How life prosperous in impossible places

I was sitting in my garden with a bowl of ice cream in the almost total darkness not long ago. It was just after 10 p.m., not late according to standards, except those of a new parent. My two -year -old daughter was sleeping upstairs, but who knew how long, or how many times she could wake up. However, my desire to attend one of the greatest evolutionary paradoxes on earth was stronger than the attraction of my bed.

I had spoken to scientists who study the vision of a common butterfly type, but rarely observed: the Hawkmoth elephant. This butterfly has not only a night vision, it can see the color even by a moonless night. The big cats, the monkeys with bulbous eyes and the owls all have an excellent view to locate and catch their nocturnal prey, but they are all guided by shades of black and white.

What this insect does every summer night was once impossible. The species, Deilephila Elperorwas appointed for the first time by Carl Linneaus in 1758, but it was not until 2002 that his color vision was discovered. As Almut Kelber wrote – Perhaps with a hint of exasperation in our own anthropocentrism – this year in the review Nature: “Humans are disabled at night, and it has been assumed that this is true for all animals.” But its experiences with a halogen bulb and a range of UV filters have shown that these animals could choose their favorite yellow flowers at light levels of the stars, a simulated night of 100 million times darker than a sunny day.

In other words, these insects chose their favorite flower without the light of the moon or the sun. They used the remains of photons from distant stars. Since the nearest star system is over four light years, this means that elephant hawkmoths use a lighting source which first shone with a distant star well before the birth of their great-back-Grand-Beaux.

Little by little, the bird balloons outwards, its angular silhouette cultivating curves.

Relying on so few photons for color vision means that elephant hawkmoths use a summons, a process similar to long exposure photography. In breaks their photosensitive cells until they were bathed in enough photons, they can create a blurred but always precise image of flowers and their colors. But Eric Mandate, a vision scientist at Lund University and Kelber colleague, told me that even it might not fully explain the vision of night colors. “I don’t think it’s the whole image,” he said.

I was wondering if I should finish the whole bathtub of ice cream and call it one night, I heard a sound of a strong fringe coming on our garden wall. An elephant hawkmoth floated among honeysuckle flowers, and I tried to get close enough to decipher any color. I couldn’t. Seizing my daughter’s crab fillet, I wondered if I could catch the insect and take a look with the flashlight of my phone. But I hesitated. Guided by distant stars and see colors that I could no longer discern made this almost mythological animal appear at that time. To trap him, even for a moment, seemed like the cage of a unicorn.

Only the width of my little finger, this insect was part of a story much greater than me, a marriage of millions of years of evolution and the nuclear fusion of distant stars. And so I stood, a green net in my hand, a half -eaten bathtub with ice cream walks away, my eyes barely capable of discerning the Hawkmoth elephant while he was flying on the wall in the dark.

With a speckled brown plumage and a long, slightly turned beak, the tail godwit is a banal shore shore bird. Each year, it feeds on worms and clams buried in the arctic mud reflections and its physique begins to change. Little by little, the bird balloons outwards, its angular silhouette cultivating curves. The breast muscles suddenly seem to be engulfed the whole body. The bird is transformed into a softball form, only with a front beak.

However, it has not become more muscular, because its flight muscles have been inactive for months. Instead, he became obese. At the end of the Boréal summer, more than 50% of its body weight is fatty (morbid obesity in humans is defined as 40% of body weight). To take off, an Arctic researcher told me that birds often need to wait for an ascending current.

And yet, the tail Godwit is an extraordinary athlete. Although these birds do not travel to some other migratory birds – just between Alaska and New Zealand – they do everything in one time. A non-stop and trans-Pacific flight that can take eight to nine days. Departed by their huge fat deposits, these birds are essentially “Obese Super Athletes”, as a researcher says.

I found a water bear in a tuft of cushion mousse outside the window of our kitchen.

The difference between obesity in humans and obesity in the animal kingdom is double. The first, and the best known, is the place where fat is deposited. We store fat around our organs (supposedly visceral fat), which can restrict their function, while birds – and whales and bears – drop their fat under their skin, subcutaneously, which can help protect against cold. But for obese athletes such as tail Godwit, fat is stored in 16 places around the body, including around the intestines.

This is how they transport this fat around the body which is so important. Just as the oil is at the top of a glass of water, fats cannot circulate in a blood circulation (largely based on water) as do the sugars. They are insoluble. To get around this, migratory birds such as bars -tailed godwits pump their body full of molecular guides – known as lipoproteins – which can hang on fat (or lipid) which are released from their storage sites, by exceeding them where they are necessary: ​​mainly the lungs and flight muscles.

“And this is where mammals are late,” explains Chris Guglielmo, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario who studies migratory birds. “We are terrible on the transport side [of utilizing fats]. Even when we run marathons, we must count on glycogen and glucose … We do not count very well on fat. »»

Given for the first time under the microscope in the 1770s, water bears have long puzzled scientists and enthusiasts. How can a fitted and adorable animal survive in boiling, freezing at almost absolute zero temperatures and explosions of radiation that would kill a human in a few seconds?

In recent years, scientists working on two species of Tardigrade –HypiSibius motif And Ramazzottius varnornatus– Have found that their endurance derives from two sources: they produce extraordinary levels of repair proteins to spread their internal machinery and have another protein, which is unique to them, that destruction thwarts in the first place, well named the deletion of damage.

Talking about Tardigrades is being suffocated by superlatives. They have the type of indestructibility generally reserved for the heroes of the comic strip. It is easy to forget that these creatures are real, that they inhabit this land, that they are our neighbors and the parents far from the Animalia kingdom. And that they are abundant: wherever there is water, you will probably find water bears, pockets of cast iron water in the Greenland glaciers with foam that grows on the wall outside your house. With a $ 10 microscope, I found one in a tuft of cushion mousse outside our kitchen window.

The two laboratory favorites –Hypsibius And Rammazotius– are representatives of a large and old phylum which includes 1,380 known species. Taxonomists of Tardigrade think at least twice this number. While these species living on earth have been the most closely studied and sampled, water bears also live in marine ecosystems, especially in sand grains in the seabed. While most terrestrial species have claws at the ends of their legs, marine species have sucking -shaped discs that allow them to flow along the seabed.

And then he was well named Tanctus Bubulubus. Discovered in seabed off the coast of the Faroe Islands, this marine species of water bear has 16 to 20 tank organs attached to its rear end, elaborate structures that the animal uses as success in water and adhesive anchors in the sediments. Floating through the depths, this water bear always seems ready to celebrate a birthday party. Indeed, just knowing that T. Bubulubus He fell there somewhere in the middle of the ocean seems a fact worthy of celebration.

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Image of lead: Imogen Warren / Shutterstock

• Alex Riley

  Published on September 29, 2025

  Alex Riley is a award -winning scientific writer and author of Super natural: how life prosperous in impossible places. He lives in southern Devon, in the United Kingdom, with his family.