Life is fragile
But fragile life
Often shows amazing tenacity
Not long ago, a bizarre video circulated on the Internet.
A poor bug, somehow suffering, had left only a thin shell on its lower body, while it was still crawling freely in the grass, seemingly completely unaware that its body had been completely hollowed out.
This surprised all the friends who had seen this video: Was this bug infected with the T virus and turned into a zombie?
Needless to say, in the comment area of the video, there are really many people who give similar explanations.
They said that the bug was already dead, but that some kind of parasite or fungus in its body was controlling its body to continue crawling.
emmm...... If so, then this bug is really a veritable zombie, and if this thing is infected with humans, won't Resident Evil really be staged in reality?
So, is there really such a crazy parasite or bacteria in the world?
Frankly, no!
Or, scientifically, there has been no such thing as turning another creature into a zombie.
When I say this, some people may be immediately unhappy: You lonely thing, even if you have not heard of zombie ants and zombie snails, have you not seen clematis control mantises to throw themselves into the water?
Yes, there are some parasites that can parasitize insects and control their brains, such as the "zombie fungus" that has been on Earth for more than 48 million years.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > lateral Cordyceps spp</h1>
This terrible fungus, mainly hosted by the Ley's humpback ant and its close relatives, can control the ants to climb into an environment suitable for fungal growth and reproduction, and clamp the leaf veins tightly with their jaws until death.
While the host is waiting for death, the sporocarp of the sporocarp of the fungus is produced from the host's head, ruptured and released spores, thus completing the cycle of life.
Infected with the eccentric Cordyceps fungus, the ant behaves like a thoughtless walking dead, so many biologists refer to the infected ants as "zombie ants."
However, in practice, neither the partial Cordyceps sinensis nor parasites such as golden wasps, double disc flukes, clematis, etc. that can "kidnap" the host can kill the host before manipulating the host's corpse.
They can only stimulate the brain nerves of the host through chemicals, thus driving the living host to run to places they don't like and do things they don't like, such as throwing themselves into the water and committing suicide. After the death of the host, these parasites leave the host's body and return to the vast expanse of nature.
That is to say, once the host dies, no amount of fungus or parasite can make it move half a step. It can be seen that this hollowed-out insect is not an insect carcass manipulated by some fungus or parasite.
Compared to the zombie claim, another explanation that also exists in the comments section sounds much more reliable — some believe that the bug is still crawling because the nerves are not completely dead.
This answer is correct in a way, but it is too pale. Because the nerve is not dead, it can only explain why its legs are still moving, not why it is still alive.
Shortly after the creature dies, fresh nerves may indeed continue to drive limb movement due to reflexes. For example, the bullfrog, which had been skinned and cut into pieces, suddenly fell off the table like chicken blood and fled...
I really don't know if this table guest is lucky or unlucky, obviously got a fairly fresh ingredient, but such fresh ingredients pulled their legs before the pot and fled.
This scene also looks quite strange, but from a scientific point of view, it is not terrible, it is just the most basic neural reflex phenomenon of animals.
Nerves are like "wires" throughout an animal's body, exchanging information through electrical impulse signals.
When organisms are stimulated by the outside world, the pulse signals sent by sensory organs such as eyes, ears, mouths, noses or skin are generally transmitted to the brain through the nervous system, and after the brain is analyzed, the new pulse signals are fed back to the muscles, and then we will make corresponding limb responses.
However, in some cases, nerve impulses do not need to pass through the brain to act directly on the limbs, such as...
This condition is called neural reflex. Since nerve reflexes are the behavior of nerve impulses that do not pass through the brain, when the knee is tapped, you simply cannot control the leg that has nowhere to stay, and no matter how hard you try, it will "Duang" bounce up.
At the same time, it is precisely because neural reflexes do not require the intervention of the brain, so even if your head has moved, the body will still have a knee-jerking reaction at a certain time, as well as other neural reflex phenomena.
And this hollowed-out worm is obviously not crawling under the mechanism of neural reflexes, and from the point of view of behavior, it is still alive in a normal way—even if it can live like this for a few days, in short, it is conscious, thoughtful, hopeful.
So what kind of bug is this, and why is the vitality so tenacious?
In fact, it is not difficult to verify its body, from the shape of the neck and head, the end of the leaf-like antennae, and the white spots on the side of the abdomen can be clearly distinguished, it is a species under the Coleoptera \ Polyphalus suborder \ Golden Turtle family, that is, we commonly known as "Scarab Beetle" a species, the scientific name is -
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > giant chestnut gill horned golden turtle</h1>
Also, it is a female large chestnut gill horned golden turtle.
This scarab is widely distributed and was once listed as a major pest in Europe. There is a significant difference between their females and males: the males have seven lobes at the ends of their forehead antennae, while the females have only six lobes.
The gill-horned golden turtle is not very strong, and even in the 20th century, when European countries sprayed insecticides on a large scale, they almost became extinct, but fortunately, the government later regulated the use of pesticides, and their numbers gradually rebounded.
It can be said that the large chestnut gill horned golden turtle is a very fragile insect. So why is its body hollowed out and still tenaciously surviving?
This has a lot to do with the body structure of insects.
Friends who have watched "Death is Coming" know that if death wants to kill a person, it can create tens of thousands of bizarre ways to die in minutes, but in fact, accidental death is ultimately only three ways to die.
One is to lose enough oxygen supply and be choked to death; the other is to lose good blood circulation and die of shock; and then to lose the ability to eat, to be killed alive in the face of food, oh no, starvation.
In other words, animal life is actually directly supported by the three core systems of the respiratory system, the blood circulation system, and the digestive system. In the event of accidental damage, if either of these systems is destroyed, the person quickly becomes gameover.
But insects are very different from humans — to put it bluntly, they're all "heartless, lungless" stuff.
First, insects do not rely on the lungs to breathe, and their respiratory system is made up of valves and trachea.
Valves are small opening and closing holes that are distributed on both sides of the chest and abdomen and are directly connected to the trachea. The trachea, on the other hand, is similar to human blood vessels, is networked throughout the body, and can contract and expand to control gas exchange.
After oxygen enters the insect through the valves, it is transported by dense trachea to various parts of the body.
This means that one part of the insect's body is damaged, which does not affect the oxygen supply of other parts, and it is difficult to die of suffocation.
In addition, insects have no heart, only a dorsal blood vessel similar to the heart function, composed of multiple ventricles, which pump blood into the arteries and power blood circulation throughout the body.
Still, the dorsal blood vessels are much less dynamic than the heart, so the blood pressure of most insects is very low. This allows them to suffer serious injuries without losing blood as quickly as humans do and causing rapid organ failure.
It is worth mentioning that all insects have dorsal blood vessels on the upper side of the abdomen, so the beetle's abdomen is hollowed out, which means that its dorsal blood vessels have been completely damaged, and it is obviously unable to circulate blood, which is undoubtedly fatal to it.
However, insects are not as dependent on blood circulation as vertebrates, or the termination of blood circulation does not cause the insect to die quickly or go into shock. This is because insects do not have red blood cells in their blood, do not participate in oxygen transport, and even if the blood stops circulating, the brain and major organs will not lack oxygen.
Of course, insect blood still has basic roles such as transporting nutrients, maintaining body temperature, and providing immunity. The loss of the dorsal blood vessel is therefore an absolute fatal injury to the insect, and it will soon die if it does not die of other causes.
In addition, the hollowing out of the abdomen also means that the beetle has completely lost its digestive system, and it is unable to take energy through eating, which will also take its life without accident, but it will also take a certain amount of time to take its life.
Therefore, this poor beetle did not turn into a zombie, but its lost organs were not enough for it to die immediately, so it could still drag most of its shell to survive for a while, but it would never survive for a long time.