What's Inside These 8 Unique Creatures?

from blistering hot deserts to deep blue oceans from frozen ponds too swampy wetlands animal species have adapted and evolved in unique ways let's take a look deep inside these distinctive animals and learn what adaptations they've picked up in order to call these harsh landscapes home at first glance a kangaroo's pouch looks like nothing but a built-in baby sling but if you peeked inside you'd see it's far more complex than a simple pocket it has to be because the Joey inside is not your average baby an adult male red kangaroo can stand over one-and-a-half meters tall and weigh 90 kilograms that's larger than a grown man but the newborn start out the size of jellybeans they're blind deaf and hairless to boot after all they only spend 33 days inside their mom before births that's like a human having a baby when she's 2 months pregnant so the underdeveloped roo isn't ready to face the harsh Australian wilderness that's where the pouch comes in it's a pocket of skin that acts like a second womb giving the Joey a safe cozy environment to grow and like a pregnant belly the pouch can stretch to fit the baby as it gets bigger it's lined with powerful but flexible muscles and ligaments to keep the Joey safe mom can tighten those muscles to shut the pouch flush against her body just like pulling a drawstring bag closed and it will need the extra space because over the course of eight months that bean sized baby will reach the size of a large house cat that's thousands of times its birth weight that rapid growth is thanks to the pouches for nipples which spout milk that contains germ fighting antibodies to keep the little roo from getting sick but that's just the start you see the nutrient levels change to meet the baby's needs as it ages for example sulfur a major building block of hair Peaks around three months in that's the same time the baby starts growing fur the best part mom can produce multiple types of milk at the same time each squirting from its own nipple so she can suckle two babies in different age groups simultaneously another special feature about the kangaroo pouch is that it's lined with sweat glands that release antimicrobial substances which help protect the baby Roos from harmful viruses bacteria and parasites but there's one more way that pouches design keeps the Joey's safe it's totally hairless and that skin-to-skin contact keeps the baby warm and cozy basically it's the ultimate nursery but nothing lasts forever eventually the Joey will need to leave the pouch at about five months old it pokes its head out and a month later it takes its first tentative steps into the world there it will explore for a few short seconds before hightailing at home but as it gets older and bolder it stays out longer until eight months in it's ready to leave the nest well the pouch for good what would you do for the power to fly how about shedding your skin and dissolving your own muscles now believe it or not that gruesome process is how caterpillars earn their wings here's what you might not know about what's inside a caterpillars cocoon contrary to popular belief this is not a cocoon only certain moths built cocoons which are like a silky sleeping bag that covers the insect this on the other hand is what's called a chrysalis it's not a sac or a pouch it's actually the caterpillars own body when it's time for the transformation to begin the caterpillars body ramps up production of a hormone called Ekta zone and that causes it to cast off its outer coating sort of like how a snake sheds its skin and underneath is a hard shell similar to the exoskeleton of a beetle after that life for the little caterpillar gets easy first it releases enzymes called caspases these rip apart and dissolve cells in its muscles digestive system and other organs but the enzymes don't quite liquefy all of the caterpillar they leave key structures intact like breathing tubes at the same time specialized cells called imaginal discs start waking up before the chrysalis stage these discs were kept dormant by a series of hormones in the caterpillars body but once the transformation begins those hormone levels take a nosedive giving these discs the opportunity to do what they do best build a butterfly you see each disc contains the genetic recipe to form a different adult body part starting from the inside out after one week the digestive system of the butterfly is well on its way and by day 16 the adults legs wings eyes and mouth are all present and in working order now two weeks is a remarkably short time for all of this to happen since each imaginal disc starts out with only about 50 sells and must multiply those into thousands just to form a single wing and if you checked out the chrysalis around day 16 you might even be able to see those brilliantly colored wings because for some species their chrysalis turns transparent in their final days of metamorphosis now fully formed it's time to hit the road the chrysalis splits open down the center and the butterfly escapes meanwhile a reddish liquid spills out that's all the waste the butterfly in a caterpillar produced during its stay once its wings expand and harden it's ready to mate pollinate and slurp nectar to its heart's desire but one of the most interesting parts of all research suggests that butterflies and moths can remember their caterpillar days in one study researchers trained moth caterpillars to associate an odor with an electric shock so whenever the larvae smelled it they'd move away but even after they transformed into adult moths they still avoided the scary smell it makes you wonder what else they could recall from their younger days when it comes to deadly predators plants generally don't come to mind after all they're typically at the bottom of the food chain but the Carolinas are home to one vicious vegetable the Venus flytrap using its famous trap it can catch prey faster than you can blink but what happens next inside a Venus flytrap funny thing about venus flytraps they don't usually trap flies in fact winged insects only make up about 5% of their diet and we really ought to be calling it the Carolina spider trap because that's really it's only found in the Carolinas and actually a little piece of the Carolinas and in most lead spiders and and in ants but of course regardless of species that bug is going to have a bad day it all starts when the victim one into the trap possibly lured by the bright red hue or fragrant scent or maybe they're just unlucky we think the spider is mostly just blunder the trap itself looks like an open mouth it's made of two pads attached to a hinge on each one of those pads there are usually three little trigger hairs in a kind of a triangle and those trigger hairs are very very sensitive to being disturbed the first time a spider knocks into a hair it sets off an electrical signal sort of like the electrical currents in your brain that signal starts the countdown if the bug escapes within 20 to 30 seconds nothing else happens that way the plant doesn't waste energy but if the bug brushes against another hair snap in just a hundred milliseconds about four times faster than you can blink the trap slams shut then the trap rapidly goes from convex to concave on each side and the long little spikes on the rims of the pads interlock to form kind of a cage now of course the spider isn't happy with this turn of events so it tries to escape which is exactly what the plant wants the more the spider struggles the more it knocks into the trigger hairs the tighter the trap closes and after an hour or two the trap locks completely cells on the edges of the pads secrete moisture which glues the edges together to form an airtight seal suddenly that trap isn't a mouse anymore it's a stomach digestive juices flood into the closed compartment dissolving the spiders soft organs and the traps lining sucks up that nutrient-rich slushie after about a week all that's left is an empty husk the spiders exoskeleton next the trap reopens and the husk tumbles out the trap is now ready for its next meal but bugs aren't the only food that trap capture just like leaves on other plants the trap surface contains a green pigment that lets it convert the sun's energy into sugar through a process called photosynthesis so then why bother with the bugs well venus flytraps live an acidic waterlogged soil that doesn't have many nutrients so instead of slurping up nitrogen and phosphorous through its roots it needs to borrow some from the bugs that explains why it shares its home with other hungry carnivorous plants like pitcher plants and sundews which could only mean one thing North Carolina is not a fun place to be a bug if there's one thing you know about pufferfish it's that they can do this when aggravated by a predator they you know puff up some puffers like the porcupine fish become a bonafide spiked ball moving through the water seemingly out of control but if you peer inside a puffer you'll learn that puffing up isn't the only trait that makes these fish one of the most threatening creatures in the sea contrary to what it looks like puffer fish are not like balloons because what's normally inside them isn't air its water what they do is they actually take water into their mouths in a big mouthful of water and then they pump it down into their stomach that's Elizabeth Brainard a biologist and pufferfish expert at Brown University and they do that anywhere 10 or 15 times pump pump pump pump pump pump until they inflate completely and then they hold it and they'll just be a big spiny ball and as you might expect this requires some pretty sophisticated biology starting with the stomach it's made of dozens of tiny folds kind of like an accordion these folds are important because when the stomach fills up with water it can expand without rupturing and puffer fish expand a lot up to three times their size that's like if an average human man could flate his waist to a circumference of three meters but there is a drawback to these amazing skills brainerd suspects that puffer fish stomachs have actually lost the ability to digest food which means their intestines have to do all the work you know given the apparent importance of this defense mechanism they've given up the advantages of having a stomach where some digestion can start but the stomach it's just one of many bizarre features inside a puffer for example they have specialized muscles that you won't find in most other fish some in their mouth which pump all that water into their stomach some in their esophagus to seal off their stomach like a drain plug once it's full and some in the base of their bellies which contracts to squeeze out water when they're ready to deflate but what you won't find inside is even more bizarre there are couple characters that are really helpful in their ability to puff up and one of those is that they don't have any ribs and another one is they don't have any pelvis in other words puffers are essentially missing bones and that's a good thing because otherwise they'd get in the way of inflation in fact according to Brainard if it weren't for these missing bones pufferfish would probably have never evolved this way in the first place and that would be a shame since puffing up really is a good defense consider one old study in which researchers watched birds go fishing the birds caught 11 pufferfish but they dropped nearly half of them because the fish started to inflate but what's more surprising is that the birds left with empty beaks might have been the lucky ones because puffers have another more potent defense up their sleeves their bodies are laced with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin it's up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide so poisonous that one puffer fish can kill 30 adult humans so poisonous that puffers are reportedly the second most poisonous vertebrae in world which is why it's also surprising that us humans we actually eat them that's right in Japan pufferfish is actually a delicacy called fugu which only trained chefs can prepare and considering that these fish are basically spiked balls filled with poison and we're still serving them in restaurants they must be seriously delicious if you're hiking pretty much anywhere in the US this is one sound you don't want to hear the warning of a rattlesnake now just because a rattlesnakes tail sounds like a built-in maraca doesn't mean it works like one there are no beads rattling about in here so what's really going on inside if you opened up a rattlesnakes rattle and shook it absolutely nothing would fall out after all so rattlesnake rattles are hollow that's herpetologist Tim Colston he says the secret to that rattling sound comes from the shell itself it's made of keratin the same hard substance as your fingernails the keratin is arranged in a chain of interlocking rings which are hooked together by tiny grooves along their edge now watch what happens to those rings when Colston shakes the rattle when ever I shake them very fast they bump together producing the sound because the rattle is hollow inside sound waves can bounce off the walls and echo the same way shouting in a cave amplifies the sound and the bigger the cave or hollow rings in this case the more amplification so it's a louder the rattle but a big hollow chamber can't get the job done on its own that's where the tail muscles come in rattlesnakes are equipped with three powerful shaker muscles at the base of their spine those can contract so fast they vibrate the rattle up to 90 times a second for comparison the human eye blinks 15 to 20 times a minute by vibrating so quickly the rattle makes a sound that hits between these specific frequencies and it just so happens that that range is best heard by mammals it turns out that tail is custom designed to make predators like bears raccoons and weasels listen up unfortunately snake 'lets yes that's what baby snakes are called don't have this warning signal whenever a rattlesnake is born it just has a single button it looks similar to the one I don't know if you can see that's on the end here without a second button to clack against the baby rattle can't make any noise but every time they shed their skin they add another button to the base of the rattle which grows into the segment above sort of like the structure of a Russian stacking doll the rattle will keep growing until snap just like your fingernails those rattles are pretty fragile and they can break off if they get too long in fact the rattles rarely make it past eight to ten rings before snapping off luckily snakes shed their entire lives so the rattle will grow back good as new which is good news for you hikers because that handy tail can mean the difference between an exciting day on the trail and a painful trip to the hospital did you know that camels used to live in the Arctic tundra yes camels walking around on ice and snow it's true in 2013 scientists announced they'd discovered mummified leg bones on Ellesmere Island which belonged to the ancestors of modern day one and two humped camels in fact in during the frigid Tundra is how scientists think camels got their iconic hump in the first place because what's inside helps them survive in an age when many other animals were wiped out what's inside a camel hump is fat and a lot of people think it's water but it's certainly not it's fat and it nourishes them when they're on wrong journey that's right fat each hump can store up to 36 killer of it which can sustain the camel for weeks or even months without food and that sort of adaptation was especially important 3.5 million years ago during the middle of an ice age when the ancestors to modern camels were hanging out in the Arctic tundra talking about the Ice Age when a lot of mammals were killed during that time and yet the camel managed to survive by developing this emergency food system if you like some eventually camels migrated across the Bering Strait into regions of Asia and Africa where the fat inside their humps help them adapt yet again this time to the blistering hot temperatures of deserts like the Gobi and Sahara you see camels are one of the only animals in the world that store all their fat in one spot and that's useful for keeping cool in a hot climate because heat can escape faster from the rest of their body which helps them maintain a lower body temperature compare that to other mammals like humans who store fat all over making it a lot harder to stay cool today cam will still use the fat in their humps as a food reserve but they're not the only ones in extreme circumstances the Turkana tribe in Kenya for example will eat camel fat to survive they suffer a lot from periods of extreme drought and I have seen these people there be very very short of food and this is difficult to believe but it's true slit open the top of a camel's hump take out the fat for their own consumption and then put the top of the hump back on again but don't worry the camel makes a full recovery and instances are rare but this practice has started to generate some buzz around camel fat as a new superfood turns out camel fat is loaded with fatty acids vitamins and minerals desert farms a company that sells camel fat says that just one tablespoon contains 40 percent of your daily vitamin b12 needs and three times the amount of oleic acid then coconut oil a superfood staple and since all that nutritious fat is what fills the hump out when a camel fasts for long periods its hump can actually go limp gradually diminishing size but it's been in a very harsh environment they go completely limp and flop over the side of the camels backbone now since we know that fat is what makes up the hump instead of water I got us wondering how do camels stay hydrated in such dry climates well they have unique blood cells that run throughout their entire body including a few in the hump itself these blood cells are extremely elastic perfect for holding a lot of water camels can drink up to 115 liters in about 10 minutes expanding the cells up to two hundred and forty percent in the process there are capillaries throughout its body and when it has a drink it drinks and drinks and drinks and it swells up and it looks as though it's pregnant if that's not impressive enough the wild camel of China has even been known to survive on salt water so whether it's surviving the harsh desert heat weeks without food and water or even the Canadian Arctic the camel is one of the best adapters in the animal kingdom and that's in large part thanks to its iconic hump at first glance a fire ant hill or mound as its properly called looks impossibly small and yet a colony of up to 250 thousand ants call it home but here's the secret that mound is just the tip of an enormous iceberg so let's take a closer look at what's inside an anthill the mound is really the top of an enormous underground structure the nest which is basically a giant nursery a nice cozy place to raise babies a lot of babies their mother the Queen roams around the nest while laying 1,500 eggs a day now all those baby ants need to live in a narrow temperature range to grow so that nest sports temperature controlled and it does so without the help of an AC unit the secret is in the design the nest is arranged like an ice-cream cone at the top you have the mound the ice-cream as it were because it's above the surface it warms from the heat of the Sun so the babies can snuggle up in toasty chambers network throughout the mound but they can't stay there all day or they'd get too hot that's where the cone part of the ice cream cone comes in the mound is connected to several vertical shafts that plunge up to 2 meters beneath the ground that's taller than most humans throughout the day adult ants ferry the babies up and down the shafts chasing that perfect temperature for their young charges the nest also sports dozens of tapering tunnels that branch off from these main shafts these connect to small chambers where the ants rest eat and feed the babies until it's time to move the little ones once again now there's one more type of tunnel inside the nest but only a few ants ever use it you see someone needs to find food for the rest of the colony but running around outside the nest is dangerous business that's where forager tunnels come in these are a couple of horizontal passages buried just a few centimeters from the surface but they run throughout the entire territory which can cover up to 185 square meters of land by scurrying through these passageways the scouts can stay underground as long as possible but unfortunately the nest and all its roads can't protect the ants from every threat it turns out all sorts of critters sneaked inside fire ant nests and while many of them are actually harmless others are horrible houseguests for example beetles burrow into the nest and devour the eggs and larvae but invaders aren't the only threat to the colony occasionally clueless humans or major floods disturb the nest and when that happens the fire ants have only one option leave once a year on average the colony will move out and build an entirely new nest from scratch and best of all they only need a few days to do it that's right practically overnight meters upon meters of tunnels can pop up in your yard and all you'll notice is a tiny mound a turtle shell is as much a part of its body as our ribcage is of ours in fact it is their ribcage and their spine and their vertebrae and their sternum basically a turtle skeleton is inside out and just like you can't take a skeleton out of a person right you can't take a turtle out of its shell either but if you could you'd probably be surprised by what you discover here's the inside of a turtle that's Maria Wojciechowski a biologist who's been studying turtle ecology for more than a decade here's your shoulder girdle here's your hip girdle notice how those hips and shoulders are actually inside the turtles rib cage turtles are one of the only land animals on the planet with this feature they're also some of the only animals that can breathe with their butts you see inside a turtle shell is a very particular respiratory system you will see the lungs towards the top here now most land animals breathe by expanding and contracting their ribs which creates a natural pump that guides air in and out of their lungs but turtles can't do this because they're rigid shells don't expand so instead they rely on sheets of muscles within their shell to pump in oxygen through their mouths that is most of the time then there are other times when Turtles breathe out the other end more specifically through what scientists call the cloaca it's the same opening that Turtles used to urinate defecate and lay eggs and in some cases it can double as a set of gills sucking in water and absorbing the oxygen within scientists think that Turtles do this they're spending long periods of time underwater like when they're hibernating and if you look really closely at the inside of a shell you'd discover another feature that helps with hibernating underwater a scaffold like structure that can store and release chemicals that structure actually helps turtles breathe without any oxygen at all it works like this many turtles hibernate in frozen ponds that are starved of oxygen and to survives their metabolism switches over from aerobic to anaerobic that means they stop using oxygen for energy and start using glucose instead via a process called anaerobic respiration and the byproduct of that is lactic acid now theoretically this acid could build up in a turtle's body and kill it that's where the shells structure comes in it can absorb the lactic acid as well as release a bicarbonate to neutralize that acid it's essentially tums but for turtles so as it turns out having a shell is pretty handy for certain situations in fact scientists think that turtles originally got their shells for digging likely more than 200 million years ago so you take like really really complex burrowing structures underground and of course shells are incredibly useful for defense against predators no matter how fierce they may be turtles are amazing [Music]

Channel: Science Insider

Views: 400,010

Rating: 4.8997436 out of 5

Keywords: Business Insider, Science Insider, animals, creatures, species, environment, evolution, kangaroo, puffer fish, rattlensake, anthill, turtle, camel

Id: RFePohz1-4Q

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020