After the eruption of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, the lava ejected by the volcano covered about 35 square kilometers of the Big Island, killing all life with high temperatures and starting the process of soil formation from scratch. However, the first to arrive at the new settlement were not plants or even microbes, but very strange insects discovered in 1978 and called lava crickets.
What is the mystery of these amazing insects, which crowds of biologists immediately came to study in Hawaii?
In fact, there are only two riddles, and the first riddle is that biologists do not understand what insects eat on absolutely bare stones?
All other species of crickets feed on dead plants and smaller insects, and in extreme cases, they begin to eat each other. But on the lava fields there is not even moss - especially any other insects. Therefore, according to the theory, the wind brings sea foam to the lava fields, which contains a little protein - the remains of algae and other marine life forms. Crickets find it and eat it.
The technical version seems to be logical and very correct, however, lava crickets live not only in Hawaii, but also on the lava fields of Africa, where the sea foam can only be brought by the breeze from the Sahara. Nevertheless, let's not be very strict with the officials and assume that their funny version has a right to exist. But what about the second question to be answered?
And this second question is that as soon as a plant appears on lava fields and, as a result, other insects - lava crickets die out there at the root, there are not even eggs left that will wait for centuries for the next eruption. However, when the eruption occurs again, the lava crickets again begin to multiply with terrible force. Therefore, it is not clear: how do they get there?
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The migration issue of common crickets is obvious: since crickets are flying insects, they have wings. However, lava crickets do not have wings and they cannot fly over the ocean from another island even with a strong wind, so technically they can only be born together with lava.
But how can crickets live in lava that's hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius? Or are they somehow teleported from another island or even from another dimension? Or, perhaps, someone artificially spray them, using like nanobots for land reclamation?
Although this idea seems fantastic, it nevertheless explains reality much better than the clinical nonsense suggested by the officials.
People have been engaged in the classification of biological species for about 250 years: they create atlases, write descriptive articles. About half of these new species are insects.
250 years ago, describing everything was very complicated and simple. It was just because the biologist needed a landing net, scalpel, pencil and paper to place a new animal in the atlas. Well, the difficulty was that a sailboat was still needed, on which some Jacques Paganel sawed somewhere to Australia, which lasted quite a long time and did not contribute to the speed of work.
In addition, the study of new animals in the XVIII-XIX centuries was, as a rule, fun for rich people. There were no universities, grants or anything else. A nutcase like Monsieur Paganel was probably the only one in France.
Then everything became a little more complicated, but at the same time it became simpler: universities, patrons of the arts appeared - and there were many, many more crazy people. They were armed with research ships, cameras, and then also computer databases. And about 15 years ago, such a chip as a DNA barcode appeared - that is, the ability to classify species based on a short sequence of several hundred nucleotides.
Based on these innovations, the number of openable species should either have grown with terrible force, or tend to zero, since all species are already, as it were, open. But … the number of annually discovered species has been STABLE for many, many decades and amounts to about 17,000 thousand per year.
A total of 1.7 million species are described, which, in terms of 250 years, gives about 7,000 new species discovered per year, if we consider the average. That is, there is no particular progress in discoveries, which is rather strange.
Is it possible that the lack of progress is due to the fact that everything is already open and described? So, according to the most conservative estimates of unknown species on the planet, 10 million, and the maximum of unknown species per trillion. And how, then, in this case, to explain the stable rate of openings? Why is there no progress?
And the explanation for the lack of progress here is very very simple and suggests itself. The explanation for this is that there are actually not as many species as they write, but most likely two million or a little more. But someone is constantly experimenting with these species, as a result of this, the modern Monsieur Paganel looks through a microscope, then jumps up, slaps himself on the forehead and with bulging eyes runs and screams: “I have discovered a new species!”. And watching this circus some “Martians” who have created this “new species” laugh to tears.
And these same “Martians” can be sources of lava crickets that appear on the rocks from nowhere. By the way, this is approximately how different ancient sources and legends describe the appearance of new species on the planet. Therefore, in biology, and not such miracles can be.
Moreover, this is not a scientific and theoretical question and is not at all idle, because if some "Martians" are engaged in the creation of nanorobots for processing manure or post-volcanic reclamation, then with the same success they can make other self-fertile bots for the extraction and processing of some other substrate or debris in general.