Pretty sure they have 100 percent mortality rate as most animals do. There are some species of jellyfish that technically are immortal (capable of immortality anyway) - they revert back to a polyp stage and start life over again without dying. But every other animal species, like us humans, does have to bow down to the grim reaper at some point.
“Caterpillar” is not a species. It’s a stage of some animals’ life cycle. It means 99% of catepillars die before they become butterflies or moths or whatever
If there are other immortal animal species, what are they? My comment about jellyfish being immortal was from the article in national Geographic. What are the animals you are thinking of?
The hydra. There’s a species of worm (pretty sure it’s a flatworm, could be a round one though). Technically, lobsters are too. They also aren’t cos growing their news shells is incredibly taxing and that’s how the old ones usually succumb, but yeah, genetically, they do the whole telomere regeneration shit. Their DNA is like 17yo when they die at age 130. So, yeah.
Hydra, eh? According to the web, hydra are "virtually immortal" in a lab environment. On the other hand, though I've heard lobsters could be immortal, the web (which obviously is the only true source of info, wink wink) says it's a myth, eventually the lobster will die "from exhaustion during a moult." However I know they can live a long long time, many animals can easily out live humans.
Oh ffs. I swear to god we don’t deserve the internet. I literally pointed out that lobsters do die. The reason we can consider em immortal is cos they clean up their telomere damage. You colossal idiot. You’re trying to trip me up and “expose” me, but you can’t even get the fundamentals right…
Alien species discovers earth … “Holy shit Kang! These little bipeds are delicious! And all you have to do is support whatever community or belief they follow and they’ll go anywhere you tell them”
Hmm, interesting indeed! I get what you’re trying to say, but I would also tend to believe that it’s still the same animal? If not that, then wouldn’t the caterpillar cease to exist when it metamorphosised into something else?
“Caterpillar” is not a species. It’s a stage of some animals’ life cycle. It means 99% of catepillars die before they become butterflies or moths or whatever
I wish it were 100% in tomato hornworms. Seeing that 99% of them die before turning into moths makes me think all of the surviving ones just hang out in my garden.
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.
Add comment