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Why hasn't the world evolved a fire-breathing creature?
First, there are already animals in the world that once breathed fire. In addition to human circus performances, there is also a domestic cow in the Netherlands. Because of flatulence, the owner called a veterinarian. The veterinarian wanted to use a lighter to observe the tongue coating of the cow at night, but the gas exhaled by the cow was actually ignited. Fever burnt.
It turns out that the grass eaten by cows is decomposed by microorganisms in the stomach, producing methane gas, which is as flammable as hydrogen.
But this fire-breathing is actually a morbid state, just like squirting stomach acid when vomiting, it has no function.
There are generally two types, one is gunpowder propelling , one bottle is sprayed at a time, and the other is continuous spraying, but in general, it only takes a dozen short bursts. This short burst is the equivalent of a puff of fire.
Then, the heat of one liter of gasoline is more than 8,000 calories. If this thing is sprayed with ten fires, it will almost exceed 80,000 calories.
Well, an animal as big as a human consumes around 2,400 calories throughout the day. Swimmers normally don’t overtrain, so they only consume around 4,500 calories a day. The amount you consume with a few mouthfuls of fire has caught up with other people’s consumption in ten days. .
So are you breathing fire to hunt for food, or to lose weight?
So, no fire-breathing animals principle is simple: Combustion is a process of converting chemical energy into heat through a violent oxidation reaction. The physiological activity of animals is a process in which a slow oxidation reaction converts chemical energy into kinetic energy, heat energy and other energy. So no matter the structure or the like, arson is robbing one's own life energy, but it can't achieve any return value.
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When you want to spew out a raging fire, you have to solve a very difficult problem - how does the fire start?
This problem not only disrupted the evolution of biological fire -breathing functions, but also plagued aerospace engineers for a long time.
From the following examples, you can see that it is only more difficult for creatures to breathe fire than spaceflight.
Long before the birth of modern rockets, Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky calculated that liquid oxygen + liquid hydrogen is the most efficient chemical energy fuel .
But people have not been able to do a liquid oxygen + liquid hydrogen rocket engine for a long time.
One of the key questions is: liquid oxygen + liquid hydrogen will not burn by themselves when they meet, how to ignite?
The early rocket engineers tried everything you could think of, including the usual spark plugs and gunpowder, etc., but these devices ignited erratically.
What you want is a full burn, but the result is usually a fancy explosion.
Just think, if the metal structure of the rocket engine can not withstand these explosions, how can living organisms?
The simplest, and one that was put into practice earlier, is self-igniting rocket fuel, which burns automatically when the oxidant encounters the reducing agent .
The idea is good, but choosing the fuel is a hassle:
You need the fuel to be chemically active or it won't ignite spontaneously.
but! You also need the fuel to be less reactive or explode too often.
(How lively...)
Over the decades, countless engineers have experimented with numerous fuels.
In this type of fuel, the most famous one is unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine + nitrous oxide, which is the famous Wannian poison.
These fuels, which are very toxic to organisms , are obviously not suitable for organisms to use themselves.
These are high performance fuels that require forced ignition.
The Soviets chose to use a powder column with a heating wire to ignite pressurized liquid oxygen + high temperature kerosene;
Americans chose electric spark plugs to ignite high-pressure liquid oxygen + high-pressure liquid hydrogen .
Although organisms cannot be forced to evolve the effect of a rocket engine, there are still organisms, which similarly achieve the effect of spontaneous combustion.
These animals belong to:
Arthropoda (one of the most diverse phyla on Earth)
Insecta (the most diverse class of arthropods)
Coleoptera (the most diverse order in the class of insects, including various common beetles)
Infantry (this is not the most...)
Airborne subfamily
In this huge evolutionary pool, structures similar to small rocket engines have evolved.
These gas armors have a storage chamber RSC (the rocket's fuel tank), a reaction chamber RXC (the rocket's combustion chamber), and the vent EC (the rocket's vent).
On top of that, the glands that produce the fuel, which this rocket doesn't have, are all externally charged.
And the principle of Qibujia injection lies in the catalyst!
Friends who have studied biology in high school should be familiar with special proteins such as enzymes. Some tax collectors like to call them enzymes.
Enzymes are chemical engineers in the biological world. Even though they are almost all proteins, they can realize chemical reactions that make human chemical engineers extremely headaches at normal temperature and pressure.
The catalyst used in the gas-bubble is catalase.
Usually, the mixed solution of hydrogen peroxide (hydrogen peroxide) and hydroquinone produced by the gland [formula]can be stored in the storage room.
Once needed, the solution in the storage chamber flows into the reaction chamber, and a large amount of gas is generated under the reaction of the catalyst , and the high temperature (~100 °C) and high pressure gas (including hydrogen and oxygen) is ejected together with the liquid.
During the reaction, hydrogen and oxygen will produce some combustion and explosion due to the instability of the reaction.
This group of Qibujias with their own short reaction time, intermittent start-up, and "rocket engines" that blend water and fire may be the closest creatures to fire-breathing in biological evolution.
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Mainly, "No such trait has ever arisen by chance in history".
One of the common explanations is "because fire breathing requires corresponding organs, fuel containing a large amount of chemical energy , and tissue properties to prevent burns, which requires a part of body weight and energy consumption to maintain, then the physiological function of fire breathing is very important to the organism. life to be useful, whether it be predation, self-defense, or courtship.” This is actually superficial and inaccurate. The physiological functions of earth creatures can be redundant.
In the case of predation, what kind of food can be eaten when burned and supplement the energy you lose for burning? Using this energy to drive minions, slings, venom, etc. can expect predation effects, without the risk of igniting plants or their own fur, and if you have to use fire, human ancestors can use fire without evolving a portable lighter.
In self-defense, what are its natural enemies so that it needs to spray flames that dissipate quickly, instead of using poisons and irritating chemicals that can stick to or penetrate the target's interior for a long time? If it is used to intimidate other creatures, why not use colors, sounds, etc., but consume a lot of fuel?
In courtship, why use this strange way of quickly depleting a large number of chemicals within sight, rather than diffusing pheromones in the air?
There are some magicians, jugglers, etc. among human beings who use combustibles to perform fire-breathing (making the fuel mist from the mouth pass through the open flame to generate plumes or flames), which is not part of the physiological function. There are no extant species other than humans that emit true plasma flames visible to the naked eye. No species suspected of having such a function has been found in the fossil record.
In addition to humans, the earth creatures associated with fire-breathing are:
A fart bug that sprays a toxic liquid at 100 degrees Celsius with hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone [1] ,
Drum shrimp with high temperature vacuoles under water,
The dark-colored sea bream that spit out luciferin from ostracods mixed with luciferase to produce a luminescent light.
It takes about 200-300 degrees Celsius to ignite grass and dry wood. In the case that 100 degrees Celsius of liquid can already defend itself, organisms lack the possibility of evolving such a high temperature that may ignite surrounding objects and damage themselves.
The high temperature produced by the drum shrimp is limited to a very small volume under water, and it will not ignite when hit by conventional combustibles. It is enough prey in this way, lacking the possibility of evolving a portable flamethrower .
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands observed the activity of the drum shrimp Alpheus heterochaelis using a high-speed camera that can take 40,000 consecutive shots per second. The researchers found that the closing of the giant claws produced a high-speed jet of water, which formed cavitation and created low-pressure bubbles. When the bubbles collapsed, they could generate a sound volume of up to 200 decibels, enough to shatter glass and kill small fish within 1.8 meters. When the bubbles burst, they will produce sonoluminescence (that is, the bubbles explode inwardly in the water, producing light and high temperature), and they named the sonoluminescence of the drum shrimp "shrimpoluminescence" [2] .
The bubbles generated by the drum shrimp are rapidly compressed, and the heat has nowhere to dissipate, so that the temperature in the bubbles can surge to 4,700 degrees Celsius, producing a bright light that lasts for several nanoseconds. The light is invisible to the naked eye and is just a by-product of shock waves, but this is the first time an animal has been seen using this light to emit light.
The glowing objects ejected by the dark-colored sea bream do not emit much heat, nor is it its own physiological function. It is similar to the fire-breathing performance of humans, but this is not a performance but a defense mechanism for ostracods. Food glows in the body, attracting larger predators to spit it out.
Organisms that use bioluminescence for mates rely on the brightness, color, shape, light and shade changes of light, etc., and no flames have evolved. Organisms that use radioactive chemicals to mate have no need to set them on fire.
Creatures can have unwanted overkill traits. You can imagine an animal that uses an electric eel-like generator to ignite hay, resin, or dander collected by itself to spew flames and set plants on fire to kill prey. There is nothing unreasonably strange about it.
Aboriginal Australians say some birds of prey were " fire eagles ", hunting with fire and teaching human ancestors how to use it. This is myth and legend, but black kites, howling chestnut kites, brown falcons use their claws or beaks to pick up burning branches in the savannah of northern Australia and even cooperate in carrying larger burning branches, repeatedly throwing them on vegetation that can be ignited, eating quilts The behavior of fire frightened animals and burning dead animal carcasses has been observed.
Ornithologists conducted field investigations in Australia from 2011 to 2017, witnessed the "arson" behavior of Australian raptors, and recorded more than 20 reports of "arson" sightings of raptors. You can refer to the literature:
Mark Bonta, Robert Gosford, Dick Eussen, Nathan Ferguson, Erana Loveless, Maxwell Witwer "Intentional Fire-Spreading by "Firehawk" Raptors in Northern Australia," Journal of Ethnobiology, 37(4), 700-718, (1 December 2017)
It's much easier than spitting fire.
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