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99% is pretty impressive, most species have 100% mortality rate
That’s an interesting point!
Any animal that changes or metamorphosises into a different animal technically has a less than 100% mortality rate
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 actually an animal though, it’s a stage of life.
Aah indeed, now I’m aware :)
I would also lean closer towards ‘same animal’ but its physical morphology undergoes such drastic changes its definitely blurred lines
Psychologically I think there are tests that show butterflies and moths retain memories from pre-metamorphisis stages
Metaphysical questions are so cool just because we may never be able to answer them!!!
As mentioned in one of the comments, since caterpillar is just a stage of life, I guess it isn’t as much of a contradiction/paradox then.
But yes, stuff like this is loads of fun! :D
Animals are a social construct
This is why the infant mortality rate isn’t 100%
“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
So caterpillars do have a chance to be “immortal” and transcend instead to a superior state of existence* at the end of their time. Whoa.
*that is, unfortunately, very mortal.
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.
I think noting caterpillar is the same as say infant death rate for humans
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.
Some caterpillars are cool and spiky or poisonous or venomous maybe?
there are definitely some ninja-inspired caterpillars out there
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.
Due to Newtons 46th law of awesomeness, Ninjas are still cooler than spikes, but still are pretty dang cool.
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.
*This metaphor thanks to Douglas Adams
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I thought hotdogs were nature’s hotdogs.
Little known fact, but nature abhors a vacuum and hot dogs.
Nature’s 100 percent unnatural hotdogs. MMMMMM You can really taste the hog anus.
This could get extremely philosophical fast. If humanity is part of nature, and we make hotdogs, then hotdogs are part of nature.
Hot dogs are satan’s boner on a bun. (!) MMMM mmm, that’s good boner meat.
Has anyone run them through HotDogNotHotDog app analysis? Maybe they’re not just nature’s hotdogs, and we’re missing out.
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”
Delicious and spectacularly dumb. What did they think we meant when we said our books are about serving man.
But there’s still more space dust on this book. It’s actually “how to cook for humans.” Oh wait - no, it’s “how to cook Forty humans.”
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
Yeah, they’re also wrong about jellyfish being the only immortal animals. Gotta love being confidently incorrect…
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.
Interesting stuff, thanks for the comments.
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…
I’m not trying to do any such thing and I am undeserving of colossal anger as a response. You have severe emotional issues if you can’t listen to another person’s contributions without feeling somehow “attacked” by them.
And just so you know, though I doubt you’ll be capable of understanding it, and “idiot” is a dirty mongrel who tries to make others look bad so he can look better by comparison. And you never can look better, because you can’t even get the fundamentals of behaving like a human being right…go fuck yourself, you vile stupid idiot bastard!
