A beetle that heads for the ‘back door’ when eaten by a frog (2020)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
A stork once strolled by the pond's edge,
where he spotted a blind slow-worm, a hedge.
The stork exclaimed, "Oh, this is quite grand!"
and devoured it, all, without a reprimand.
The slow-worm lay in the stork's belly,
and both found this situation rather smelly.
The blind slow-worm then spoke with dismay,
"Such horror!" and slipped through the back door away.
The stork, vexed by this unhappy twist,
couldn't believe he'd let the slow-worm persist.
So, without hesitation or delay,
he ate the slow-worm again the same way.
He cleverly wedged the back door tight,
so the blind slow-worm could not escape his sight.
The stork called in, with a cunning tone:
"Well, if you can, try escaping on your own!"
The sly slow-worm found the front door clear,
and promptly made his escape with no fear.
But the stork, filled with anger and spite,
ate the slow-worm once more, sealing his plight.
In a crafty invention, the stork's mind did revel,
he connected both doors to secure his prey well.
Then, addressing the slow-worm inside without fail,
"Now get ready for a round trip, without fail!"
The accuracy and level of detail makes me speechless.
Then again, I saw the title and continued reading, so I knew what I was getting into.
At least I have more vocabulary for when my dog rolls in something on a walk.
A hilarious non-sequitur for the dog scenario.
I present my favorite video of the rough-skinned newt “actively escaping” from a bullfrog’s body after being eaten:
Between 6 and 240 minutes... How come such a wild range? Some take time sightseeing?
The photos of the escape make me imagine the world's strangest motivational "hang in there" type of poster.
Duster — Me And The Birds starts playing
Likely not. Animal trials are usually one use, to get the best data. And the animals in use get usually killed afterwards anyway. If you like animals, you probably do not want to learn too many details about it all.
They usually didn't make it very long but it's something. This was dogs though, so advanced stages of the trial, early stage vermin definitely didn't get the same treatment.
Side story: I did IT there and could access just about any building on campus, but whenever I had to go to the animal testing building to do whatever maintenance it was, I had a security guard escort and loom over me wherever I went. From what I was told they had an animal rights group infiltrate and attempt to release all of the animals a couple of years before.
I went to a vegan restaurant once and met some randoms in London, I think it was a meetup.com thing. And one lady was telling me how she would happily take a lead pipe and hurt people working in animal testing.
I was shocked that someone would would share their violent ideals with a total stranger. I mean I could have been an undercover policeman or something...
And just to be clear, I definitely don't think hurting humans is a good idea.
If the police wanted to bust people hypothetically threatening other people with violence, they just have to look on social media a bit. But as far as I know, a vague hypothetical threat like this, would probably be dismissed by a court. I rather know, that there are many people walking freely around who do make not cague, but concrete threats to concrete people and the police usually says, they cannot do anything.
I got the impression this lady I met was a little un-hinged / manic. Although more than capable of causing harassment to those unlucky to be in her path.
(Sorry, it's the oh-so-appropriate punch line from a joke in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).)
> Sugiura suspects that the beetles also use their legs to stimulate the frog’s cloacal sphincter, causing it to defecate. However, he’ll need to run more tests to be sure...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtiqS1l_SbM Very NSFW language.
Hilarious, foul and disgusting coprophilia .. "back magic".
And, if it's alive, so that it will be dead instead.
I didn't say that.
Putting things another way, just a few minutes of observation are sufficient to demonstrate that running the air intake past the esophagus is so irrelevant to the purpose of chewing that the absence of that problem does not affect the behavior in any way.
1. Chewing -> bad throat
2. Good throat -> no chewing
Good throat -> chewing not required for that reason but possibly for other reason.
Chewing -> bad throat possible, but not required.
Not chewing -> bad throat badge not unlocked.
No, I haven't. That quite simply does not follow, at all. There is to much variation in the definitions and permutations of chewing, throat design, air intake design, types of foods eaten, and digestive systems to make that leap.
Thus, it's because grass and weeds are bland and lacking in tasty fat that bovines and ruminants chew their food for so long and so many times.
Carnivores vs. herbivores.
Also, it depends if something eats leaves (not very digestible, not very nourishing) vs fruit (very digestible, except the seeds, and highly nourishing).
Carnivores don't need to chew much.
Carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores.
For most animals, this is true I think. But frogs seem to be perfectly happy swallowing live prey whole. You can see videos of frogs eating live mice!
breathe /briːð/ -- verb: the act of inhaling and exhaling for the purposes of respiration.
They are not the same word and they do not sound the same.
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I know what the words mean.
Interestingly, sprint predators such as cheetahs have to pause to get their breath back after a fast chase before they can eat their prey. In contrast, raptors such as falcons can eat immediately after a kill because they don't get out of breath in the same way. The avian respiratory system is actually quite different to ours, with relatively rigid lungs, separate air sacs to pump the air, and a one-way flow through the lungs, in contrast to mammalian lungs where the air goes in and out through the same pipe, and the lungs act as bellows as well as gas transfer devices.
One such example is the way our retinas are wired to the optic nerve on the inside of the eye, rather than behind, causing us to have a "blind spot" where the nerve fibres need to go back. In some other animals, particularly the octopus, the retina is wired the "right way", such that they don't have a blind spot.
Same for the design of our pharynx, larynx and esophagus. As mentioned in sibling comments, other animals suffer from choking much less, as compared to humans, where we have ~5k deaths/year from choking just in the US [0].
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/527321/deaths-due-to-cho...
Choking kills thousands of people every year and is the fourth leading cause in children under 5. According to this article (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099619/), aspirated pneumonia is even worse, especially for older people, who guess what, can't chew well.
And it's all due to the (apparently not terrible) design.
And even if you agree that evolution is an optimization process, attempts to define its objective function run into problems with tautology and circular definitions once you move beyond simple examples.
That is the TL;DR. He, she or it that has the most babies, wins.
"He found that the beetles had similarly high success rates with four other frog species....
"When swallowed, other similar water beetles were killed and digested by the frog...."