A Few Things About Sloths Everybody Should Know

by Anupum Pant

A few days back, on 20th October, Sloth Day was celebrated all around the world. You’d be thinking, what is so good about these strange animals, that makes people have a special day around them. Well, in that case, you need to read this.

What are these creatures?

Sloths are slow animals that make even cows look extremely active. They are so slow that they are almost stationary and algae grows on their hair. Most of their life is spent on trees hanging upside down. They hang on trees to protect themselves from the predators on the ground. Their bodies are so well engineered to stay inverted that the hair on their bodies, is oriented in the opposite direction – growing from stomach to back (This helps them to stay dry by draining water easily). Even dead sloths have been know to retain their grip and remain suspended after death. They come down only around once a week to excrete. They eat, sleep, travel, find partners, mate, give birth and even raise young ones in the canopies.

Although sloths might seem gross, creepy and unseemly, they really aren’t that bad. Sloths are sweet looking [1] [2] [3] animals (especially their babies, they are adorable) who can also swim efficiently and move wisely. We can definitely learn a lot from them.

Their diet is unbelievable

Sloths eat only leaves throughout their lives. They chew leaves slowly like cows to extract whatever nutrients they can. Sloth intestines are also adapted to extract the maximum out of their poor quality food, they are unusually long. They often like to shift to a different kind of leaf after a day or two. This balances their nutrient intake. Humans couldn’t possibly survive on a leafy salad diet for a very long time.

To save energy, sloths drop the temperature of their bodies at night. Even their bodies have more bones than muscles to prevent wastage of energy through muscular movement. After the Orangutan they are the most energy efficient animals.

Other facts about them

Sloths have blunt teeth to chew leaves properly, have large claws to hang on to branches and inverted fur orientation (as also mentioned before). Another interesting thing about them is that they have remained physically un-evolved for a long time because they don’t really have to compete with anyone else for their diet.

Mutualisms

This is where the awesomeness of Sloths come in. Sloths are home to a several kinds of other organism (tiny ones living in their fur). These organism depend on sloths (hosts) for various things and in turn provide an advantage to their hosts. This is called mutualism.

  1. Algae + Sloth – Algae, for instance, uses the long grooves on sloth hair to grow with a secure footing. As a rent for this safe apartment, the algae gives them [sloths] a nice shade of green color to camouflage on trees. This and their still bodies make them virtually impossible to spot with the naked eye. The camouflage protects them from eagles.
  2. Bacteria + Sloth – Apart from the several other bacteria which live inside a sloth to digest the leafy diet, two kinds of Cyanobacteria live on sloth furs too. These bacteria also give sloths a nice gray hue which helps them in the same ways as above.
  3. The Sloth Moth – The Pyralidae Moth also live on Sloths. These feed on the algae which grows on the fur. In return for the good food, moths give them nothing. Yes, nothing. This is called Commensalism.
  4. Others – Similarly, various other organisms like flies, mites and three types of beetles are often found living in a Sloth. Up to 900 beetles have been found on a single Sloth!

There is so much more to write about these amazing little creatures who provide for so many other creatures too. I’ll keep it for the second part that I’ll write some other day. So the next time you see a Sloth crossing the road, carefully pick it up by holding its mid body and gently place it on a tree. Remember to use a glove/cloth.