The world is so big that there are no wonders, can you imagine that some kind of animal can live freely without breathing? You may say, how is it possible, living on earth, an animal has to breathe, whether it is with nostrils, or with skin, breathing is a natural law, otherwise it is only waiting for burps.
However, scientists have really found an animal that does not breathe, not because it does not want to breathe, but that it does not have the gene to breathe at all, which is the only animal known on our planet that does not breathe, this animal is called henneguya salminicola, a bubble-like parasite that parasitizes in salmon.
The study, led by dorothée Huchon, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, used microscopes and fluorescent agents to study and sequence the genes of this myxosporidium, and the results showed that salmon myxosporidium had lost its mitochondrial genome and thus the ability to perform aerobic cell respiration.
Respiration is the process of animal cells oxidating and decomposing organic matter and converting them into energy, and the energy that completes life activities in animal cells needs to be provided by animal respiration. Animals are multicellular creatures with many genes and have evolved to become more and more complex to adapt to the demands of more energy and perpetuation of their genes. However, scientists' research has found that salmon myxosporids seem to be "reverse" evolution, they not only lost tissues, nerve cells, muscles, everything, even lost the mitochondrial gene, even the ability to breathe, evolved to no multicellular characteristics, almost became a single-celled organism.
You can see this from the morphology of salmon myxosporids, which, under a fluorescence microscope, have green or blue cells that look like green or blue sperm, but with two tails and a pair of alien-like oval eyes. These eyes are actually a spiny cell, but instead of venom, they are used to grab the host and attach to the host, and these prickly cells are almost the only animal features in salmonid myxosporidium evolution that have not been abandoned.
You might be thinking, oh my God, how are these guys going to survive without breathing? These myxosporids parasitize the dense muscles of salmon and do not have the conditions to breathe, and scientists are not sure how they can obtain the energy they need to survive. But some similar parasites have some proteins that can be obtained directly from infected hosts adenosine triphosphate (ATP), and Musporidium salmonoides may have a similar mechanism.
It seems that retrograde is also a way of survival, but the price paid is inevitably too large, salmon myxosporids almost all animal characteristics, completely no fun at all. When you grow into a tree, what is the meaning of your life? Birds on you at will, moths drill holes in you at will, and then they are cut off by a motorcycle saw, five horses are torn apart, turned into furniture, or sent to the hearth, no free movement, no free thought, what is the difference between these slimospores trapped in the muscles of salmon? Losing all abilities, life becomes stubborn, this is not survival, this is reverse evolution, waiting for hiccups and group extinction.
The study was published Feb. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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