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A Tail of One Species

By Peter Lloyd

Mother Nature has solved all problems—any problem you can imagine. With a few billion years of evolution behind her, she’s seen it all, to say the least. There’s not a challenge she hasn’t faced, stared down, and sent shrinking. If you want Mother Nature’s help solving your problem, your challenge is to find which of her solutions fits your problem.

In The River of Doubt, the story or Theodore Roosevelt’s exploration of an Amazon River tributary, Candice Millard introduced me to a boatload of exotic aquatic species that have solved some of the earth’s toughest survival tests.

The Amazon she describes as a seething cauldron of competition, which has spawned the world’s greatest diversity of aquatic life—more that 3000 species of fish alone. By comparison, the Missouri-Mississippi River system is home to a mere 375 fish species.

Millard mentions the thousand-pound manatee, stingray, armored fish, and the arawana, also called the water monkey for its practice of leaping out of the water to snatch small animals from low-hanging branches. She also notes the lungfish that can breathe air out of water, the four-eyed fish with eyes that simultaneously see above and below water, and the tambaqui with teeth the size of sheep molars that can crack bowling-ball-size brazil nuts (right).

No fish fascinated me more, however, than the electric fish. Interesting enough that it contains its own power plant and communicates wirelessly in the water, but this species dines on itself. That is, it eats the tails of other electric fish. Millard claims they dine exclusively on the tails of their own kind.
There are electric fish that eat nothing but the tails of other electric fish, which can regenerate their appendages, thus ensuring the predator a limitless food supply.
In The Science Times Book of Fish, however, Millard’s claim is slightly dampened.
The most peculiar among electric fish…are two species of tail-eaters. When researchers examined the fish, their stomachs were filled entirely with the tails of other electric fish…while the researchers know the fish eat the tails of other species, they may eat the tails of members of their own species as well. The electric fish can rapidly regenerate lost parts, which makes the meal of choice of these species both plentiful and naturally renewable.
I have no plans to head for the Amazon to resolve the question, but the idea of a group feeding itself on food it naturally regenerates represents just one of the billions of bright ideas Mother Nature offers. All you have to do is look around you. Her solutions are literally everywhere!

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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