Face mites live out their entire life cycles without ever pooping once. They lack any anal opening, storing waste inside their own body cells until they die and decompose.
This was disproven over 50 years ago. If you’re baiting - well done.
For a long time, there was a myth that face mites didn’t have an anus to expel waste. Instead, they stored their poo in their bodies. The feces-filled body would then explode when the mite died. That’s not true, Perotti says, and it never has been. When scientists couldn’t find the face mite anus, they just assumed it didn’t exist. But it “was discovered in the [1970s],” Perotti says. Her team also confirmed it in their study.
This became a Today I Learned… I always thought this was a too weird to be true fact. I learned in biology that all living things have to produce waste, so that makes sense.
That is a thing, but it’s usually a short lived stage after a metamorphosis to mate or do something, if it’s less than a month the strategy works. Not having an anus and stuff means you can not grow that organ and make something else instead or have a shorter growth period.
Face mites live out their entire life cycles without ever pooping once. They lack any anal opening, storing waste inside their own body cells until they die and decompose.
This was disproven over 50 years ago. If you’re baiting - well done.
This became a Today I Learned… I always thought this was a too weird to be true fact. I learned in biology that all living things have to produce waste, so that makes sense.
That is a thing, but it’s usually a short lived stage after a metamorphosis to mate or do something, if it’s less than a month the strategy works. Not having an anus and stuff means you can not grow that organ and make something else instead or have a shorter growth period.
Some microscopic animals don’t have anuses, but that’s because they have one dual purpose orifice that handles food in both directions.
cool