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Imagine being so determined to survive that you tell half of your immune system to fuck right off.

krazykristaPosted for Friends to comment on, 4 years ago3 min read

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Anglerfish

I came across a super interesting article yesterday while getting in my daily dose of news. I read news daily with my coffee, but am super selective with what I choose to absorb. It mostly consists of science, crypto, and oddities, sometimes I dive into current events also.

Back to the article at hand "The Anglerfish Deleted Its Immune System to Fuse With Its Mate", I linked it here twice with hopes that you give it a go, as it tells the details better than I will.

Imagine being so determined to survive that you tell half of your immune system to fuck right off.

Anglerfish have two different types of immune systems, innate and adaptive (all vertebrates do).
There are around 300 different types of anglerfish..which is interesting on its own...but wait there's more. Several types of anglerfish were studied by grinding up samples of preserved anglerfish that the researchers hunted down at various establishments. The anglerfish were elusive, so they were unable to collect live specimens for the study. The study was conducted by researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute and the University of Washington.
The anglerfish were found to have evolved to knock out half of their fucking immune system in order to be able to partake in sexual parasitism. Sexual parasitism takes place when the mates fuse together instead of needing to find one another to fornicate. Sometimes a female anglerfish has several mates fuse to her. Some the fusions are permanent abs some are only temporary. Talk about survival of the fittest ay? Female anglerfish straight up kidnap the males, if that isn't hardcore I don't know what is. Back to the immune system bit, when humans get organ transplants, they have to go on anti rejection medication for the rest of their lives. They then have weakened immune systems, and many reject the organs anyways. The anglerfish solved rejection issues by saying "hey adaptive immune system, I'm going to need you to fuck right off". The researchers plan to study how this finding with the anglerfish may help human transplant recipients. They may have made themselves vulnerable, but since they live so deep in the ocean, I'm not sure that they had very much to defend against anyways. Either way it appears to be working for them.

Anyways, I found the article quite fascinating, I think I included most of the relevant information, sprinkled with a ton of the fuck for my own amusement (and yours).
You should give it a quick read anyways and let me know what you think.

All the Love-

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