The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 56 Anomalies
  The chelicerae slowly clamped one of the sea star's arms and legs and began to tear it apart.

The torn off arm quickly began to regenerate, and Lin Yi deliberately asked the research mother to lay two nutrient eggs to provide better division of the starfish.

Soon, two identical starfish individuals appeared in the field of vision of the compound eye in the mother's body sac. The chelicerae slowly clamped the body of the second starfish, ready to start studying.

The first thing to study is how to kill starfish efficiently without letting them regenerate more individuals.

The regenerative ability of starfish is already ridiculous, and the regenerative ability of these starfish is even more ridiculously strong, making physical attacks almost ineffective. Only the poison of Binghao can completely kill them.

However, Binghao's toxins are limited. If faced with a large number of starfish, it would be quite disadvantageous. Lin Yi needs to find a way to effectively restrain them to kill these guys easily.

Thinking about it, he aimed his chelicerae at the center of the starfish's radially symmetrical body and stabbed it hard, stirring it internally in an attempt to destroy its internal tissues.

After some tossing, one starfish finally stopped moving. Lin Yi controlled the chelicerae to tear it apart again, but this time, it did not regenerate.

Picking up a broken tentacle and examining it, Lin Yi discovered that a nerve-like thing had been pulled out. It seemed that it was this thing that made it impossible to regenerate.

Then he tore off an tentacle from the starfish and allowed it to regenerate a new individual. Then he immediately controlled the chelicerae to fix it, and stretched the other chelicera towards the center of its body segments.

The chelicerae reached inside and stirred a few times, groping for the location of the ganglion. With a strong pull, the entire ganglion was pulled out. The densely packed tube feet on the ventral surface of the starfish immediately stopped peristalsis, and the tentacles hung down weakly, dead.

Later, Lin Yi familiarly cut it into pieces, and as expected, the flesh and blood tissue that regenerated at an astonishing speed did not react at all.

Sure enough, ganglia are the lifeblood of these starfish. Once it is pulled out, no matter how strong the regeneration ability is, it will not work. I don’t know whether this is the case for later generations of starfish, or whether it is due to the evolution of these starfish after they formed a nest colony.

After cleaning up the remains of these split individuals for the mother nest to absorb and interpret the genetic sequence, Lin Yi continued to study the body of the starfish.

This time, he wants to try to study whether these starfish have the same gene editing capabilities as other nest colonies without a mother nest.

It is very likely that these starfish ate the floating mother nests of the Orthophylla nests, and then acquired the relevant gene sequences during a division, and then developed complex eyeball structures after a division.

As for why it suddenly split inexplicably, Lin Yi suddenly came up with a guess - he thought of the leader of the ancient jaw group by the Dikla Crater that year.

As I thought about it, my perspective shifted to the vicinity of the Dikla Crater.

In the water, countless fish eggs are floating among the swaying clusters of sea ringworms. Around them, several workers are taking care of, or in other words, monitoring the actions of these eggs.

Finally, inside the translucent egg shell, the shape of the larvae gradually emerged - an eel-shaped body, huge protruding eyeballs, and fine tooth-like conodonts arranged like saw blades in the mouth, all indicating their identity - the leader. Ancient Jaws.

These are the ancient jaw eggs that Lin Yi had previously obtained in the center of the crater. The eggs are laid by the crazed adult leader Ancient Jaw after eating the yellowish-brown liquid secreted by the brood-like object.

And those leading ancient jaws also lost their lives after laying eggs. I don't know if they were like this originally, or if something similar to the mother's nest caused some changes in their eggs, which led to their death after laying eggs. After controlling the pioneer mother to collect them, Lin Yi asked the workers to start incubating them, trying to hatch the larvae of the leader ancient jaw, so that he could combine it with the mother's nest-like object to study and understand everything.

Now is the moment to reveal the answer - the first Archaeognathus egg begins to hatch. The larvae inside struggle to break open the egg shell and slowly swim out with their eel-shaped bodies. A pair of protruding eyeballs looks at this curiously. world.

But the next second, a giant claw came diagonally and clamped its newly hatched body tightly.

In the translucent body, the original spine was immediately broken by such a huge force, and its body suddenly hung downwards feebly.

The other three pincers waved their bows from left to right, and soon caught several other leader larvae that had broken out of their shells - they were Lin Yi's workers. Two pairs of four pincers in total quickly closed in front of the body, and the paddling feet swung to push the body upwards.

The corpses of several leader ancient jaw larvae were skillfully stuffed into the holes on the surface of the mother's nest by Lin Yi's control workers and began to be absorbed. The genetic sequence was skillfully extracted and analysis began.

Soon, he analyzed the results. The genetic sequences of these larvae of Archaeognathus are slightly different from those of their maternal parents, but they do not show obvious traits. According to the standards of later taxonomy, it seems that they should be identified as a subspecies of Archaeognathus.

But suddenly, Lin Yi suddenly felt that something was wrong. It seemed that he had missed something when he absorbed the genetic sequence of the leader Ancient Jaw.

With a thought, he started a detailed analysis of the genetic sequence of the previously absorbed leader's ancient jaw. This analysis revealed something was wrong.

First of all, there is their lateral line structure - as a primitive fish, the Archaeognathus has a lateral line system similar to that of later fishes, which is used to sense water flow and vibrations of specific frequencies.

After Lin Yi analyzed the gene fragments related to the lateral line system, he found that it did not seem to be that simple.

Generally speaking, lateral lines are used to sense the direction of water flow and assist swimming. But the lateral lines of these ancient jaws seem to have some other functions - they seem to be able to sense vibrations, that is, sound waves, and are extremely sensitive to low-frequency sound waves of a certain frequency.

In later generations, most of this will appear in creatures that are more social and can communicate.

The leader, Ancient Jaw, does have a certain degree of sociality. Although the limelight has been snatched away by the true social nests of various demons, it is undeniable that they are also existences that are out of tune with the times.

But this is not the most critical point - the underlying logic of these ancient jaw gene sequences, which is the part that determines the survival and reproduction instincts of organisms, is somewhat different from other organisms. It seems that they have undergone gene editing!

Previously, Lin Yi's gene editing level was not enough to conduct detailed analysis of these underlying logically related gene sequences.

But now, after absorbing and analyzing a large number of genetic samples from the Orthogonal Floating Mother Nest, he finally discovered something was wrong.

He felt that he was finally close to the truth about the extremely abnormal behavior of the leader Gu Jia, and at the same time, an extremely bold idea emerged in his mind.

　I finally figured out the Easter egg stamps, and I will post the Easter eggs when I post pictures in the future.
  　　
  　
  (End of this chapter)