Tiny snail swims like a bee flies

boing
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Some organisms have no shame.

[note sarcasm]

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This discovery is just satisfying on so many levels.

Zooplankton gotta flap, bee gotta fly
Evolution converges and you know why?
Natural Selection is coming to town…

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…but fruit flies like a banana.

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Odd, isn’t it? This little animal is far more interesting and attractive than Trump, but which thread gets all the comments? Perhaps it should issue a PR statement about its plans to get all the blue-green algae out of the Pacific and make them build a wall.

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It is a lovely example of convergent evolution; but also interesting because it is apparently very much the exception: moving in a (relatively) viscous fluid where achieving neutral buoyancy is fairly easy is rather unlike flying in air; and apparently most of this curious beast’s colleagues take advantage of that and don’t do it this way.

It’d be fascinating to know why this particular one uses a wing strategy rather than paddling; as well as how the efficiency compares.

It sure is eerily bee-like in silhouette, despite the whole ‘has a shell’ thing.

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Evolution?
Merely evidence that god is just as lazy as the rest of us.

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I think all the pelagic snails are beautiful!

Also, I was in a group of natural scientists once when a person confidently made the statement “mankind is the only creature that kills its own young”, intending this to be a convincing condemnation of abortion.

The mammalogists, entemologists, ichthyologists, herpetologists, and ornithologists all said, no, no, that’s simply not true. They all had examples of this happening, and could not prove that any organisms in their fields never killed their own young in times of resource contention or adversity. But the malacologists - the snail doctors - while admitting that most beasties in their area of study could and indeed had been known to kill their own young, said that “pelagic snails, having no ability to harm their young, never do so.”   They are peaceable as well as beautiful!

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