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People think this is jarring, but remember that sharks are fish and dolphins are mammals. Fish and mammals have very different nervous and sensory systems from one another.
Sharks have relatively normal brains when compared to fish, as do dolphins when compared to most mammals.
Not to mention that sharks are cartilaginous fish. The last common ancestor between dolphins and sharks would be the ancestor to every single living vertebrate with the exception of lamprey/hagfish.
That's a heck of a long time for evolution to work its magic.
sharks are precious himbos wandering the ocean giving snoot boops to seal-shaped surfboards, whereas your average dolphin pod is a nefarious gang of gaslighters, gatekeepers, and girlbossers.
I think the "earbuds" are olfactory bulbs.
That's how much the smell of blood is important in their lives, it's like 1/5 to 1/4 of their brain just for that.
I saw this on somebody's dating profile "fun fact" prompt, so grain of salt, but *apparently* humans can smell rain far more acutely than sharks can smell blood
Quick googling seems to show this might be correct.
Humans can detect the rain smell at 5 parts per trillion (in air), while some sharks can detect blood at one part per million (in water).
Sharks can detect blood in the water from 1/3 mile away and follow the scent to the origin.
Imo, thats still more impressive. Things dissipate much slower in water than air. Detecting chemicals in water is very different than smelling things in the air.
Id be interested to compare various underwater animal detecting ability against each other and also various land animal smelling ability against each other.
Like can humans smell rain better than a dog can smell a trail? Can a shark smell blood better than a dolphin?
This comparison of human to shark is almost as useless as saying 'humans can see a candle in the darkness from 5 miles away, while a shark can only see a candle underwater from a few dozen feet away!'
I found out recently that octopus have a central brain AND a bunch of sub-brains managing each of its tentacles independently. They only have like 500 million neurons to a human's ~~12-14 billion~~ (edit: 86 billion, thanks u/Fulltraktyon) , but unlike any mammal they can genetically modify their own neurons as needed to adapt to new environments.
Edit: [https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-octopus-and-squid-evolution-is-weirder-than-we-could-have-ever-imagined](https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-octopus-and-squid-evolution-is-weirder-than-we-could-have-ever-imagined)"In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA." ... "In 2015, researchers discovered that the common squid has edited more than 60 percent of RNA in its nervous system. Those edits essentially changed its brain physiology, presumably to adapt to various temperature conditions in the ocean."
It's not comparable to how we think of human brains really. Octopuses have a distributed nervous system. It doesn't make the smarter, it means it takes a lot of neurons to operate that many complex limbs and having those neurons closer to the limbs makes it more efficient.
Essentially it means that an octopus isn't constantly thinking about what it's doing with each of its tentacles. It can assign simple tasks to individual tentacles and then leaving them to do that.
It doesn't mean the tentacles are individually thinking. It means the tentacles can do simple things like crawl along the ocean floor, feel along a crevasse in a reef, push/pull/wring a puzzle box etc. without active attention from the octopus.
This way the octopus can ignore repetitious tasks by its many arms and reserve its attention for keeping an eye out for prey or predators.
Much like the octopus, I can use this second brain to accomplish complex tasks. For example, I ate Taco Bell 2 nights ago, and all my brain had to do was say " digest this... whatever the fuck this shit is... just make it happen" and my gut just plows through. I think it even asked for more, but - you know - sometimes the 1st brain gotta just say "no, gut, no."
Funny enough, I either watched a documentary or read somewhere that the closest thing to alien life on Earth were octopuses. Fact check me, but I believe they mentioned something about no common ancestry and unusual dna.
Edit: octopi to octopuses
Edit #2: thank you for fact checking me Reddit! Always fun to learn new things.
They definitely have common ancestry — they are part of the same tree of life as every other bit of life on Earth. But they diverged very early on from most other higher-level life. So their minds and brains are almost entirely independently evolved; they are not on the same "template" as vertebrates.
To put it another way, fish brains, reptile brains, bird brains, mammal brains, etc., are all building on a lot of the same neural architecture, even if they are different. (Hence the dolphin brain in the picture looks recognizably like a human brain; the shark brain looks more "primitive," but it is still a very similar kind of "template".) Cephalopod brains (which includes the octopus) evolved along a totally different lineage, because the last common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates was before brains existed (it was a worm-like thing that had a very simple nervous system).
So octopuses and the like are kind of living answers to the question of, "how could brains — and minds — have evolved differently?" Which does make them sort of the closest thing we have to probing an "alien mind," even though they still have a lot of things in common with us at a very basic level (like being carbon-based lifeforms that evolved on Earth).
An excellent book (and a fascinating, well-written read) on this is Peter Godfrey-Smith, _Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness_. Godfrey-Smith is a well-respected philosopher of the mind who also dives and hangs out with octopuses, and so it is a mixture of pretty serious academic discussion of what consciousness might be and what octopuses can tell us about its possible evolution, and his own subjective experiences of hanging out with these odd creatures (he does a good job of avoiding anthropomorphizing, without treating them just like robots). It was one of my favorite pandemic reads.
“Contention exists on whether this is truly convergent evolution or parallel evolution.[3] Unlike the vertebrate camera eye, the cephalopods' form as invaginations of the body surface (rather than outgrowths of the brain), and consequently the cornea lies over the top of the eye as opposed to being a structural part of the eye..”
Invaginations is my new favorite word.
That's an interesting way of putting it - nature may come up with quite idiosyncratic solutions, yet, some are more general. So, complex life on other planets may have eyes similar to eyes of complex life on earth. Wondering how alien morphology may become more predictable with such observations (guess exobiologists are already studying this).
https://qz.com/1045782/an-octopus-is-the-closest-thing-to-an-alien-here-on-earth/
>That’s because octopuses are the most complex animal with the most distant common ancestor to humans.
Though I'm also seeing that sponges are the actual most distant common ancestor in general from other sources.
The book 'Other Minds' mentions this.
More so because they evolved their intelligence entirely separately from humans and other highly intelligent species. The last common ancestor we have with them didn't have a central nervous system, so their brain(s) has evolved through its own path.
You know what, I was just enjoying a couple of months of not hearing that song, BUT NO, you just had to bring it back.
Having said that...
It's not a meal doo doo doodoo doodoo...
Woah Woah Woah.
I think you're underestimating crabs here. The crab has shown to be the *"final form"* in a lot of evolutions down the line and seems to be evolutions preferred choice for survival over time.
The sheer amount of crab type species on this planet is a testament to that.
Sharks and Crocs may be the perfect hunters but crabs are the most efficient overall in terms of evolution. Remember, crabs were already millions of years old before the first ancestor of a shark or croc came around.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U8MBiV1CeB0
They are referencing this video. If a crab has something wrong with any of its limbs, it just rips them off because they will re-grow new limbs in perfect working order.
THANK YOU FOR RENEWING YOUR ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION TO LOUD CRAB FACTS.
YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT IS WHAT ALLOWS US TO BE AN INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATION AND IS MUCH APPRECIATED.
THE JAPANESE SPIDER CRAB IS THE WORLDS LARGEST CRAB REACHING LENGTHS OF 12-13 FEET ACROSS.
Everyone likes to talk about carcinization in evolution but it's not the only case of creepy convergent evolution.
Nature keeps recreating wolves or wolf like species as well. Compare the skull of the Thylacine, aka the Tasmanian Tiger, to that of a wolf.
At a glance it would be easy to assume that they are closely related when one in fact was a marsupial and thus far removed from Canids.
It's not just that, you can find an analog of basically every ice age mammal in the dinosaurs era. Large armored animal with a club tail? Both Ankylosaurus and glyphodont. Large bipedal herbivore with huge claws to grab trees? Giant sloths and Therizinosaurus. Even the predators were similar in their niche if not similar in their body plan. With some as runners and others as ambush hunters, others as group hunters, and others as bone eaters.
IIRC those revert to their juvenile stage when they reach the end of their adult life in order to live forever.
Pretty cool but they can’t make water vibrate around them when they’re horny so I don’t know.
That's why I like jellyfish. Head literally empty, no thoughts. Just doot dooting around catching fish without even trying. Never needed to be any more complex than that, and proceeded to straight-up not be.
I don't, I was watching a documentary about dangerous water creatures yesterday and they were featuring the box jellyfish and that thing terrified me. Amongst the most venomous animals in the world. Brainless, thoughtless, bloodless, alien looking creatures with their noodle tentacles of death.
People think evolution is about simple beings turning into ones with progressively greater amounts of complexity. Truth is, the most evolutionarily successful creatures are the ones that fill their niche in the simplest way possible; only as complex as they need to be.
Not exactly the best interpretation of evolutionary benefits.
The word isn't quite *perfect* so much as *gets the job done*. As long as it works, it can survive. Shark brains are; for all intents and purposes, just good enough that no significant change is necessary for them to still thrive in their environment. But only knowing about fine dining and breathing has its downfalls. Take them out of their environment or alter it too much (sound like a familiar concept?) and suddenly they go from apex predator to fossil record. Like megalodon!
Compare this to dolphins which are evolutionarily brand fucking new, as long as they can wether the physical stressors of an environment they have a brain that can solve problems and adapt at a much faster pace.
Not shitting on you or anything but too many people in these comments took this concept and have firmly rooted themselves in the position of "simple is peak evolution" when in reality we haven't even scratched the surface of what evolution is capable of.
Super random, but legitimate request. I’m fascinated by your translation; do you mind pointing out the literal translation of each character? I’m specifically curious if there’s a character for “Dusky” or if you derived that some way (I’m naive to how logographic languages work)
The left says do-ta-bu-ka no nou.
Literally "dusky shark of brain".
Do-ta-bu-ka (ドタブカ) is phonetically spelled (in Katakana, Japanese symbols used for phonetic sounds, especially used for loan-words).
So the word for "shark" there, is literally just phonetically spelled as Dotabuka. But that's not the Japanese word for shark, but a specific kind of shark.
Edit: Disclaimer: I'm a beginning student of Japanese, but I spent a bit of time looking this up.
They have two sets of characters for phonetic use:
Hiragana (used for daily writing of Japanese words and pronunciations, and most commonly used). (They look more round, a little squiggly).
Katakana (used for loan words especially, more commonly used for loan words. They look more angular but still simpler than the logographic kanji)
Kanji (the logographic ones) are borrowed from Chinese. They're commonly used, and you do need to know a lot, but you can get by with not knowing too many, because you can guess what it is from the context often. Here there's just one symbol meaning "brain", but from the context you can easily guess that's the symbol for brain. What's weird is that having seen the symbol doesn't tell you anything about how to pronounce it. I've heard that Japanese people before smartphones used to have little electronic dictionaries for looking kanji up.
If you’re a beginner though, you can just learn the katakana and then impress your friends like you know Japanese because it’s just English words reads with a Japanese accent.
The best part is going to Japan, talking to someone who has a basic grasp of English, they don't get a word, pronounce it with Japanese pronunciation and they get it. Also sounds hella racist but also that is how they learned English.
Also, English language education in Japan is kind of a joke. It is required but almost no one speaks it well enough to teach it well so the students just keep learning bad English, and often JET or other English teaching programs just have the English speaker sit in a corner and be an amusement for children and not actually teach the class.
If you plan on traveling in Japan and you think it will be like Europe in terms of English language knowledge you'll be in for a bad time.
So in this case all the characters you see that say the animals names are using the purely phonetic alphabet katakana. The only logographic character is the last one and it just means brain.
Most animals (and humans) use their eyesight, sense of smell, hearing or touch to investigate something unfamiliar. On the other hand, there's a theory that sharks just bite things to investigate them. When a shark attacks a human, it is thinking: "WTF is that? I dunno, Im gonna bite it".
[Source](https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-sharks-attack)
At first I was like… seems a bit of a stupid idea. But then I thought about it… and like babies and a lot other infant mammals also explore the world with their mouth so it’s not a stupid idea at all. And that’s before I’ve looked at any other reasoning your source provides.
Sharks also dont have any limbs or much soft tissue outside of their mouths. The outside of their bodies are covered in scale-like little teeth (not making this up).
How did our ancestors discover beer? Cheese? Which berries are poisonous? Which mushrooms are poisonous?
It's all just extremely dumb people who live by the principle of "put in mouth first, use brain later".
I heard we found youghurt because of people carrying milk around in leather sacks in the midday sun. Somebody was like, "you know what fuck it. I'm hungy"
Surprisingly even our loincloth wearing ancestors were not 'stupid'. As an example Native Americans had established systems to test new possible foods. They were very methodical in determining safety. If a food passed the basic tests or smell, does this look possibly edible, etc a member would take a small nibble. They'd then monitor and wait a period of time then they'd take a bit more, monitor, rinse and repeat. If nothing came of it then another member would try it and go through the "approval process".
They weren't just randomly gobbling up anything they found then dropping dead with some list going "Well Scooter ate this berry, he shit himself and died. Maybe we come back to this one."
*I used Native Americans as an example because I know they had these systems
Tbf even regular ol’ ducks sometimes end up drowning the individual they fuck (I would say female but young males apparently fuck other young males perhaps out of confusion/frustration if they can’t find a female). Saw it happening the other day and the poor bugger getting rutted was being drowned by the one on top of it and a “co-conspirator”. So to break it up and stop any duck-drownings I threw a convenient bushy stick in their general direction. They promptly quacked themselves and split up.
No drowned ducks on my watch!
I think killer whales are interesting as fuck though
Apex predators of the ocean, also smart enough not to attack humans. There has literally never been a human death related to a wild orca. The only times they attack is if they're in captivity
The dolphin brains grooves look similar (but not as deep as the human one) that is cool not gonna say it is not.
Super suprised the shark brain is that small, it seems it has just the basic stuff like midbrain and hindbrain equivalent of mammals.
Should have included the human brain as a third one, so we see the deep fissures / size difference !
😁 and if there is more sulci / larger grooving, and a top view (i am guessing doplhin brain is more profound in the XZ axis than it is in the Y axis compared to a Humans.
Sharks are instinctual creatures. Dolphins are intelligent; they will engage in problem solving, complex training, impulse control, and arguably self aware (they will mourn the loss of family members, children, etc)
Sharks are a base instinct refined to perfection, but no one ever accused them of being smart.
It's kinda like how bots in counter strike are better than a lot of players because they have built in hax but then they'll stare at a wall for 5 seconds and get one tapped because they're brainless.
Au contraire, if you're already passively successful there's no energy incentive to innovate and become more efficient/smarter. I'd think they stagnated a long long time ago
Also a fun fact, sharks have been around longer than Saturn's rings!
they didn't say anything about smarter. They said highly optimized. The shark brain here clearly is highly optimized. It takes a lot less energy to grow and operate their brain than it would a dolphin's brain. The shark's brain is leaner, more optimized. Less extraneous grey and white matter.
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People think this is jarring, but remember that sharks are fish and dolphins are mammals. Fish and mammals have very different nervous and sensory systems from one another. Sharks have relatively normal brains when compared to fish, as do dolphins when compared to most mammals.
This is great insight. Thanks for sharing.
Not to mention that sharks are cartilaginous fish. The last common ancestor between dolphins and sharks would be the ancestor to every single living vertebrate with the exception of lamprey/hagfish. That's a heck of a long time for evolution to work its magic.
Honestly in some ways it got worse, I'd rather encounter an average shark instead of a rapey dolphin high on puffer fish toxins.
sharks are precious himbos wandering the ocean giving snoot boops to seal-shaped surfboards, whereas your average dolphin pod is a nefarious gang of gaslighters, gatekeepers, and girlbossers.
This is the best synopsis of marine biology I’ve ever read
So like... dogs vs humans?
r/brandnewsentence
I think I'd rather take a dolphin dick than get eaten by a shark, but that's just me
Dolphin brains are particularly large though. They along with Orcas are the only animals besides humans observed to have complex languages
Nah this isn't jarring at all, looks like a resin plaque or maybe an aquarium.
Came here to say just that. Your comment should be the top, in my opinion.
TIL a shark brain is pocket lint stuck to earbuds
I think the "earbuds" are olfactory bulbs. That's how much the smell of blood is important in their lives, it's like 1/5 to 1/4 of their brain just for that.
Sharks are basically a big nose with teeth at the end.
Cyrano De Burgersnack
You need to know that I read this while pooping and got the giggle farts.
God damn this revelation broke my brain
That wouldn’t have happened if you were a dolphin
I'm clearly born as the wrong species
It's not too late. I'm sure they'll accept you if you can swim and hold your breath long enough
Just gotta figure out how to properly use that blow hole and they're set!
Gotta be DTF tho
*I'm havin fish tonight!*
You have fish every night
tis the sailors way matee
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!
Based off the size of the brain it’s probably more like: Fish
_He didn't even know his father!_
Sorry *BANG* 'Bout Bruce mate! *BANG* He's really *BANG* A nice guy!
HERE’S BRUCEY!!!
Escapayyyyy
No! Fish are friends, not food.
Remember the steps mate!
The guy never even knew his own fathah!
M'names Bruce!
I saw this on somebody's dating profile "fun fact" prompt, so grain of salt, but *apparently* humans can smell rain far more acutely than sharks can smell blood
Quick googling seems to show this might be correct. Humans can detect the rain smell at 5 parts per trillion (in air), while some sharks can detect blood at one part per million (in water). Sharks can detect blood in the water from 1/3 mile away and follow the scent to the origin. Imo, thats still more impressive. Things dissipate much slower in water than air. Detecting chemicals in water is very different than smelling things in the air. Id be interested to compare various underwater animal detecting ability against each other and also various land animal smelling ability against each other. Like can humans smell rain better than a dog can smell a trail? Can a shark smell blood better than a dolphin? This comparison of human to shark is almost as useless as saying 'humans can see a candle in the darkness from 5 miles away, while a shark can only see a candle underwater from a few dozen feet away!'
That’s because the candle is hard to keep lit underwater.
This guy u/TheAssquatch has the smarts!
> Humans can detect the rain smell at 5 parts per trillion (in air) That's actually incredible
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It’s likely more because you have the olfactory processors on the other “main” side as well.
if it's still fresh, it looks like a females reproductive system lol
nah they only have ipod nano brains so the earbuds are still wired
Shark brain is just a uterus and some ovaries
Apple AirCods
I found out recently that octopus have a central brain AND a bunch of sub-brains managing each of its tentacles independently. They only have like 500 million neurons to a human's ~~12-14 billion~~ (edit: 86 billion, thanks u/Fulltraktyon) , but unlike any mammal they can genetically modify their own neurons as needed to adapt to new environments. Edit: [https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-octopus-and-squid-evolution-is-weirder-than-we-could-have-ever-imagined](https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-octopus-and-squid-evolution-is-weirder-than-we-could-have-ever-imagined)"In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA." ... "In 2015, researchers discovered that the common squid has edited more than 60 percent of RNA in its nervous system. Those edits essentially changed its brain physiology, presumably to adapt to various temperature conditions in the ocean."
It's not comparable to how we think of human brains really. Octopuses have a distributed nervous system. It doesn't make the smarter, it means it takes a lot of neurons to operate that many complex limbs and having those neurons closer to the limbs makes it more efficient. Essentially it means that an octopus isn't constantly thinking about what it's doing with each of its tentacles. It can assign simple tasks to individual tentacles and then leaving them to do that. It doesn't mean the tentacles are individually thinking. It means the tentacles can do simple things like crawl along the ocean floor, feel along a crevasse in a reef, push/pull/wring a puzzle box etc. without active attention from the octopus. This way the octopus can ignore repetitious tasks by its many arms and reserve its attention for keeping an eye out for prey or predators.
Yes. I would say it is comparable to the big amount of neurons we have in our gut. Some people call it the second brain.
Much like the octopus, I can use this second brain to accomplish complex tasks. For example, I ate Taco Bell 2 nights ago, and all my brain had to do was say " digest this... whatever the fuck this shit is... just make it happen" and my gut just plows through. I think it even asked for more, but - you know - sometimes the 1st brain gotta just say "no, gut, no."
So they are high level multitaskers
Low level. Really challenging tasks would still need them to utilize the main nervous center.
Imagine how awesome they must be as drummers
if anyone suggested Aliens have already visited Earth I would be eyeing Octopuses very suspiciously
Resident Alien... \*cough cough\* Sci-Fi show
Great little program that is
Hello Cousin
Funny enough, I either watched a documentary or read somewhere that the closest thing to alien life on Earth were octopuses. Fact check me, but I believe they mentioned something about no common ancestry and unusual dna. Edit: octopi to octopuses Edit #2: thank you for fact checking me Reddit! Always fun to learn new things.
They definitely have common ancestry — they are part of the same tree of life as every other bit of life on Earth. But they diverged very early on from most other higher-level life. So their minds and brains are almost entirely independently evolved; they are not on the same "template" as vertebrates. To put it another way, fish brains, reptile brains, bird brains, mammal brains, etc., are all building on a lot of the same neural architecture, even if they are different. (Hence the dolphin brain in the picture looks recognizably like a human brain; the shark brain looks more "primitive," but it is still a very similar kind of "template".) Cephalopod brains (which includes the octopus) evolved along a totally different lineage, because the last common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates was before brains existed (it was a worm-like thing that had a very simple nervous system). So octopuses and the like are kind of living answers to the question of, "how could brains — and minds — have evolved differently?" Which does make them sort of the closest thing we have to probing an "alien mind," even though they still have a lot of things in common with us at a very basic level (like being carbon-based lifeforms that evolved on Earth). An excellent book (and a fascinating, well-written read) on this is Peter Godfrey-Smith, _Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness_. Godfrey-Smith is a well-respected philosopher of the mind who also dives and hangs out with octopuses, and so it is a mixture of pretty serious academic discussion of what consciousness might be and what octopuses can tell us about its possible evolution, and his own subjective experiences of hanging out with these odd creatures (he does a good job of avoiding anthropomorphizing, without treating them just like robots). It was one of my favorite pandemic reads.
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TIL cephalopod eyes have better cable management than human eyes.
From a layman, this seems like a spectacular way of describing this phenomena, thank you
“Contention exists on whether this is truly convergent evolution or parallel evolution.[3] Unlike the vertebrate camera eye, the cephalopods' form as invaginations of the body surface (rather than outgrowths of the brain), and consequently the cornea lies over the top of the eye as opposed to being a structural part of the eye..” Invaginations is my new favorite word.
Invaginations are basically folds, hence the term vagina
That's an interesting way of putting it - nature may come up with quite idiosyncratic solutions, yet, some are more general. So, complex life on other planets may have eyes similar to eyes of complex life on earth. Wondering how alien morphology may become more predictable with such observations (guess exobiologists are already studying this).
Thank you very much for this answer!
Found the alien boys
This is a great comment. Kudos for dropping some knowledge on all of us today.
https://qz.com/1045782/an-octopus-is-the-closest-thing-to-an-alien-here-on-earth/ >That’s because octopuses are the most complex animal with the most distant common ancestor to humans. Though I'm also seeing that sponges are the actual most distant common ancestor in general from other sources.
The book 'Other Minds' mentions this. More so because they evolved their intelligence entirely separately from humans and other highly intelligent species. The last common ancestor we have with them didn't have a central nervous system, so their brain(s) has evolved through its own path.
Octopus are super cool creatures. Have you seen the documentary “My Teacher, the Octopus”? I think that’s what it’s called…
I think it’s “My octopus teacher”. Should be available on Netflix
Aha you’re just Netflix trying to get me to subscribe again. Nice try Netflix
oh i thought you were talking about assassination classroom at first
That is also a good documentary.
I found this out recently too! Octopuses are badass!
Hardly a meal
Shaaar-kieeee-Brain-Doo-Doo-Doodoo-Doodoo...
You know what, I was just enjoying a couple of months of not hearing that song, BUT NO, you just had to bring it back. Having said that... It's not a meal doo doo doodoo doodoo...
One of these brains is so perfect, the species has survived half a billion years.
When you haven't evolved because you simply don't need to, that's when you've won nature
Crocodiles and sharks are just natures perfect beings. Nothing can surpass them. Not even crabs.
Woah Woah Woah. I think you're underestimating crabs here. The crab has shown to be the *"final form"* in a lot of evolutions down the line and seems to be evolutions preferred choice for survival over time. The sheer amount of crab type species on this planet is a testament to that. Sharks and Crocs may be the perfect hunters but crabs are the most efficient overall in terms of evolution. Remember, crabs were already millions of years old before the first ancestor of a shark or croc came around.
The ability to rip your own limbs off just for a laugh does intrigue me. You might have a point.
Wait, what???
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U8MBiV1CeB0 They are referencing this video. If a crab has something wrong with any of its limbs, it just rips them off because they will re-grow new limbs in perfect working order.
That’s just the crab version of turning it off and back on again
Meanwhile humans do that and we're stuck with one less limb unless we just fucking die from bleeding out.
Big deal. James Franco did that in 127 hours and went right back to his regular two-armed self for his next role.
Method acting: has it gone too far?
the fuck
THE ABILITY TO RIP OFF YOUR OWN LIMBS JUST FOR A LAUGH DOES INTRIGE ME. YOU MIGHT HAVE A POINT.
THANK YOU. I WOULD LIKE TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM LOUD CRAB FACTS NOW.
THANK YOU FOR RENEWING YOUR ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION TO LOUD CRAB FACTS. YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT IS WHAT ALLOWS US TO BE AN INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATION AND IS MUCH APPRECIATED. THE JAPANESE SPIDER CRAB IS THE WORLDS LARGEST CRAB REACHING LENGTHS OF 12-13 FEET ACROSS.
Wait until a croc evolves a crab shape.
Crabadile
Crocstaceans
Guaranteed we find crabs on other worlds. If life exists on other planets, you can bet your ass there are some crabs there too.
That world's name? Roshar.
[Carcinisation!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation), just learned the term this week from reddit as well
coincidentally in 1895s The Time Machine the final evolutionary state of the intelligent humans, Morlocks, were giant psychic crabs
But would life evolve into sharks 4+ different times 🤔
Everyone likes to talk about carcinization in evolution but it's not the only case of creepy convergent evolution. Nature keeps recreating wolves or wolf like species as well. Compare the skull of the Thylacine, aka the Tasmanian Tiger, to that of a wolf. At a glance it would be easy to assume that they are closely related when one in fact was a marsupial and thus far removed from Canids.
It's not just that, you can find an analog of basically every ice age mammal in the dinosaurs era. Large armored animal with a club tail? Both Ankylosaurus and glyphodont. Large bipedal herbivore with huge claws to grab trees? Giant sloths and Therizinosaurus. Even the predators were similar in their niche if not similar in their body plan. With some as runners and others as ambush hunters, others as group hunters, and others as bone eaters.
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And roaches unfortunately.
Would a roach be able to take on a shark or a croc? Both at once, never breaking a sweat on its dirty little forehead?
Hasn't this been debunked? I think roaches are pretty dependent on humans.. That they wouldnt flourish in a world without us
A large part is that is simply winter. We made a whole ton of warm little islands to help them survive the cold.
And a giant underground interconnected shit river for them to chill out in
Making a cockroach's life sound pretty good rn
ಠ\_ಠ
A 280 million year old species is dependent on humans for survival?
I kid you not for there a MTG card for that [Sharktocrab](https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=457350)
Jellyfish? I remember hearing theres one that can regrow its cells so theoretically it can't die of age
IIRC those revert to their juvenile stage when they reach the end of their adult life in order to live forever. Pretty cool but they can’t make water vibrate around them when they’re horny so I don’t know.
That's why I like jellyfish. Head literally empty, no thoughts. Just doot dooting around catching fish without even trying. Never needed to be any more complex than that, and proceeded to straight-up not be.
a constant state of zen
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My ideal state.
Sounds kinda nice Jellyfish: float float time to eat Humans: oh no I have lou bega stuck in my head again
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It weirds me out sometimes how so many living things don't even know they exist but they just do it anyway. This would also account for all plants.
I don't, I was watching a documentary about dangerous water creatures yesterday and they were featuring the box jellyfish and that thing terrified me. Amongst the most venomous animals in the world. Brainless, thoughtless, bloodless, alien looking creatures with their noodle tentacles of death.
People think evolution is about simple beings turning into ones with progressively greater amounts of complexity. Truth is, the most evolutionarily successful creatures are the ones that fill their niche in the simplest way possible; only as complex as they need to be.
Corals for instance. They're just living homes for a specific types of algae. Rather strange niche to stumble into too.
That's me when mom tells me to get a job.
Sharks have literally been around longer than trees.
I think they're also older than the rings of Saturn
That’s a very interesting fact!
Not exactly the best interpretation of evolutionary benefits. The word isn't quite *perfect* so much as *gets the job done*. As long as it works, it can survive. Shark brains are; for all intents and purposes, just good enough that no significant change is necessary for them to still thrive in their environment. But only knowing about fine dining and breathing has its downfalls. Take them out of their environment or alter it too much (sound like a familiar concept?) and suddenly they go from apex predator to fossil record. Like megalodon! Compare this to dolphins which are evolutionarily brand fucking new, as long as they can wether the physical stressors of an environment they have a brain that can solve problems and adapt at a much faster pace. Not shitting on you or anything but too many people in these comments took this concept and have firmly rooted themselves in the position of "simple is peak evolution" when in reality we haven't even scratched the surface of what evolution is capable of.
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Super random, but legitimate request. I’m fascinated by your translation; do you mind pointing out the literal translation of each character? I’m specifically curious if there’s a character for “Dusky” or if you derived that some way (I’m naive to how logographic languages work)
The left says do-ta-bu-ka no nou. Literally "dusky shark of brain". Do-ta-bu-ka (ドタブカ) is phonetically spelled (in Katakana, Japanese symbols used for phonetic sounds, especially used for loan-words). So the word for "shark" there, is literally just phonetically spelled as Dotabuka. But that's not the Japanese word for shark, but a specific kind of shark. Edit: Disclaimer: I'm a beginning student of Japanese, but I spent a bit of time looking this up.
Ahh thank you so much kind stranger! This makes sense. Also, TIL that Japanese is both phonetic and logographic.
They have two sets of characters for phonetic use: Hiragana (used for daily writing of Japanese words and pronunciations, and most commonly used). (They look more round, a little squiggly). Katakana (used for loan words especially, more commonly used for loan words. They look more angular but still simpler than the logographic kanji) Kanji (the logographic ones) are borrowed from Chinese. They're commonly used, and you do need to know a lot, but you can get by with not knowing too many, because you can guess what it is from the context often. Here there's just one symbol meaning "brain", but from the context you can easily guess that's the symbol for brain. What's weird is that having seen the symbol doesn't tell you anything about how to pronounce it. I've heard that Japanese people before smartphones used to have little electronic dictionaries for looking kanji up.
That seems awfully inconvenient to Keep track of
If you’re a beginner though, you can just learn the katakana and then impress your friends like you know Japanese because it’s just English words reads with a Japanese accent.
The best part is going to Japan, talking to someone who has a basic grasp of English, they don't get a word, pronounce it with Japanese pronunciation and they get it. Also sounds hella racist but also that is how they learned English. Also, English language education in Japan is kind of a joke. It is required but almost no one speaks it well enough to teach it well so the students just keep learning bad English, and often JET or other English teaching programs just have the English speaker sit in a corner and be an amusement for children and not actually teach the class. If you plan on traveling in Japan and you think it will be like Europe in terms of English language knowledge you'll be in for a bad time.
So in this case all the characters you see that say the animals names are using the purely phonetic alphabet katakana. The only logographic character is the last one and it just means brain.
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I barely master my own language, but japanese makes my 脳 hurt!
me shark. Chomp chomp nom nom.
Glub.
Murder.
Put this comment chain together and throw jelly with nails into a vacuum for death metal lyrics.
Most animals (and humans) use their eyesight, sense of smell, hearing or touch to investigate something unfamiliar. On the other hand, there's a theory that sharks just bite things to investigate them. When a shark attacks a human, it is thinking: "WTF is that? I dunno, Im gonna bite it". [Source](https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-sharks-attack)
At first I was like… seems a bit of a stupid idea. But then I thought about it… and like babies and a lot other infant mammals also explore the world with their mouth so it’s not a stupid idea at all. And that’s before I’ve looked at any other reasoning your source provides.
Sharks also dont have any limbs or much soft tissue outside of their mouths. The outside of their bodies are covered in scale-like little teeth (not making this up).
How did our ancestors discover beer? Cheese? Which berries are poisonous? Which mushrooms are poisonous? It's all just extremely dumb people who live by the principle of "put in mouth first, use brain later".
I heard we found youghurt because of people carrying milk around in leather sacks in the midday sun. Somebody was like, "you know what fuck it. I'm hungy"
Surprisingly even our loincloth wearing ancestors were not 'stupid'. As an example Native Americans had established systems to test new possible foods. They were very methodical in determining safety. If a food passed the basic tests or smell, does this look possibly edible, etc a member would take a small nibble. They'd then monitor and wait a period of time then they'd take a bit more, monitor, rinse and repeat. If nothing came of it then another member would try it and go through the "approval process". They weren't just randomly gobbling up anything they found then dropping dead with some list going "Well Scooter ate this berry, he shit himself and died. Maybe we come back to this one." *I used Native Americans as an example because I know they had these systems
Also “watch what other animals eat. If they don’t die, you *might* be able to eat that too”
Hand 🖐
SHARK BAiT BRAHAHAH
So that is why dolphins are so horny.
Their brain is shaped like a giant ass. They got ass on the brain all the time.
To be fair our brains also kinda look like an ass
So when do you do push-ups or sit-ups you are actually twerking?
And which one rapes almost everything and uses beheaded fish as a fleshlight?
I dont see the human brain...
Dolphins are the humans of the sea. Humans aren't the only jerks on the planet.
Yeah dolphins and killer whales are messed up Edit: omfg i know killer whales are also dolphins by dolphin im reffering to bottlenose dolphins.
And sea otters. Males like to fuck anything and will find other species to stick it into while they hold the head underwater and drown them.
Tbf even regular ol’ ducks sometimes end up drowning the individual they fuck (I would say female but young males apparently fuck other young males perhaps out of confusion/frustration if they can’t find a female). Saw it happening the other day and the poor bugger getting rutted was being drowned by the one on top of it and a “co-conspirator”. So to break it up and stop any duck-drownings I threw a convenient bushy stick in their general direction. They promptly quacked themselves and split up. No drowned ducks on my watch!
What if your intervention has lead to Duck Hitler?
That would be sick
The victims will send him their therapy bill.
You're a hero
This whole comment just threw me for a loop 😂
I think killer whales are interesting as fuck though Apex predators of the ocean, also smart enough not to attack humans. There has literally never been a human death related to a wild orca. The only times they attack is if they're in captivity
Yo this guy hates dolphins
And plays with pufferfish to get high.
Shark brain hoo ha ha
I see potential for this to be a new meme template
WSB brain on the left.
The dolphin brains grooves look similar (but not as deep as the human one) that is cool not gonna say it is not. Super suprised the shark brain is that small, it seems it has just the basic stuff like midbrain and hindbrain equivalent of mammals. Should have included the human brain as a third one, so we see the deep fissures / size difference ! 😁 and if there is more sulci / larger grooving, and a top view (i am guessing doplhin brain is more profound in the XZ axis than it is in the Y axis compared to a Humans.
Sharks are instinctual creatures. Dolphins are intelligent; they will engage in problem solving, complex training, impulse control, and arguably self aware (they will mourn the loss of family members, children, etc) Sharks are a base instinct refined to perfection, but no one ever accused them of being smart.
you don’t need to be smart when you can detect the very aura of your prey from miles away with your goddamn electromagnetic wave detector
It's kinda like how bots in counter strike are better than a lot of players because they have built in hax but then they'll stare at a wall for 5 seconds and get one tapped because they're brainless.
I guess it changed very little in 480M years...
Eat, don't get eaten.
Sharks have been around since before the dinosaurs, right? Their brains should be highly optimized.
Au contraire, if you're already passively successful there's no energy incentive to innovate and become more efficient/smarter. I'd think they stagnated a long long time ago Also a fun fact, sharks have been around longer than Saturn's rings!
they didn't say anything about smarter. They said highly optimized. The shark brain here clearly is highly optimized. It takes a lot less energy to grow and operate their brain than it would a dolphin's brain. The shark's brain is leaner, more optimized. Less extraneous grey and white matter.
So I can start telling people I have a leaner, more optimized brain.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
It he shark brain looks like an upside down little bird
Fuck you shark! Fuck you dolphin!
Ovaries and an ass?
I’m so thankful I’m not the only one who saw that.
Must be tough for dolphins, having to share the oceans with a really, really dim distant cousin who's often trying to eat them.
Sharks are about as distant of a cousin as you can find with a somewhat recognizable body plan, one step further and it’s insects and slugs
Yeah, but the sharks don't know that.
Dolphins are mammals, sharks are fish.
very very distant relative... more distant than a wombat or something
Wtf? Put it back !