May 14, 2024 05:25 PM
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2024 05:25 PM by C C.)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n...180984268/
INTRO: Milk seems to set mammals apart. The very name of our beastly family, after all, comes from the word mammae, a term for the chest glands that produce milk. The feature has bound mammals together through hundreds of millions of years, including egg-layers like the duck-billed platypus that secrete milk from pores in their skin.
As zoologists have continued to explore life on Earth, however, they keep finding unexpected milk-producers among creatures as distantly related as jumping spiders and penguins. Milk, of one form or another, is not actually synonymous with mammals.
Earlier this year, in the journal Science, biologist Carlos Jared of the Butantan Institute, in São Paulo, Brazil, and colleagues announced the discovery of one such unprecedented milk provider. Females of the worm-like amphibian Siphonops annulatus exuded fatty fluid—milk—for their new offspring over the course of two months.
The milk didn’t come through a nipple, the researchers found, but from within the amphibian’s cloaca in a case of convergent evolution. The babies even made clicking sounds as they approached their mother for milk, not unlike hungry puppies eager for their next meal... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: Milk seems to set mammals apart. The very name of our beastly family, after all, comes from the word mammae, a term for the chest glands that produce milk. The feature has bound mammals together through hundreds of millions of years, including egg-layers like the duck-billed platypus that secrete milk from pores in their skin.
As zoologists have continued to explore life on Earth, however, they keep finding unexpected milk-producers among creatures as distantly related as jumping spiders and penguins. Milk, of one form or another, is not actually synonymous with mammals.
Earlier this year, in the journal Science, biologist Carlos Jared of the Butantan Institute, in São Paulo, Brazil, and colleagues announced the discovery of one such unprecedented milk provider. Females of the worm-like amphibian Siphonops annulatus exuded fatty fluid—milk—for their new offspring over the course of two months.
The milk didn’t come through a nipple, the researchers found, but from within the amphibian’s cloaca in a case of convergent evolution. The babies even made clicking sounds as they approached their mother for milk, not unlike hungry puppies eager for their next meal... (MORE - missing details)
