Octopodes no longer die when they give birth, meaning they can teach their young and form societies.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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WAIT THEY DIE ON BIRTH!??
WTF this actually needs to be fixed.
Submit a bug report or fork the repo and do it yourself. It's only maintained by volunteers after all.
But they are not social creatures, so if they were, even when they died someone in the social group could still teach the youngs
A breed of 100+ pound Chihuahua with the same temperament as the original.
Ok, take this with a grain of salt because I read about it ages ago in a dubious pop-sci book and my memory is shaky. One time, they tried to gene edit yeast to be able to survive much higher alcohol concentrations. There's lots of good reasons to want to do this... Beer/wine is just about the strongest beverage you can make without distillation of some kind because the yeast dies. Making way higher ethanol yields just from fermentation makes biofuel way more viable. Stuff like that.
EXCEPT... It nearly escaped, and was able to survive on it's own. Yeast is very ubiquitous in nature, so a wild yeast that can tolerate massive ethanol concentrations could conceivably have altered life on earth as we know it.
A cursory internet search isn't turning up anything about this, but I'm pretty sure I read it in the book Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, if anyone wants to look harder than I did.
Give any animal the ability to photosynthesize. Now animals are of course complex creatures that need a variety of nutrients to function properly, and the number of chemicals we've seen be able to be photosynthesized is low, but imagine only needing to nude sunbathe for like a half hour to get enough sugars to fulfill your caloric intake, including the less efficient carb->protein/carb->fat conversion and pop a pill for some vitamins. Imagine if all animals had that as a baseline and just needed to hunt/forage for nutrients and vitamins to support auxillary functions.
Overpopulation would be nearly impossible despite massive population booms, with the only real limitation being physical space and the social dynamics of any given species or interspecies interactions.
The reason you don’t really see animals that can photosynthesize (other than microbes) is because you don’t actually get that much energy per unit of area. Think about how much area a cow has to graze vs the surface area of the cow itself. And much of the cow’s surface isn’t even facing the sun.
Not only that but that the energy from the nutrients generated in a plant is solely used for cell growth and maintenance. Even remotely suggesting a self-warming and extremely kinetic mammal can get energy solely from the sun is nuts.
I also saw a documentary about the ineffectiveness of the photosynthesis Enzyme. Maybe we need to alter this for something like mammal photosynthesis.
In a push to deal with micro plastics, bacteria are developed to be able to break down plastic. Eventually, it gets into the plastic installed for a purpose and starts breaking that down.
bacteria are not animals.
All life with gills learn to breathe air without water, and suddenly all marine life is competing with us for land space
A malicious gene drive. Basically, use molecular tools to ensure that a gene is always passed down from a parent to its progeny, regardless of the other parent’s genetic makeup.
Many choices available: propagate resistance to a pesticide for mosquitos, guarantee Huntington’s disease in a family, or crash a population of beneficial species by reducing fertility, to name a few.
Amaranth that can grow on sand and be watered with seawater
Edit: ops, only animals? Make bees able to break down any kind of sugar into honey
Not very up on biology, so not sure if this would even be a thing, but I would say some kind of internal structure like plants allowing animals to overcome the square-cube law
Ant phagogenesis
99% sterility. Virus transmitted. Long incubation. People would freak out.
I loved the movie children of Men. It was very interesting. You might like it too. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
viruses are not animals
Depending on what causes the sterility it could be managed through diffecountries. It's like huge spark to class warfare instantly. especially for less well off counrries.