"Great scientist, have you gained anything?"

When Cycad returned to his home in the Maple Leaf Apartment, it was almost two o'clock in the afternoon. As soon as he opened the door and entered the house, he saw Yang Ruoliu lying on the ground, staring intently at the Ant Leech Emperor with a magnifying glass.

"Sort of!" Yang Ruoliu responded lightly, and her eyes stared at the Leech Emperor in the magnifying glass, obviously seeing something that made her reluctant to give up observation.

At this moment, Yang Ruoliu is wearing a loose shirt and only shorts. This is full of her own clothes, and I don't know how she reduced the waist of her shorts. However, the woman looks really good in her shirt at home, loose and collapsed, and she completely wears the stiffness of the shirt and wears it softly, and it looks very comfortable.

"Get up, let you see something good." The cycads, who had gone out empty-handed in the morning, returned home at this time with a cardboard box. He placed the box on the couch and patted it gently.

"Ahh You're so smart! I love you so much! ”

Yang Ruoliu, who was a little reluctant to see the scene in the magnifying glass, turned her head to look at the box on the sofa and suddenly exclaimed. Even if I thought about it a lot, I couldn't imagine that the cycad would know how to get back a digital microscope, and it was a very well-known brand of biological trinocular microscope. It's a very strange thing to most people, but for someone like me who has been in the biology lab for a long time, it's like a treasure.

"How did you come to be so smart? I was thinking I couldn't see much with a magnifying glass, but I didn't expect you to get this back. At this moment, Yang Ruoliu couldn't put down this unopened instrument.

"Why else am I coming back now?" Su Tie smiled and said, "But this thing is not cheap, it costs more than 20,000 yuan." You'll use it, right? I knew it was there, but I didn't use it. ”

Yang Ruoliu's face was full of energy, he was most familiar with such an instrument, and he was simply his other eye in the laboratory.

She couldn't help but say, quickly opened the box and placed the microscope on the coffee table. Then turn on the computer, install the included driver software, and finally connect the microscope via the USB port. Finally, restart the computer, turn on the microscope power and the included microscope operation software on the computer.

"It's as simple as that?" Su Tie looked at Yang Ruoliu, and it didn't take two or three minutes to get it done, and he was stunned for a moment.

"How complicated do you think it is?" Yang Ruoliu glanced at him, "But the operation is a little troublesome later, you watch and learn quietly." ”

Yang Ruoliu is really good at such an instrument, and soon an ant leech magnified N times appeared on the computer screen, with dark yellow in the black and small tips at both ends. What I see now is the belly of the leech, and between the fine lines, four scotomas appear side by side on both sides of the abdomen. The head and tail are very different, the head is completely pointed, and the tail has two small protrusions like a truncated tail, but it really can't be seen without a microscope.

Su Tie was excited in his heart, this was the first time he had observed an ant leech like this, and he had saved the lives of several people with this little thing, but it was the first time he had seen its true face.

"See those eight black protrusions, right?" Yang Ruoliu said, "I looked at it with a magnifying glass for a while in the morning, and I felt that this leech was so strange, and I suspected that this was not the leech we have always understood, and it did not belong to a kind of annelids in zoology." ”

"Not annelids?" Cycad smiled and said, "Is it a mammal?" Don't tell me these eight little black dots are their little grandma. ”

"Die! It's obscene. Yang Ruoliu slapped this guy's head with a red face, "This is their claw." ”

Burst!

The cycads sounded like claws, and they vomited a liter of blood in amusement. It's understandable to say that it's a little grandmother, but it's incredible to say it's a claw. Can those eight protruding dots be called claws? If so, the ant leech is outrageously crippled. However, I don't understand such zoology, so I can only listen to Yang Ruoliu.

"Strictly speaking, their suction cups rely on these eight protrusions to attach to other objects." "But it should be a vestigial or unformed arthropod, which means it is more likely to be a species of the phylum Arthropod." ”

"Phylum Arthropods?" The cycad was stunned for a moment, "You mean animals like shrimp and crabs." ”

Yang Ruoliu nodded and said, "Indeed." However, shrimp and crabs belong to the crustacean subphylum of arthropods, and it is uncertain how closely related the leeches are to them. ”

Su Tie's heart was shocked, and he immediately thought of the milky white substance secreted by the Ant Leech Emperor yesterday, which contained a large amount of chitin. And chitin is precisely the main component of shrimp and crab shells. It's just that I didn't expect that ant leeches put chitin in their bodies and secrete it when they need it to protect themselves, rather than being born with shrimp and crabs.

"If that shell you said yesterday is chitin, that's easy to understand." Yang Ruoliu said, "If it is really a link, the secretion substance should be mostly protein, but it is too incredible to secrete a large amount of chitin." ”

"But I'm sure leeches can also secrete hirudin, what's going on?" Su Tie said in wonder.

Yang Ruoliu held her chin with her hands and thought for a while, then waved her hand and said with a smile: "I can't do such a detailed analysis." But leeches are largely not leeches. Arthropods and annelids are only separated by a mollusk in evolution, and who knows what God has done in such a close evolutionary process? ”

Then she suddenly approached the cycad and said mysteriously, "Do you guess the computer is male or female?" ”

Su Tie was about to answer, when he suddenly saw Yang Ruoliu wearing his wide shirt and accidentally walked away, looking at the snowflakes inside and a little red in the snow, his face suddenly became hot, he deliberately turned his head to look at the balcony, but saw that Yang Ruoliu's clothes were all hanging outside from the inside out.

"Isn't it hermaphroditic?" Cycad swallowed his saliva and said.

"I'll let you see a few more." Yang Ruoliu didn't notice his wide shirt at all, and immediately put one leech emperor and two leeches on a glass plate, and then put the glass piece on the microscope stage.

"Hey, how come there is an ant leech with only one tail?" Cycad looked at the image on the computer screen and screamed, in the image, the tail of the leech emperor and another leech each have two short protrusions, and one of them only has a rather thick protrusion in the middle of the tail, accounting for almost two-thirds of the tail, which is particularly obvious in the middle of the three leeches.

"I think the name leech is very good now. You know how ants reproduce, right? Yang Ruoliu leaned over again and said, cycads accidentally saw a white flower again.

"I haven't studied it." Su Tie scratched his head and said, his eyes quickly stared at the computer screen again, but there seemed to be a white flower on Yang Ruoliu's chest on the screen.

"There are basically queens, workers and males in the colony." Yang Ruoliu said, "Only the queen ant and the worker ants are female, and the male ants are only responsible for mating, and they will die after mating." The queen ant is responsible for giving birth to babies, and the worker ants are responsible for the work. Once the queen ant mates, she gets lifelong sperm in her body, and there is no need for male ants in the future. ”

Burst! Burst!

If you're dead, you're dead, why do you say that death is so playful?

Giving birth to ants gives birth to ants, why do you say that giving birth to a baby is so cute? You say it's okay to lay eggs.

But I really didn't know that the fate of male ants was so tragic, and he had to pay the price of his life for a good time. But this can only be blamed on God, who let the old man be so vulgar to put the male ants in a group of female animals, so that this guy only takes on the task of being cool once.

"This male ant is so pitiful!" The cycad was a little distracted, and he didn't dare to look at Yang Ruliu anymore, otherwise the white rabbit jumped into his eyes again.

"Who told you about male ants?" Yang Ruoliu pouted, she pointed to the leech with only one tail on the screen and said, "I mean that in terms of reproduction, the leech is very similar to the way ants, parthenogenesis." Of the leeches caught, only this one was male. ”

"You mean male leeches are the same as males?" Cycad asked, he didn't care about ants, but seeing that his gold-like leeches were such fate, he still felt a little sympathy in his heart.

"Yes, if there are so few of them statistically? This is somewhat similar to the distribution of male ants. Yang Ruoliu nodded and said, "Besides, male ant leeches have relatively thick and obvious genitals, which are very similar to male ants." ”

Burst! Burst! Burst!

Hearing Yang Ruoliu say this, Su Tie couldn't help but spit out a few mouthfuls of blood in his heart. Although it can only be seen clearly under a microscope, Yang Ruoliu is not wrong when he says that it is thick, after all, the tail-like genitals of the male leech are indeed unusually large for its body. However, it is more appropriate to use developed biological descriptions.

"Since it is so developed, how does it mate with the female?" Cycad suddenly asked.

"How do I know?" She had used the wrong word, Yang Ruoliu's face was flushed, she heard Su Tie ask this nervous question, she was so angry that she twisted him hard, and immediately said like a curse: "Anyway, I think it's dead when it's over, and the only one who can mate with it is the Ant Leech Emperor." ”

Watching the cycad painfully touching the small piece of meat on his body, Yang Ruoliu was angry and funny. She straightened her expression and said, "If they are the same as ants in terms of reproduction, I believe that ordinary female leeches can also develop into leech emperors, but no matter what, they need to be fertilized to give birth to other leeches." ”

Su Tie nodded, he roughly understood Yang Ruoliu's words. I don't know much about ants, but at least I know that the queen ant emits some hormones, causing other ants in the colony to be infertile. But no matter how detailed the cause mechanism is, I don't know it.

The queen ant is certainly not created out of thin air, otherwise how could there be such a large population of ants on the earth? As for how it came about, it must have developed from female ants. If a male ant becomes a queen, it is a bit scary for you.