I knew a guy who once engineered a continuous yogurt-making machine… (maybe even the guy whose machine is in all the yogurt shops,) he was a engineer, not a biologist… but… you might be onto something.
There were some interesting aspects of engineering. Not nearly as many as he thought…
The problem is they they’re just designed to eat and get chonky. If they had invested in cool ninja combat during evolution, scientists believe they would be not only more likely to survive, but be a lot cooler.
sometimes i wonder if life is sort of designed to be like that though. not in a strictly intentional intelligent way but also not in a fully accidental coincidental way.
somebody has to turn plant into food right? without them and homies like them our food system don’t work.
It’s designed that way in the same way as a hole was designed for a puddle*. The caterpillars are evolutionarily successful because of a “spray and pray” strategy, and other species are successful because of the easy food.
Biology is an arms race, in a sense: so everything is interlinked, and affected by everything else, even if only by distant, myriad links in an unbroken web of chains. It’s the reason a lot of biologists like myself are anxious about the ecological destruction that’s been unfolding for so long. Life finds a way in the long term, but short term…it sucks to be alive when many of the things you depend on aren’t.
Most caterpillars are mildly poisonous since they only eat a single type of plant so they are immune to the plants poisonous effect. That gets into their fleshy hotdog body. Unfortunately most birds are also mostly immune.
They missed “environmental catastrophe unrelated to climate change that is getting ignored because it’s unrelated to climate change”
Soil depletion, micro plastics, habitat loss, fertilizer runoff, invasive species, heavy metal contamination, light pollution, etc etc. Yes climate change is a big fucking problem, but if it were to magically get resolved overnight we’d still wake up to a mountain of other human-created environmental issues. But because everyone is so focused on climate change specifically, we’re standing still (or even moving backward) on other issues. For example: electric cars are heralded as an environmental solution, but they: still require a lot of mining and resource extraction, still pollute through tire and brakepad wear, still produce a mountain of waste at the end of their lifespan, still use asphalt roads that require salting in winter, and still promote poor land use that creates all kinds of domino-effect problems (environmental and otherwise). Similarly hydroelectric is promoted as a sustainable energy source, but they wreak absolute havoc on river ecosystems.
Sure some habitat loss is due directly or indirectly to climate change, like polar bears, seals, and penguins losing the ice they need to breed and/or feed. But other instances are completely unrelated. For example, monarch butterflies in North America have experienced huge decreases in population due to an increase in herbicide use that destroyed massive numbers of milkweed plants, the only plant they lay eggs on, as well as destruction of the trees the monarchs over winter on in Mexico (eg through clear-cutting for avocado farms). Climate change has also hurt monarchs in various ways, but the specific issue of monarch habitat loss is generally unrelated.
If you found it interesting and enriching to do that’s the most important shit. You have the opportunity to research a subject you like now I guess at least
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