Gross

After two weeks I broke down and ordered cable. Last night was my first viewing. I found a show on Discovery called, "Nasty by Nature" and my goodness it was gross. It showed disgusting characteristics of all kinds of animals and then explained the purpose behind their behavior. It was pretty amazing to see how nature handles problems but a very different perspective on cool. Let me share...

The Hagfish. (This one doesn't seem so gross, maybe because it's in the ocean. Thought it would be a good starting place.) It looks like a primitive eel but it's actually a fish. It has no eyes, no jaws and feeds off corpses of whatever falls to the ocean floor. It has small white holes lining the sides of its body where, when being pursued by a predator, it can secrete a protein that reacts with the water to create a gooey slime. The predator gets a mouthful of slime and the hagfish slithers away. The slime is so thick and so gooey that predators can actually suffocate from it. Incredible line of defense! **

The Botfly. This fly captures a mosquito to lay her eggs. When the mosquito is released it carries on with business and bites its prey (horse, cow, pig, dog... human). As the mosquito lands, body heat resonating from the mammal causes the botfly egg to hatch and the larva then transfers to its new host. It burrows down under the skin into the soft tissue (where the "meat" isn't so tough) and begins eating. From the surface you can only see a small hole at first; the breathing hole for the larva. As time goes on and the larva gets bigger, a bump begins to form on the skin surface. The way it was described sounds kind of like a mosquito bite, except quite painful. Eventually, if the larva isn't removed, it will mature to the point that it crawls out on its own. By then, it drops off the body and is ready to proceed to the next step of metamorphosis. Pretty gross. Google it.

The Turkey Vulture. We all know what a vulture is so I'll spare the details on that. The difference with this one is that it lives out in the desert where temperatures range from 30 degrees-130 degrees and it doesn't have the ability to sweat. In order to regulate its body temperature on a hot day, it defecates on itself. The feces is a white runny liquid that pours down the sides of its legs. When the wind comes it cools the body temperature of the bird down by 20 degrees! Incredibly disgusting but pretty ingenious. I guess when you consider what they're eating, the fact that they "poop themselves" isn't quite as gross.

Nature is quite inventive.

**My field of study is interesting for a lot of reasons but one of them is for the potential of discovery. There are a lot of animals in the ocean that are still quite mysterious to us. Many researchers study these organisms to determine potential uses for the products they naturally create. The hagfish is one of them. They are currently being studied for the slime they produce. I mentioned earlier that it's made of protein. Not surprising. Many of the structures we make naturally are comprised of protein as well. Anyway, on a commercial level there is thought about marketing the hagfish slime as an alternative to egg whites. Imagine a breakfast of toast and hagfish slime. :) The slime though, in addition to being made of protein, can withstand pressure up to 200% before breaking. It is comparable to spider silk and being explored for the possibility of replacing other synthetic fibers in things such as bullet proof vests.

If that interests you, look into transgenic organisms and the possibility of harvesting this slime in animals that are easier for us to handle. For example, scientists have extracted the gene from spiders that enable them to spin silk and transferred the gene into goats. You end up with a goat able to produce spider silk- not by spinning webs though. Scientists extract the silk from the goat's milk. Not only is it easier to obtain, but they can produce more of it. It's still a fairly new field. More on that another day...