• Dallimjp
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    5 months ago

    How isn’t there one post mentioning Mantis shrimp for the vision and punching power. Or any gorilla for being vegan and jacked. What about a giraffe? You could taste a women’s urine to know if she’s ovulating. Are these not no the default answers?

    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      Mantis Shrimp have worse colour vision than humans. They need all those receptors because their brains are too simple to combine colours like a human brain can. A human can see hundreds of shades of purple in between red and blue. A mantis shrimp can only see as many colours as it has receptors. It’s like seeing in 8 bit.

        • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          A mantis shrimp can punch hard enough that it vaporises the water in front of it into steam, which causes an explosion. It’s an effect called cavitation, and it can kill a prey animal that the shrimp didn’t even touch from the force of the explosion. Cavitation can also be an issue for sea vessels if the propeller and hull design creates too much turbulence, and this can damage vessels. If you’ve played Subnautica, cavitation is what happens when you run the Cyclops at full engine for too long.

          Subnautica also has a deep sea vessel called a prawn. Prawns have claws on the first six legs, while shrimp only have claws on the first four. Australians love prawns, and do not call them shrimp. The famous line “shrimp on the barbie” was deliberately changed to make it easier for Americans to understand. Under normal circumstances an Australian would never talk about cooking shrimp, even if the animal on the barbie only had four claws.

          Shrimp, prawns, and other marine crustaceans need a chemical called Calcium Carbonate, or CaCO3, to grow their shells. CaCO3 is a buffer chemical, which means that it can react with both hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions to form other chemicals. Buffer chemicals make a solution resistant to changes in pH. If you add an acid or base to a solution with a buffer, the pH will change very little, at least until the buffer runs out. Calcium Carbonate makes the ocean resistant to changes in pH, which is pretty handy because carbon dioxide reacts with seawater to produce carbonic acid. Human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide would have already turned the oceans to acid and killed off all the marine ecosystems if it weren’t for CaCO3. Unfortunately, the amount of CaCO3 in the ocean has been greatly reduced. This makes it harder for crustaceans like shrimp to grow their shells. This has lead to a decline in both population and size for marine crustaceans. If we keep emitting carbon dioxide, the calcium carbonate buffer will run out and the crustaceans will all die. Also, the ocean will turn to acid and all the fish will die too, whether it be due to the acid directly, or to food web collapse. This may herald the end of most life on earth.

            • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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              5 months ago

              You can help protect the shrimp from extinction by getting rid of your car, going vegan, avoiding unnecessary flights, assassinating billionaires, and participating in armed revolution against the capitalist institutions.

              Here’s a browser-based video game where you can see how humanity would do against climate change under your leadership, if we converted the world’s governments to socialism immediately: https://play.half.earth/

              • Biezelbob@programming.dev
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                5 months ago

                unfortunately I already do most things (the ones I can influence, anyway) but no way I can do more, even us as people vs countries that dont give a shit (china, india, etc).

                • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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                  5 months ago

                  China and India both have lower emissions per capita than rich western countries like America, England, and Australia. These high emission countries should only be complaining about China if they were already world leaders on emissions, which they are not. The top ten countries on per capita emissions are African. Afghanistan is 11. India is the leader of the larger countries.