The Anglerfish Deleted Its Immune System to Fuse with Its Mate | Hacker News Reader

The Anglerfish Deleted Its Immune System to Fuse with Its Mate

wired.com

74 pointsMindGods30 comments

Well, this is cool and all, but:

Boehm believes that the anglerfish somehow boosts its own innate immune system to make up for the loss of the adaptive system.

So it hasn't actually deleted its entire immune system, like the title suggests. Just some part of it.

I mean I hated the title on sight because I don't even know what "the immune system" is. And I've thought about this a whole lot and written a few rambly blog posts about it (probably not currently online).

If you talk about "your circulatory system," you can name specific organs, etc. Same is true if you talk about "your nervous system" or "your digestive tract."

The same is not true of "your immune system."

Your skin is part of your immune system. It helps keep out invaders.

Your saliva and stomach acid are part of your immune system. They help kill microbes in your food to help make it safe for you to eat.

The mucus lining all mucus membranes in your body, including your respiratory tract and digestive tract, is part of your immune system. It helps keep out invaders.

So while it's fascinating that this fish has apparently deleted some important pieces of its immune system, I don't think it is accurate to say "it deleted its immune system" (in its entirety) because the odds are good it still has many systems that help protect it from invading microbes, starting with some kind of skin/scales/hide and including some kind of digestive function.

It's a really interesting piece, but the immune system isn't any one thing. It's everything the body does to try to keep out invaders and white blood cells are just one part of that.

I do think the title could have been made more accurate by weakening it, but I'm curious linguistically why the title as is evokes hatred. Would you feel it similarly misleading if a headline said "individual crashes their car" but it turned out they had another conveyance and could still drive? Is it that the title leaves open the ambiguity that it could be referring to one of its immune systems versus the entire immune system? Or is it to do with the semantics of the verb deleted that implies a completeness of removal? I suppose the closest parallel I can think of is "Big bank deletes its security system", which would be confusing, but I wouldn't be led to believe that they removed all their doors and windows too, even if they are technically components of physical security, and I wouldn't really expect that to be disambiguated in the headline.

To me personally, the most characteristic part of the immune system is the adaptive portion of it, and when I hear that an organism's immune system is deleted, the first thing that comes to mind is that it doesn't produce or recognize antibodies, rather than that it has deleted its skin and mucosa, so this doesn't really feel that dishonest compared to other forms of click-bait. Not perfectly accurate, but if it had said "deleted some of its immune system", I probably wouldn't have assumed that it was missing its entire adaptive immune system. To me, it feels like the pragmatics dulls the semantic ambiguity to a pretty tolerable level, especially for popular science reporting. Maybe I'm missing the point and the issue at hand is how we talk about the immune system in general. Hope this doesn't come off as attacking, I'm interested in understanding the semantic point you're presenting.

I have a genetic disorder. This causes me to have a compromised immune system.

This is a personal sore point for me because of that. Trying to figure out "What in heck does that even mean in practical terms????!!!" has been a years-long process.

My condition is a dread disease and it's torture. Figuring out how to effectively manage it has been complicated by the misleading way we frame immune function. So I wish the world wouldn't do that to begin with.

Apologies if I've touched on a sore topic. How can I help to frame the immune system in a less misleading way?

I don't know.

I've developed mental models for what is pertinent to my needs, but I have no idea how to talk with other people about this stuff.

My condition involves misprocessing of dietary fats. It took me ages to realize this was one of the ways my immune system was compromised: Bone marrow is fatty and is where white blood cells get produced.

Avoiding fats I don't process well has dramatically reduced my symptoms overall, especially chronic inflammation. But getting enough of the right fats has proven critical to my health and well-being. Loading up on butter and other fats I tolerate well is the quickest way to stop bone pain and I'm convinced it's because that pain is due to stress on my immune system.

Fasting has been beneficial and it took me years and years to realize that and to come up with mental models for why on Earth fasting would boost immune function.

Extreme aquagenic wrinkling is a known tendency for my condition. As I've grown healthier, I'm less prone to that.

It took me years and years to realize this suggests my skin is abnormally spongy and soaks things up instead of keeping things out and this is a really important way my immune function is compromised. So I have gotten a lot pickier about what I am willing to touch because my skin fails to do its job.

It's like we don't tell people that the body's equivalent of windows and doors are even part of the equation. We act like the cameras and alarms are all there is to it and never talk about "If something is really whackadoodle, it's like all the windows are broken and none of the doors have locks, so it almost doesn't matter if the cameras and alarms work. You're screwed anyway."

Just jumping in here, but all I'd suggest is that other biological systems may be similarly complex in ways that don't necessarily impact you. And if we stopped to disambiguate every nuance, we'd never be able to have fruitful conversations.

That said, I understand why this particular nuance is important to you and I think it's a helpful distinction to make that many may have not considered, so I appreciate you making it.

This is not just me being neurotic and over sensitive. I have tried to look up "the immune system" and found definitions indicating "it's how the body protects itself from invaders" and failing to list specific organs in the body.

I have also made remarks trying to elucidate the lymphatic system and how it works. The circulatory system pumps it for half the equation. Most people seem to have no idea how the lymphatic system works either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anDIlMVgNwk

Awesome video. Thanks for sharing. Puts the news in context.

Anglerfish have always been the animal that top the charts for me in disgust, terror, and fascination. Really cool to learn more about the way they live.

They are absolutely terrifying to me on a visual level but holy crap are they cool creatures

Not only the aesthetics, but also the idea that individuals of one sex dissolve into their mates bodies. It's all kind of nightmarish.

No no, that’s the cool part haha

I spent many years thinking they were invented as scary video game baddies...was pretty horrified when I found out they're actually real.

Can someone explain this in the context of evolution? How is this "mating ritual" an adaptive advantage? How does going from two of the species to one a benefit? I understand they're mating, but that's not immediate.

In the dark depths where the anglerfish lives, it’s rare to encounter a mate. Evolving a mechanism to allow the male to latch onto the female well in advance of mating ensures the female has access to sperm when it’s ready to produce eggs. Otherwise it’d be a gamble to randomly encounter a male during the short window when mating is viable.

For the male, minimizing its size and lowering its immune system allows it to more efficiently live off the females for the long period of time until it gets to mate.

Given that it was not designed, but evolved gradually, it is easy to deduce that recently males were just floating around, sticking, and then feeding off female's blood by biting into their body. They basically be born and eat women like parasites, but with a reproduction feedback. Remember that when someone calls life a beauty again.

It's odd that the Darwinian phrase "survival of the fittest" conjures up images of strength and beauty, but parasitism is a surprisingly common and highly effective fitness strategy.

If I am understanding correctly, a virus that targeted any receptors within the Anglerfish would be fatal 100% of the time?

The article seemed to imply that's one thing that deserves more research.

They still have an innate immune system, and the article mentions researchers suspecting that the innate immune system is stronger in anglerfish.

Can an innate immune system do anything about a virus that has already entered the organism? Or perhaps they just have such a strong outer layer and are so dispersed that viruses rarely evolve to target them, and quickly die out if they do.

Yes. There are cellular receptors that recognize viral features (dsRNA &c). The innate immune system is the first line of defense in vertebrates and the only thing that nonvertebrates have, and it's pretty efficient.

There has been an evolutionary arms race between viruses and potential host cells where host cells constantly figure out new defenses and viruses figure out ways to counter them. The adaptive immune system is a very sophisticated defense mechanism, but not the only one available. E.g. check out Toll like receptors [1], PKR [2], APOBEC3, etc.

Viruses of course have to counter these defenses somehow, but it still slows them down, and if only because they require additional RNA/DNA to encode it which can mutate and render subsequent viruses inactive.

There is a great lecture on the topic of intrinsic and innate defenses against viruses by Vincent Racianello [3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll-like_receptor#Summary_of_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_kinase_R

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMNbrTlV4_w

It may be that viruses are simply less of a concern: perhaps at that depth viruses have difficulty surviving outside of a host and so can't spread very easily?

It could even be that they lost their immune systems first due to a lack of genetic pressure to keep them, and this allowed their "fusing" behaviour to evolve.

Mirror: https://archive.is/fRNhJ

hopes that the finding will perhaps lead to a new understanding of immunosuppression in humans, and perhaps better treatments for organ transplant recipients in the future

Honestly that always sounds like a little stretch to me, like porting kqueue user code to iocp through cygwin under wine and expecting the same io performance.

Absolutely fascinating! Is there any other animal known to have evolved like that?

There is an insect species with live birth, where the males never get born, but mate with their sisters while still in the mother's body. The sisters then get born already pregnant.

I guess they beat the anglerfish in weirdness.

There's an excellent essay by the evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould about sexual dimorphism [0], mostly in the context of anglerfish, but which also mentions a parasitic mollusk, of which the male embeds itself in the female body and looses most all organs except the testes.

That same essay leaves us with this gem of a quote: "In some ultimate Freudian sense, what male could resist the fantasy of a life as a penis with a heart, deeply and permanently embedded within a caring and providing female?"

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=o6g2tvN0nJoC&lpg=PT15&ots=...

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