On Valentine's Day 2014, the Great King's Foot worm "No. 1" was declared dead at the Japanese Aquarium. At this time, it had been on hunger strike for 5 years and 43 days, setting a world record for the longest animal hunger strike.
Its last meal was a 50-gram horse mackerel eaten on January 2, 2009, after which it was eaten or drunk. The keeper couldn't figure out why he didn't eat, and tried everything to no avail. And it often pretends to move its mouth to eat, but never swallows the food.
This "hunger" made the king's foot worm famous and attracted widespread attention. As a result, people began to speculate about the reason for its choice of hunger strike, but so far there is no definite result. In honor of this warrior who died on hunger strike, the Japanese also introduced many king footed peripherals, such as handmade, pillows, and mobile phone cases.
What is even more unexpected is that this hunger strike has also ignited the business of "fried king foot worms" in Japan. Although the King's Foot worm may seem a little scary, it is actually a hunting delicacy, and it is said that the meat is very lobster-like and tastes very good.
However, most of the people on the table are "cottage versions" of the king's foot worm, another creature, the Dow deep water lice. Both of these extremely similarly shaped creatures belong to isopods, a class of organisms that are changing our understanding of the course of evolution.
Bathynomus giganteus, also known as "giant deep-sea lice" and "giant isopods", is the largest isopod in the world. They appeared about 160 million years ago and have lived until now, but their appearance has hardly changed, so people call them "living fossils in the deep sea".
This ancient creature looks strange, like the cosmic creature in the movie Alien. You see, it also has a special pair of compound eyes, which are a combination of nearly 4,000 flat small eyes, located on each side of the head.
It has two pairs of tentacles on its head and seven pairs of articulated limbs on its abdomen. The calcareous outer bone of its scales is very special, and the upper part is integrated with the head, below and tail, like a lilac shield.
In general, the main food of the great king haspods is the carcasses of marine organisms. But there is also evidence that they are not pure scavengers, and occasionally catch them alive to eat.
Despite their abundant food sources, they choose a long-term hunger strike when they disagree, and at the same time, the great king has a habit of overeating. They will eat the carcasses of large animals at once, and may even affect movement by eating too much. Maybe for them, eating or not eating all depends on the mood, anyway, they can live for a few years without eating.
The French zoologist Minai Eduard was the first to depict the species. He captured a male cub of a king pod in the Gulf of Mexico in 1879. The first appearance of this creature upended the theory of deep-sea inanimateness at that time.
Since the great king has become famous, humans have discovered that it is a superior delicacy. However, because the great king haspods usually live in deep and cold deep seas, it is difficult to catch. Driven by profits, merchants often use the relatively easy-to-catch Dow deep water lice to counterfeit it. Because the two creatures look so much alike, and they are both members of the large family of isopods.
Isopods are a class of crustaceans with high diversity and adaptability. In fact, this kind of creature is very common in life, and the watermelon worm that we used to catch and play with when we were young is one of them. Watermelon worms, also known as tidal worms, were the first animals to be listed as isopods. But there were also some small episodes in between.
Originally, because of the similarity of hippods to Diplopods, scientists once classified isopods as M yriopoda. However, with the discovery of aquatic and other foot orders, it was gradually classified as crustacea.
Today, scientists have found that there are about 10,000 species of isopods in existence. Their living environment varies widely, including marine, freshwater, terrestrial, in vitro and in vivo parasitic species. Terrestrial isopods mainly live under the dead leaves of wet rocks or in burrows, such as common rat women, tide insects, etc.; the living environment of freshwater isopods includes intermittent water bodies such as rivers, lakes, and ditches; marine equinoxes are distributed on the coast, intertidal zone, Shan Lake reef, deep sea, etc., such as the sea cockroach (Ligia exotica) intertidal zone or shallow sea often attached to seaweed or other floating objects of various water lice.
Rat woman
In addition to the wide variety, the size and size of isopods also vary considerably. For example, some parasitic gill lice are only a few millimeters, while the great king has a foot that can grow about tens of centimeters and weigh up to 1 kilogram;
However, the most interesting thing is that no matter how different their living habits are, they still have the same characteristic, that is, they all have 7 pairs of 14 legs, and each pair looks like the shape of the legs, which is why they are called isopods.
The various isopods in the ocean have 14 legs regardless of their evolved shape.
It is reasonable to say that the close relatives of the isopod order are crustacean decapods to which shrimp and crabs belong. However, we often mistake the tide worm for an insect, because the head segment of the tide worm only heals with the first thoracic node, and the remaining 7 thoracic nodes are independent of each other, and each node has a pair of walking feet. This segmented body makes them look very different from the lobster's appearance.
And because crab shrimp crustaceans and the like live in water, it is difficult for us to think that hysteroids are a type of crustacean.
Terrestrial isopods are the only crustaceans that are fully adapted to terrestrial life. Like other isopods that live in water, they also have gills for breathing. To this end, they have also evolved some unusual bodily functions. In the case of watermelon worms, for example, they usually appear in damp, dark places, where they can roll into balls to protect any moisture on the gills.
In addition, they not only do not urinate, do not excrete waste products with high ammonia content in the body, but also eat feces, even their own feces. When drinking water, they protrude from the rear end of the tubular structure instead of out of the mouth.
As for when the waiting popods successfully landed on land, there has been controversy. It has been inferred from their evolutionary relationship that the ancestors of the suborder Hysteroids differentiated between the Carboniferous and Permian periods. Others have found the earliest fossils of tide insects in amber in the middle of the Cretaceous period. But what is clear is that after the emergence of tide insects, vertebrates have set off two waves of landfall, and various animals on land are fiercely fighting.
Compared to other animals, terrestrial and other foot orders have almost no advantage in survival. Yet they actually stood on their heels and spread to every corner of the world. After them, no new crustacean taxa landed successfully.
A species of terrestrial and other porcupines
In recent years, scientists have discovered that foot animals such as land can actually survive in aquatic environments again, a discovery that is changing our view of the evolutionary process. This seems to tell humans that the evolution of species is not only a "one-way street", but also the ability of species to survive in long-forgotten environments.
In 2012, astronauts from the European Space Agency's (ESA) CAVES underground training program were sent to caves in the Italian island of Sardinia for a week of training to simulate the space environment and conduct a study that included projects such as cataloging subsurface taxonomy.
They place bait near ponds and elsewhere to attract and spot as many creatures as possible. For better results, Paul Marcia, who designed the biosampling scheme, concocted a stinking bait with animal liver and spoiled cheese, a special "dish" that attracts underground creatures in a short period of time. As a result, they found a special land isopod in a small pond.
The species completed the evolutionary cycle from primitive aquatic organisms to terrestrial organisms and back to aquatic organisms. The discovery will change people's understanding of biological evolution, and scientists are currently studying it in depth.
However, humans rarely have the idea of eating terrestrial and other foot animals like tide worms.
Compared with the king's foot worm and its "cottage version" that began to be put on the table, this may be a great wisdom of the isopods that dare to land.
Isopoda . Wikipedia. on 20 November 2019, at 15:58 (UTC).
Bathynomus giganteus. Wikipedia. on 10 November 2019, at 16:50 (UTC).
Author: Little Haimi Giant Deep-Sea Lice - Big King Footworm October 1, 2018
Species evolution is not just a "one-way street" Source: China Science and Technology Network November 28, 2012
George D.F. Wilson, Fossils in the Phylogeny of the Isopod Crustaceans The Impact of Isopod Fossils.
Pierre Broly, Pascal Deville, Sébastien Maillet, The origin of terrestrial isopods (Crustacea:
Yu Haiyan Li Xinzheng: Overview of isopod taxonomic systematics and prospects of isopod research in China's coastal isopods Institute of Oceanography, Chinese Academy of Sciences