I remember being fascinated by animals as a kid and the mystery of where eels went was one of the big unsolved puzzles I remember hearing about.
Much more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent. Worth investigating if you are curious :)
DeanStevenson 47 minutes ago [-]
Fascinating how certain animals have evolved with complex migration patterns to breeding grounds. And unfortunate that 95% of the population has already collapsed.
Makes me wonder what the world was like before this last great extinction.
Nzen 19 minutes ago [-]
tl;dr Eels have a long lifecycle with several stages. They do not develop sexual organs until late in their life, when they migrate back to the Saragossa Sea. This meant earlier autopsies of eels revealed no sexual organs, even though scientists could provoke them with hormone therapy. So, a team lead by Jose Azevedo tagged female eels in the Azores in 2018, and tracked them via satellite [0].
I sometimes think about the selection pressures that lead to complex life cycles, like fig wasps. I find myself thinking about it naively, like one existed and the other grew into the niche. But, realistically, everything is changing (slowly) all the time. I just notice it for, say, influenza because their cycle time is so short.
rbanffy 2 hours ago [-]
The click bait version adds “and it’s electrifying”.
Rendered at 13:03:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Much more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent. Worth investigating if you are curious :)
Makes me wonder what the world was like before this last great extinction.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19248-8
I sometimes think about the selection pressures that lead to complex life cycles, like fig wasps. I find myself thinking about it naively, like one existed and the other grew into the niche. But, realistically, everything is changing (slowly) all the time. I just notice it for, say, influenza because their cycle time is so short.