Scientists woke up a 46,000-year-old roundworm from Siberian permafrost (wapo.st)

submitted 1 year ago by Peaces@infosec.pub to c/science@beehaw.org

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[-] frog@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Yes, I'm aware of that. I know that worms are very, very simple creatures that don't really have much of any cognitive ability at all. I think the key word in my post is "imagine".

[-] Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 points 1 year ago

At the same time I was more enthused with the tought if the world would have changed as much from the worms' perspective. I don't think the siberian flora and fauna have changed very drastically. Probably the mammoths were still around back then, and that would be the most important change. The climate might be different.

[-] frog@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

The climate was definitely very different back then. So that would have affected the flora, and there was also a whole bunch of megafauna alive back then that have since gone extinct, likely taking a lot of their gut microbiome with them, since we know that the bacteria and parasites living inside larger animals can be species-specific. I think to the roundworms' perception, there'd actually be a lot of changes in the soil that they would pick up on, that we wouldn't. Like, you know, maybe they were used to eating mammoth poop and now they're in a lab after being woken up, they're eating something that just tastes weird to them because it's not what they were used to. Even pretty simple animals can recognise and respond to changes in their environment, even if they don't question it cognitively.