CREATURES
Sparrows: It seems they all live in Berlin.
In my next life I would like to be an arctic hare.
Or perhaps one of these creatures, who live only in China and Mongolia. They prefer desert habitats, favouring sandy river basins with low shrub cover. They are capable of eating flying insects, using sound to pinpoint the location of the prey. Then they do a very quick leap to catch the flying prey. The long eared jerboa is classified as an endangered species.
Now take a moment to consider the male angler fish, who ends his life as “nothing more than a pair of gonads”.
Anglerfish employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.
At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male ceratoid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are signifantly smaller than a female angler fish, and have trouble finding food in the deep sea. This necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing its digestive organs, then its brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which releases sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is
ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.
