For animals, the brain is the most important thing, but have you ever heard of an animal that deliberately "eats" its own brain? Hello everyone, I am old K, a naïve and reliable intelligence officer who focuses on novelty.
The world is so big that there is no wonder, and in the biological world, there is such a strange animal. In order to survive, they eat their "brains", but they do not expect to end up becoming a delicacy on the human table.
The animal is called: sea squirt. It is actually a sea pineapple, also known as "sea milk" in the coastal areas of Shandong. In China, it is often used to make sea pineapple bibimbap, and in Japan and South Korea, people are keen to eat it raw.
Sea squirts are a collective term for this type of organism, they like cold environments, widely distributed in the world's cold or temperate oceans, is a very common marine life. There are about 1,250 species of sea squirts around the world, and you can find them in everything from shoals to deep seas.
As animals, sea squirts have brains in their infancy. The newborn sea squirt looks like a small tadpole, has eyes and a brain, and drags a long tail. There are also a series of pairs of cracks on either side of the pharynx, which are equivalent to their gills, allowing the sea squirts to parade freely in the sea. However, this state of freedom is short-lived and can only last for a few hours, so they need to quickly find suitable habitats.
In general, sea squirts attach to other objects to spend their lives. Once settled, the sea squirts begin to grow and develop on their own. Unlike the development of most organisms, the growth of sea squirts is more like a degeneration, which is biologically called: retrograde metamorphosis. Their tail atrophied and disappeared first, followed by its chord and nerve cords, the "brain" part.
Sea squirts, in turn, are inactive predators and can only wait for plankton to fall into their mouths or filter microbes in the water to survive. When there is no food, the existence of the "brain" consumes a huge amount of energy, and it becomes a burden to the sea squirt. If there is no food for a long time, the "brain" of the sea squirt will begin to degenerate, slowly becoming a nutrient absorbed by itself, leaving only an empty shell to survive. This evolution of sea squirts is more about reducing consumption and sustaining life.
For simple species like sea squirts, whether they have "brains" or not actually has little effect on them. Comparing humans, our human brains only account for 2% of the body's body weight, but the oxygen consumption reaches 25% of the whole body's oxygen consumption, which is a proper "energy consumption tycoon", but in exchange for higher intelligence and rapid response capabilities. For animals such as sea squirts that rely on filtering seawater, this energy consumption is too large and too detrimental to survival.
Speaking of which, everyone may think that without a "brain", this is not to be slaughtered! Don't think so, after zoologists have found that the sea squirt will spew out internal organs when it encounters danger, and most fish are very disgusted with its internal organs, even if they barely eat it, they will spit it out, which allows the sea squirt to avoid the fate of falling into the belly of the fish. After 12 days of spewing out the internal organs, the sea squirt can grow new internal organs without affecting itself. In this alternative way of preserving life, sea squirts have survived on Earth for 500 million years.
But the sea squirts could never have imagined that the way of life they had evolved over generations would have no effect on humans. It loses the ability to react flexibly, but it is convenient for humans to pick. Because sea squirts are rich in nutritional value and taste good to eat, they have unsurprisingly entered the human diet.
What makes people feel sad is that the sea squirt has worked hard to survive, but it has not escaped the "claws" of human beings. Well, this issue of the show is here, like friends remember to like the attention, we will see you in the next issue!