Designed, Born & End with Love: Story of the Ancient Mayfly

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Designed, Born & End with Love: Story of the Ancient Mayfly


A movie I watched exposed me to one kind of life on planet Earth. Our busy life as humans sure has kept us away from some beautiful things cohabiting with us.
So I met an amazing creature, MAYFLY. An aquatic insect belonging to the order Ephemeroptera - Ephemora meaning short-lived and Petra meaning winged. Born in every morning, dies at sunset.

 

No matter how brief their life may appear, they spend most of their life span under water. Their presence indicates a clean, unpolluted and highly oxygenated aquatic environment.

Like a lot of other insects, mayflies cycle through different metamorphic stages during their lives. Laid in water as an egg, hatch to larva in two weeks provided that it doesn't go into diapause.

Grow and moult over and over into a unique among insect order having a fully winged terrestrial preadult stage, the subimago (the stage that leaves the water), which moults into a sexually mature adult, the imago (the stage that reproduce).



Adult mayflies have no mouth. So even if they're hungry, they keep flying - because they have just a day or so to live. During the day they have only one mission — get a partner to complete their mating. After that they die peacefully.

Because time is of the essence during the adult life stage, some mayflies don't even need to mate to reproduce — females can produce viable female offspring through a process called parthenogenesis.


So, if you time it right in the spring or fall, you can go down to the riverside at dawn or dusk and see quite a spectacle: thousands of seemingly adult mayflies crashing to the ground and writhing out of their winged skins to unveil yet another winged body that will only live a couple of days, on average.



Respect the Mayfly — they are ancient, harmless, possibly helpful because their bodies even produce a molecule called low molecular weight chitosan, which has a lot of potential as an antitumor medicine and a very vital link in the food web of freshwater ecosystem.


I would say Mayfly body is totally designed on love, born for love and end up with love. Let's always remember the brevity of life and so love life to the fullest. — Life so hectic and brief should not be futile.

                                                                                                                                             TONI. 300L

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