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Nature nurtures many life forms that are very strange indeed.
There are tube worms over 3 meters long feeding on the bacteria that live in the deepest and darkest parts of the oceans under extreme pressures in vents spewing out boiling water with corrosive acids.
There are coral reefs, considered the rain-forests of the sea, that span areas hundreds of kilometers long. A colony of tiny living animals, they secrete hard carbonate exoskeletons which support and protect their bodies and provide a home for 25% of all marine species.
The Venus flytrap is a carnivorous plant that catches and digests insects.
Life forms do not have to look strange to be strange.
Salmon look like any other fish but they are very strange indeed. Born in freshwater streams high up in the mountains, they migrate down to the saltwater oceans 3 years later. They stay there up to 5 years growing up to 1.5 meters long. They return to the exact place where they hatched, hundreds of kilometers up mountain streams and as much as 2 kilometers above sea level, jumping over water falls almost 4 meters high. Before they die, the females lay up to 5000 eggs and the males spray the eggs with sperm. The eggs are then buried under gravel in the stream to hatch the following spring.
Desert mole rats, living in the drier regions of Ethiopia and Somalia, are mammals with a strange mixture of reptile and insect. Like reptiles they are cold blooded and like ants they live as a colony with a hundred or more. The one and only queen mother produces a litter of about 10 sterile daughters and a few fertile males once a year during her 15 year life span.
She nurses her litter the first month and the worker sisters feed them shit until they are old enough to gather tubers and vegetation. They use intestinal bacteria to digest indigestible cellulose and obtain all of their water from the food they eat. Smaller daughters dig and maintain the tunnels and hunt for food while larger ones protect the nest. They have highly unusual set of physical traits that enable them to thrive in an otherwise harsh underground environment. They lack pain sensation, are resistant to cancers and can drastically reduce their metabolism enabling them to thrive during the worst of droughts.
One of the strangest and most unique creatures on earth however is the common and ubiquitous slime mold that lives in rotting logs found in dark damp forests. It is one of the oldest members in nature's club of life forms.
Slime molds, neither animal, nor plant, nor fungus. Each slime mold begins life as an amoeba-like cell that is just wandering sperm or egg. The cell contains many nuclei and if cut in 2 forms 2 cells that can reunite into 1.
They aggregate and live in any type of dead plant material and contribute to the decomposition of vegetation, feeding on bacteria, yeasts, and fungi. They mate if they encounter their counterpart and form cells containing many nuclei without cell membranes between them.
They grow, much like a colony of single celled amoebas, into networks up to several square meters large and weighing up to 30 grams. They are merely a bag of amoebas encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and brains.
When food is abundant, slime molds exist as single-celled organisms, but when food is in short supply, they congregate and move as a single body. In this state, they are sensitive to airborne chemicals and can detect food sources. Moving at faster than 1mm per second and avoiding bright light, they swarm over and engulf food just like amoebas do.
In their hunt for food, they create nodes and branches and grow in the form of an interconnected network of tubes that uncannily resemble subway, bus and rail networks of humans. Their transportation networks to their food supplies feature shortest routes with redundant connections offering resilience in case of accidental breakage of any of its links. It is speculated that the forces generated by pulsating protoplasm are interpreted and used to determine which routes to reinforce and which connections to trim. This remarkable process of cellular computation implies that cells have intelligence and contain a signal integration system that allows them to sense, weigh and process huge numbers of signals from outside and inside their bodies and to make decisions on their own. When a slime mold is cut into various pieces that are physically separated, the parts find their way back and re-unite. Studies have even shown an ability to learn and predict periodic unfavorable conditions.
When the food supply wanes, the slime mold migrates to the surface of its substrate. Like tadpoles that metamorphose into frogs and caterpillars, into butterflies, slime molds transform into rigid fruiting bodies resembling fungi. Individual slime molds join up into a tiny multicellular slug-like coordinated creature and crawl to open places to grow into a fruiting body.
Some parts become spores, to begin the next generation, while other parts sacrifice themselves in suicidal altruism to become stalk. The stalk, like branches, reach high up in the air to allow the countless spores to be caught like in sea-weed to hitch a ride on passing animals, to later hatch into amoeba-like cells to begin the life cycle again. That demands pooling all you have - your DNA - in with the DNA from all fellow amoebas to benefit and become a super amoeba. Not only large but also intelligent.
Despite the uniqueness and strangeness of slime molds, there is one life-form even more unique and strange.
Man!
Humans, one of the newest members in nature's club of living forms, is indeed a very unique and strange creature. He is a hairless mammal who walks upright gazing up to the stars and is curious enough to wonder about his creation. Like a child playing at home with matches, he is intelligent enough to make toys capable of destroying his entire home and dumb enough to play with them.
THE END
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