Noodles.

[theiform]

I'm making dinner tonight, and dinner is therefore going to be spaghetti with meat sauce because I love spaghetti with meat sauce and because my mom picked up a mix of ground beef and ground pork that I am most interested in trying out. Lunch was Kraft Dinner (which as a Canadian I must assert is superior to all other Kraft Mac and Cheese products

Comments

[rubyelf]

Scientists recently discovered a complex cave system... I think it's in Vietnam... that's absolutely full of species that had never been seen by humans before. And the complexity of a cave ecosystem depends on the type of rock (some organisms don't like acidic water produced by dissolving minerals, and some don't like water that's alkaline), whether there's free access to the outside, how much light gets in... in caves where light or debris from outside makes its way in (sometimes in the form of bats and their droppings), the ecosystem can use that energy source, but in caves with no light and very little to eat, you see all these strange organisms (mostly arthropods) that have evolved to use very little energy, survive a long time between meals, and make do with whatever happens to wander by eventually.

Caves around here are usually heavily populated by bats. There are a lot of old collapsed mines and strip mining pits. We also have black bears on a regular basis, which makes one a bit wary about poking one's head in a cave.

[theiform]

In the caves that were full of water but had so little light in them, so many of the animals that weren't fish had evolved so as not to need eyes. There was a salamander that looked like an axolotl except for its snout, and it was just...lacking eyes. No eyes anywhere. I kind of wonder what kind of genetic mutation would cause that, and how it became so widespread a mutation that the whole species now just has no eyes. My brother and I figured it was because eyes are just one more vulnerable spot, the ones without eyes just survived longer. It didn't seem like there were many predators in the cave so maybe it just got rid of a spot that prey were lashing out at as they tried to escape

[rubyelf]

Organisms that live in places where there's no use for eyes lose them basically because there are lots of things that can go wrong in making eyes (or any other body part). Normally, evolutionary pressure eliminates mutations that hinder the functioning of eyes. If you live in complete darkness and have no use for your eyes anyway, any mutations to the genes that make eyes will not be penalized by evolution... it's literally blind to the error because the organism isn't at any disadvantage. While their above-ground relatives would suffer from even a minor mutation that hindered their eyesight, cave-dwellers don't suffer at all... the mutation is basically neutral, and our DNA is littered with neutral mutations, cluttered messes of genes that were no longer used and have been allowed to mutate freely because there's no evolutionary pressure to conserve them. So eyes just disappear gradually over time as evolution fails to correct genetic errors in eye development. Also, eyes are "expensive" in the sense that they use energy and

[theiform]

I really wanted to take time to respond to this, because I was reading it and basically all I could think was, "Oh, that makes sense, that's so cool," over and over, but then I got to the last paragraph and I read it out loud to my brother and our friend, and they in turn reminded me of this...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxA0QVGVEJw

I give you...the axolotl song.