Litany Of Wonders

Our awe to creatures performing incredible feats:

Bar-tailed godwits flying from Alaska to New Zealand in 9 days
Magnetotactic Bacteria synthesizing their own compasses
The common swift, aloft 10 months at a time
Methanopyrus living at temperatures greater than 100C and at depths of 2000 m
Tardigrades surviving open space and radiation
Tobacco plant attracts enemy's enemy to survive
Chernobyl fungi eating radiation
Golden Wheel Spider - rolling at 2640 rpm
Ocelli - single cell and plant mechanism for focusing light
Human heart - beats ~2.5 billion times in a lifetime
Overlapping reading frames in viruses - coding for multiple proteins with the same sequence offset by where one starts reading. A way to code more proteins in the same length genome.
Photosynthesis - 'nough said
Whale sounds travel over thousands of miles
Scarlet fever - strep infected with T12 bacteriophage - a.k.a my cold has its own cold which makes my cold worse
Frogs with bio-antifreeze can be frozen and spring back to life
Wooly Bear Caterpillars in the arctic - freezing through 14 winters to gather enough nutrition to metamorphose
Human supertasters getting sick less often, because of the more refined bitter taste receptors in their noses
All of the oxygen in our atmosphere was produced by organisms capable of photosynthesis
Echolocation in mammals - create mental model of the environment by producing sounds and listening to how the sound bounces off of objects. Done by bats, dolphins and sometimes humans
Paris Japonica not only has beautiful flowers but also a very long genome beating out humans by 20 billion base pairs
The diving bell spider constructs an underwater bubble and uses it to stay submerged for a long time - Scuba by evolution
Peacock feathers are actually brown, the amazing colors are created by iridescence - wave interference between reflections of two or more thin film surfaces
Tomato plants protect themselves from caterpillars by releasing a chemical that makes them eat each other
Cylosa spider builds a giant replica of itself in the center of its web. Decoy, scarecrow or just a friend?
Some plants can extract copper and other heavy metals from the soil through their roots. Burning them would leave behind clumps of the desired metal.
Bobtail squid hosts bioluminescent bacteria to camouflage from predators from below and anti fungal bacteria to protect it's eggs
There exist high definition cephalopods, for camouflage purposes
Nature did a drawing of an ant through evolution! On the wings of a fruit fly called Goniurellia tridens presumably to confused its predators
Nature also did a drawing of spider legs through evolution on Lygodium Spider Moth presumably to confuse humans writing for business insider
Unlike humans, sperm whales spend their waking hours horizontal and sleep vertically
Making the thing that eats you smell so that its predators can find it. Tobacco vs Caterpillar
Erigone spiders flying to great hights and distances through electrostatic repulsion
Sea slugs eat their enemies to gain their powers! E.g. eat algae, steal their chloroplasts, and use them for photosynthesis.
Fungi mining phosphorous to help plants in the early earth thrive.

Our gratitude to the biosphere for medicine:

Willow for aspirin
Penicillium for antibiotics
Horseshoe crab blood for aseptic vaccines
Rosy Periwinkle for curing childhood leukemia
Saw-scaled viper for Aggrastat, an anticoagulant based on its venom
CRISPR
Some viruses reproducing faster in cancer than in normal cells employed in cancer treatments

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