superheroes | Southern Fried Science

Five organisms with real super powers that rival their comic book counterparts

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Andrew Thaler

There is no force more creative than the painstakingly slow process of evolution. Ever wanted to walk through walls? Naked mole rats can physically bore through concrete. How about fly? There are a couple dozen different ways to accomplish that goal, even if you’re a squid. Incredible power of regeneration? Flatworms, roundworms, and echinoderms have us beat. Among the vertebrates, species like the axolotl can regrow limbs, organs, and parts of their brain. For practically every super power we can imagine, something on the tree of life has come up with a real-world analog.

Some real super power are more super than others:

1. The immortal rotifer that absorbs the abilities of anything it touches.

Bdelloid Rotifers. photo by Diego Fontaneto

Around 80 million years ago, a small, unassuming group of metazoa decided that sex just wasn’t for them. Instead of going through the effort of recombining their genetic material with a mate every generation to produce a viable offspring with a roughly 50% contribution from each parent, Bdelloid Rotifers started reproducing asexually. Males completely disappeared from class bdelloidea, leaving females to generate genetic duplicates through parthenogenesis. This is not their super power.

Bdelloid rotifers are incredibly tough. When environmental conditions are less than favorable, they can enter a dormant state. In this dormant state,they can survive the worst unscathed. Dehydrated, they can endure extreme temperatures, drought, even ionizing radiation. A bdelloid rotifer in its dormant state can even survive in space. If that isn’t enough, while dormant, these rotifers continue to produce offspring, which also remain dormant. This is not their super power.

Bdelloid rotifers’ super power appears when they recover from their dormant state. As they rehydrate and repair whatever damage their cells incurred, they incorporate DNA fragments from their environment. This includes partially digested food and any DNA in close proximity to them, even bacterial and archael DNA. It is this ability that allows bdelloid rotifers to overcome the limitations of asexual reproduction and survive for 80 million years without mates. They can literally absorb the attributes of those around them.

Their incredible toughness, celibate lifestyle, and ability to absorb the powers of anything they touch, put Bdelloid Rotifers firmly on par with X-Men perennial favorite: Rogue.

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Heroes and Villains

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Andrew Thaler

The following is a repost from the old Southern Fried Science WordPress blog. The original can be found here.

I finally got the chance to watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog last week. After watching and enjoying, I started thinking about something. We have our heroes, the stalwart defenders of whatever, mostly absolute in their righteousness; often torn by by their duties, their beliefs, their past; sometimes high and noble, sometimes darker and more base; but almost always connected in some primal way to our own sense of self. We love our hero’s because we see some of who we could be in them.

But then there are the villains. Sometimes twisted by a painful life, torn by lost loves, driven by revenge, and corrupted by power. Often they are deeper, more complex than the heroes; capable of great evil, but sometimes redemption. We hate them, fear them, sometimes empathize with their plight. They are what we could become, if we allow ourselves to fall from grace. Most of them have PhD’s.