[HN Gopher] A beetle that heads for the 'back door' when eaten b...
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A beetle that heads for the 'back door' when eaten by a frog (2020)
Author : redbell
Score : 228 points
Date : 2023-08-02 06:52 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| jwcacces wrote:
| The beetle crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-
| smelling foulness I can't even imagine. Or maybe I just don't
| want to. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a
| mile. I guess it comes down to a simple choice. Get busy living
| or get busy dying.
| chongli wrote:
| Thanks! This beetle reminded me of Andy Dufresne as well! What
| a champion of survival this little creature is!
| ncr100 wrote:
| That person was also referenced in the videogame Trover Saves
| the Universe:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtiqS1l_SbM Very NSFW
| language.
|
| Hilarious, foul and disgusting coprophilia .. "back magic".
| waltwalther wrote:
| Impossible not to read in Morgan Freeman's voice. This might be
| the best comment I have ever seen on HN. Thank you.
| warent wrote:
| For anyone wondering apparently this is a play on a quote from
| Shawshank Redemption, (I've never seen the movie!)
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111161/characters/nm0000151
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Dude put down whatever you are doing and watch that movie
| right now!
| hackernewds wrote:
| Why!
| teknico wrote:
| Because it's a friggin' masterpiece, that's why.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| This beats every post Ive seen on Reddit's r/prolifetip.
| Dowwie wrote:
| When you're going through hell, keep going
| LanceH wrote:
| Topologically, the beetle was never inside the frog.
| qazpot wrote:
| The beetle fell into a hole and came out the otherside.
| LanceH wrote:
| Same side. The frog can be modelled as a torus for purposes
| of this beetle's navigation.
| euroderf wrote:
| Well then, we're all just talking donuts that absolutely
| ruin perfectly good food.
| drbig wrote:
| > were able to make the trip in a minimum time of six minutes.
| (The longest journey took about four hours, per Wired.)
|
| Between 6 and 240 minutes... How come such a wild range? Some
| take time sightseeing?
| burnished wrote:
| If you get turned around and try to head in the wrong direction
| you just aren't going to make any headway.
| myspy wrote:
| Because when he's turning around, he's making his way to the
| head.
| nwatson wrote:
| Experience. For some it's the third time.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| I would imagine it also has something to do with their relative
| sizes, and how full the frogs digestive system was at the
| start.
| drbig wrote:
| Gives a nice mental image for "digging through shit".
| _Literally!_
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If you had ever watched the documentary, you'd know that
| Lemmiwinks must overcome many obstacles and trials to escape.
| passion__desire wrote:
| The Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell must be proud.
| froggit wrote:
| If Lemmiwinks was one of these beetles he'd have simply
| turned around and gone out the same way he went in xD
| [deleted]
| tamimio wrote:
| What's the point of escaping when you are going to be swallowed
| again? (I think that frog ate it after, but the video cut before
| that)
| hackernewds wrote:
| Free waterslide
| zabzonk wrote:
| definite Ig Nobel Prize candidate
| Jenkins7654 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Ze Frank is probably working on his doc about this right now.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Inspiration for this ?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-pDUO-epfg
| jakzurr wrote:
| I see a real benefit to the beetle, if it can get out. But I'm
| wondering, is there any benefit to the frog from consuming this
| type of "fiber"?
| bentobean wrote:
| Interesting. Free colon cleanse. Now we just need to find the
| beetle species that can perform the same feat in humans.
| beeforpork wrote:
| Maybe the same beetle would work. Has anyone tried?
| throwanem wrote:
| A human has a much longer gut.
| chongli wrote:
| Sure though the deadliest part, the stomach, is not that
| long.
| throwanem wrote:
| Granted, but I'm thinking more about how long the beetle
| can survive without access to air.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| That's an aquatic beetle, a lot of those store their own
| air supply under their wings...
| throwanem wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know that! I can't get to the citation, but
| per Wikipedia [1] Hydrophilidae, the family in which this
| beetle is classified, do have that capability. Whether
| even with an air bubble they can hold out long enough is
| a separate question, as is whether their also-mentioned
| ability to extract usable oxygen from ambient water would
| be helpful in this environment - but being able to carry
| air under their elytra would certainly improve their
| odds.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrophilidae
| ralgozino wrote:
| I guess you've never eaten boiled corn grains
| jkubicek wrote:
| Have you ever had an itch that you just can't reach?
| tsavo wrote:
| Unintentional spelunking by a beetle
| thecodeboy wrote:
| I feel bad for the beetle in this experiment. It must have spent
| a lot of its energy reserve to emerge out of the frog, probably
| to have been swallowed again.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "probably to have been swallowed again"
|
| Likely not. Animal trials are usually one use, to get the best
| data. And the animals in use get usually killed afterwards
| anyway. If you like animals, you probably do not want to learn
| too many details about it all.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| If you truly like animals, you probably want to learn all
| about it and see what you can do to stop it.
| jonasdegendt wrote:
| This depends, I used to work at a biotech company and when
| the dogs there were retired from their trial, the employees
| would typically "adopt" them and try and give them another
| good couple of months.
|
| They usually didn't make it very long but it's something.
| This was dogs though, so advanced stages of the trial, early
| stage vermin definitely didn't get the same treatment.
|
| Side story: I did IT there and could access just about any
| building on campus, but whenever I had to go to the animal
| testing building to do whatever maintenance it was, I had a
| security guard escort and loom over me wherever I went. From
| what I was told they had an animal rights group infiltrate
| and attempt to release all of the animals a couple of years
| before.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| In the 1980s, Skinny Puppy was a popular band in the clubs
| and my social circles. Animal welfare was a real issue
| already. I purchased this album that was a fundraiser for
| the Animal Liberation Front, and really, my main takeaway
| from this smash hit song would be the horrors of
| Thalidomide and its devastating effects on the poor
| children and childbearing/pregnant mothers, in countries
| where the drug factories really didn't care about safety or
| humans or animals (I suppose that describes all of them).
|
| https://youtu.be/bVnVcbuoyWU
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| I can believe that.
|
| I went to a vegan restaurant once and met some randoms in
| London, I think it was a meetup.com thing. And one lady was
| telling me how she would happily take a lead pipe and hurt
| people working in animal testing.
|
| I was shocked that someone would would share their violent
| ideals with a total stranger. I mean I could have been an
| undercover policeman or something...
|
| And just to be clear, I definitely don't think hurting
| humans is a good idea.
| vidarh wrote:
| Especially would think someone with those kinds of views
| would be aware of the rather well publicised sordid
| history of UK police with infiltrating animal rights
| groups and been more cautious. Unless she _was_ an
| undercover cop out fishing (I don 't think it's _likely_
| , but who knows).
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I mean I could have been an undercover policeman or
| something..."
|
| If the police wanted to bust people hypothetically
| threatening other people with violence, they just have to
| look on social media a bit. But as far as I know, a vague
| hypothetical threat like this, would probably be
| dismissed by a court. I rather know, that there are many
| people walking freely around who do make not cague, but
| concrete threats to concrete people and the police
| usually says, they cannot do anything.
| vidarh wrote:
| UK police has a multiple decades long history of
| infiltration of animal rights groups, though. They likely
| wouldn't try to act on a non-specific threat like that,
| because you're right it probably would get dismissed, but
| it's the kind of thing that certainly could trigger
| unwanted attention.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| [flagged]
| hackernewds wrote:
| There is a version of beetle that incapacitates the frog's legs
| and eats it slowly while it is immobilized. Nature is metal.
| Natsu wrote:
| Well the one where they immobilized the legs just got eaten,
| so... yeah.
|
| The photos of the escape make me imagine the world's strangest
| motivational "hang in there" type of poster.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| I think they should rename the insect to the "Andy Dufresne
| Beetle" -- the escape totally reminds me of _Shawshank
| Redemption_.
| AdamN wrote:
| "Never say Never!" "There is no try, only do"
| gcanyon wrote:
| "There is no try, only doo doo"
| [deleted]
| hhh wrote:
| One must imagine the beetle happy
|
| _Duster -- Me And The Birds starts playing_
| beeforpork wrote:
| OMG, this detail -- it itches already:
|
| > Sugiura suspects that the beetles also use their legs to
| stimulate the frog's cloacal sphincter, causing it to defecate.
| However, he'll need to run more tests to be sure...
| redbell wrote:
| So, the whole journey of the beetle be like: _f(x)=x_
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| You left off a term: _F(x) = x + S_
| thih9 wrote:
| > covered in feces, but otherwise active and seemingly healthy
|
| The accuracy and level of detail makes me speechless.
|
| Then again, I saw the title and continued reading, so I knew what
| I was getting into.
|
| At least I have more vocabulary for when my dog rolls in
| something on a walk.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yes, "my dog is covered in feces" does sound more elegant than
| "my dog just rolled in sh*t" - but how you articulate it
| doesn't improve the situation if the dog in question is sitting
| next to you...
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| ...but otherwise active and seemingly healthy!
|
| A hilarious non-sequitur for the dog scenario.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| This feels like a perfect metaphor for my career to date...
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| How does it breathe in there?
| rob74 wrote:
| It's a water beetle
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_beetle), that probably
| helps.
| 1-6 wrote:
| It makes me wonder what other living organisms are able to defeat
| the digestive tract and continue living once it is expelled out
| of the host. There has to be a name for this phenomenon.
| mufty wrote:
| This is such an interesting read. I'm wondering if this behavior
| is only observed between this Japanese frog and beetle, or
| perhaps it's spread throughout nature.
| Keysh wrote:
| From the article
|
| "He found that the beetles had similarly high success rates
| with four other frog species....
|
| "When swallowed, other similar water beetles were killed and
| digested by the frog...."
| tosser0001 wrote:
| I like how the diagram is captioned "A hypothetical escape route
| ..." as if the frog's gut were a cave system with different
| potential passageways and not a single path out
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "Well, you wouldn't shit me now, would you?"
|
| (Sorry, it's the oh-so-appropriate punch line from a joke in
| _McCabe and Mrs. Miller_ (1971).)
| i_k_k wrote:
| "According to a Kobe University statement, this study marks the
| first time that researchers have witnessed prey quickly and
| actively escape the body of its predator after being eaten."
|
| I present my favorite video of the rough-skinned newt "actively
| escaping" from a bullfrog's body after being eaten:
|
| https://youtu.be/kvBi5Wv8-qg?t=99
| tiarafawn wrote:
| Reminds me of the German poem "Storch und Schleiche" [1] (LLM
| translation): A stork once strolled by the pond's
| edge, where he spotted a blind slow-worm, a hedge.
| The stork exclaimed, "Oh, this is quite grand!" and
| devoured it, all, without a reprimand. The slow-worm
| lay in the stork's belly, and both found this situation
| rather smelly. The blind slow-worm then spoke with dismay,
| "Such horror!" and slipped through the back door away.
| The stork, vexed by this unhappy twist, couldn't believe
| he'd let the slow-worm persist. So, without hesitation or
| delay, he ate the slow-worm again the same way.
| He cleverly wedged the back door tight, so the blind slow-
| worm could not escape his sight. The stork called in, with
| a cunning tone: "Well, if you can, try escaping on your
| own!" The sly slow-worm found the front door clear,
| and promptly made his escape with no fear. But the stork,
| filled with anger and spite, ate the slow-worm once more,
| sealing his plight. In a crafty invention, the stork's
| mind did revel, he connected both doors to secure his prey
| well. Then, addressing the slow-worm inside without fail,
| "Now get ready for a round trip, without fail!"
|
| [1] https://www.schwaben-kultur.de/home/stat/larchiv/447.html
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Inspiration for The Human Centipede?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| A talent I have always personally wished to have, but never
| succeeded in.
| mongol wrote:
| Have you tried?
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| [flagged]
| krisoft wrote:
| > Speak for yourself
|
| He very clearly did.
| coryfklein wrote:
| Whoever wrote this is genius, how many times in your career do
| you get the opportunity to write this stuff. So many amazing
| quotes in this article, I'm dying. 10/10 would read again.
| tchaffee wrote:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-beetle-gets-e...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| This is why you chew your food.
| praptak wrote:
| Most frogs don't have teeth though.
| tchaffee wrote:
| https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c0/64/72/c0647299ff0863268d4adafd9.
| ..
| bmitc wrote:
| I get this is a joke, but just bouncing off: don't humans
| mainly need to chew food because we have a terrible design and
| evolution put our lifeline of air intake in a tiny hole behind
| a flap right where we swallow food in a small, relatively
| inflexible tube and location?
| krisoft wrote:
| Absolutely. But at least we (and all other animals with a
| secondary palate) can chew while breathing. I heard that
| before that has evolved it put a severe caloric disadvantage
| on the animals since one was limited in how much chewing can
| happen by the need to breath.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_palate#Evolution
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > But at least we (and all other animals with a secondary
| palate) can chew while breathing
|
| Interestingly, sprint predators such as cheetahs have to
| pause to get their breath back after a fast chase before
| they can eat their prey. In contrast, raptors such as
| falcons can eat immediately after a kill because they don't
| get out of breath in the same way. The avian respiratory
| system is actually quite different to ours, with relatively
| rigid lungs, separate air sacs to pump the air, and a one-
| way flow through the lungs, in contrast to mammalian lungs
| where the air goes in and out through the same pipe, and
| the lungs act as bellows as well as gas transfer devices.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| I think we have to know the order in which these features
| occurred. As others pointed out, chewing has other benefits.
| Maybe evolution took advantage of chewing to change the air
| intake design for some other advantage.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No. It's true that other animals don't have the difficulty
| with choking on food that we do. But it's not true that other
| animals don't chew their food. You chew your food to make it
| easier to digest and so that it will fit down your throat.
|
| And, if it's alive, so that it will be dead instead.
| midoridensha wrote:
| >And, if it's alive, so that it will be dead instead.
|
| For most animals, this is true I think. But frogs seem to
| be perfectly happy swallowing live prey whole. You can see
| videos of frogs eating live mice!
| bmitc wrote:
| > But it's not true that other animals don't chew their
| food.
|
| I didn't say that.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| If you claim that humans chew their food because their
| throats are uniquely vulnerable to choking, you have also
| claimed that animals without such awkward throats don't
| need to chew their food.
|
| Putting things another way, just a few minutes of
| observation are sufficient to demonstrate that running
| the air intake past the esophagus is so irrelevant to the
| purpose of chewing that the absence of that problem does
| not affect the behavior in any way.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Isn't that logic in reverse?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No. The two claims are contrapositives of each other:
|
| 1. Chewing -> bad throat
|
| 2. Good throat -> no chewing
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Cows and animals alike (ruminant) basically chew all day
| and they bring the food back from the stomach to chew it
| again. Otherwise they cannot get enough nutrients out of
| gras and co.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Quite a few animals chew their food multiple times for more
| effective digestion - cows for example. Plant fibers are
| notoriously hard to break down. Horses don't and if you
| compare the digestion results, you'll see a significant
| difference between horse dung and cow dung.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Besides the ruminants, there are also other animals, the
| best known being the rabbits, which are not able to
| reverse the direction of the food to bring it back from
| the stomach into the mouth, so after a one-way passage of
| the food through their bodies they must eat it again, to
| chew it for the second time.
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah. Horses are so inefficient at digestion that the
| largest breeds (such as Clydesdales) would starve to
| death in huge fields of grass. They can only survive by
| being fed copious amounts of grain such as oats.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Hmm. Do you have a reference for that? From what I have
| read, Clydesdales are fine on good pasture (hay in the
| winter), but they won't be able to do much if any work if
| they don't get additional feed. They would also likely
| not be as muscled as a horse with supplemental feed. A
| clydesdale raised on pasture only might also end up
| smaller, but they won't starve to death, assuming it is
| quality pasture.
| chongli wrote:
| I'm talking about a large breed raised on grain and then
| suddenly switched to pasture -- not one raised on pasture
| its whole life -- as you might see with a retired working
| animal. They may not literally starve to death, but they
| will lose a lot of muscle mass and may get sick and die
| from that, or may struggle to survive the winter.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| Given a sample size of my dog, I believe chewing is only
| necessary for making bland food more delicious. The more
| yummy the food, the less my dog chews it - thoroughly
| chewing dry kibble and culminating in literally inhaling
| something like roast chicken.
|
| Thus, it's because grass and weeds are bland and lacking
| in tasty fat that bovines and ruminants chew their food
| for so long and so many times.
| donatzsky wrote:
| No. It's actually important for an effective digestion. Not
| just because smaller pieces are easier to break down, but
| because the enzymes in the saliva start the process.
| bmitc wrote:
| Digestion is important but I think being able to breath is
| more important. Poor digestion won't kill you as readily as
| suffocation or pneumonia from aspiration. They, being
| protecting food from blocking or entering the trachea and
| digestion, both seem pretty important as part of the whole
| chewing system, so I don't think it's a plain "No". I
| should correct my original comment from mainly to one of
| the main reasons.
| rex_lupi wrote:
| Do you know how snakes "eat"?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Chickens have no teeth, but they chew their food (the
| food is first stored in their crop, along with gravel,
| where it is "chewed" before passing to the stomach.)
| MayeulC wrote:
| Well, sort of, it's the gizzard that "chews" it, not the
| crop.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Humans don't _need_ to chew their food at all. If there is
| enough moisture, you can swallow most foods whole in chunks.
| Chewing is part of the digestive process (especially for
| plant material) to increase the surface area of the food.
| Even carnivores with huge throats and few or no molars can be
| observed chewing certain foods.
| mongol wrote:
| I fail to see how we represent terrible design. Most animals
| our size need to chew food with their mouth, and of them I
| can't think of any more successful than us, evolutionary
| speaking.
| falcor84 wrote:
| The fact that our species is successful doesn't mean that
| every mechanism in our bodies is good. There are a lot of
| "design decisions" which could have been improved if they
| had gone through a review, rather than evolution.
|
| One such example is the way our retinas are wired to the
| optic nerve on the inside of the eye, rather than behind,
| causing us to have a "blind spot" where the nerve fibres
| need to go back. In some other animals, particularly the
| octopus, the retina is wired the "right way", such that
| they don't have a blind spot.
|
| Same for the design of our pharynx, larynx and esophagus.
| As mentioned in sibling comments, other animals suffer from
| choking much less, as compared to humans, where we have ~5k
| deaths/year from choking just in the US [0].
|
| [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/527321/deaths-due-
| to-cho...
| DrThunder wrote:
| In order for you to subjectively label it terrible you
| need to present a bad outcome from the design.
| Evolutionary/objectively, it's not a bad design.
| mongol wrote:
| Nor does it mean it is terrible. That is the kind of
| exaggregation I reacted on.
| [deleted]
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| How do you define and measure evolutionary "success"? By
| what mechanisms is it achieved?
| mongol wrote:
| It is described by Dawkins et al.
| praptak wrote:
| You don't. It is not even agreed upon that evolution
| optimizes <<something>>.
|
| And even if you agree that evolution is an optimization
| process, attempts to define its objective function run
| into problems with tautology and circular definitions
| once you move beyond simple examples.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| For a cross-species comparison, you'd usually measure
| evolutionary success in terms of biomass. More is better.
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