Shaking 200 million years, the life cycle of only one day, life and death is said to be a creature like the mayfly

In Su Shi's "Red Cliff Fugue", there is this sentence: "Sending mayflies in the sky and the earth, small as a millet in the ocean." Su Shi compares himself to a mayfly between heaven and earth, thinking that he is as small as corn between heaven and earth, not worth mentioning.

Not only Su Shi but many people compare themselves to the world's mayflies, thinking that everything in the world is eternal and that their lives are as short as mayflies to everything in the world.

But we should not be presumptuous, human beings rely on their efforts, from the Earth to the moon, from riding a horse to driving and a series of changes, are created by our own hands. Although life is fragile and small, it can still become great.

The life of a mayfly

Many people use the phrase "A day of life is a day, a lifetime of mayflies" to explain the transience of a mayfly's life. However, such a short life has been on this earth for more than 200 million years and is the "oldest winged insect" in existence.

Mayflies are slender and soft, most of them are between 3mm and 27mm in length, with a pair of long tail whiskers at the end of the abdomen, and when they are juveniles they are inside the water, and when they are adults they do not feed. Some adults can only live for a few hours, but some hardy adults can live up to about 7 days.

Mayflies live more than one day, because when they are juveniles, they will live in freshwater lakes for 1 year or more, during this stage they will go through 20 to 24 molts, some will even molt more than 40 times, before they will float from the water to the surface, crawl to the plant stems until after sunset, and then become "subadults "Mayflies at this time do not become adults, but they are similar in appearance. After emerging from the water, they will remain in the same position as they emerged from the water and undergo a day or so of molting to become true adults. This phenomenon of becoming an adult and then undergoing a molt is only found in insects of the mayfly order, and this "type of metamorphosis" is called "metamorphosis".

Therefore, mayflies will go through four stages in their life: egg, juvenile, subadult, and adult. When they become adults, they have only one day left to live.

I believe that many people who read this will, like the literati mentioned before, after seeing the life of a mayfly, wonder what is the purpose of such a short life.

In fact, in this nature, not only the life of mayflies is short, but there is also a kind of creature called "Puya flower", which is a kind of huge herb plant distributed in the Andes of South America at an altitude of 3000 meters to 4800 meters. According to the botanists, they found that this Puya flower will only bloom once every 100 years, and the flowering period is only a short two months, but once the Puya flower blooms, its beauty showy, and its flower spike up to 10 meters, dotted with more than 10,000 flowers, very showy, who can not compare.

When you think of its beauty in just two months, but to go through a hundred years of the long wait, you will still think about the "meaning of life?"

The Romance of Mayflies

As mentioned before, adult mayflies do not eat, but in fact, they choose to give up eating. When they molt, their digestive tract will be filled with air, forming a closed balloon that allows them to easily float from the water to the surface.

I want to give up feeding because mayflies, like the Puya flower, have their own "romance" in their lives. During the spring and summer months, groups of mayfly males begin to form and go on a romantic "wedding flight".

This is the time of year when mayflies mate and choose not to eat or drink to cherish their short life span. To focus on finding their mates, they keep mating and laying eggs, leaving their traces in the world, and after everything is over, their life comes to an end.

It's like mayflies are "born for love, die for love", and die contentedly after getting love.

The role of mayflies

So please don't underestimate the greatness of life. After realizing the vastness of the universe and the vastness of the world, I think every person will be confused and will doubt the meaning of life. Just like when you are learning, when you receive too much knowledge, you will feel at a loss, but when you digest them all, you will find a big gap between your previous self and your current self.

For example, in the words that Su Shi said in the previous article, after seeing the "romance of the mayfly", you can still feel his lament about the brevity of life. But the more you will think that he is inspiring you to cherish time, cherish everything in front of you, do not wait for the time to slip away, only to feel regret.

Moreover, mayflies bring us more than just inspiration, they also bring many practical effects.

Mayflies are very sensitive to their environment, especially oxygen-deprived environments and acidic environments. In 1675, a biologist from the Netherlands, Jane Wanmaydan, conducted a detailed study of mayflies and found that mayflies were abundant in the Netherlands at that time, but nowadays they are hard to be found in the whole of Europe because they are sensitive to the environment and the pollution here seriously affects the growth of mayflies.

Therefore mayflies can be used as a test standard for the quality of water bodies.

Also because mayflies are sensitive to acidic environments, acid rain in North America and Europe has destroyed the habitat of many mayfly creatures, which has started a dramatic decline in mayfly life, which has led to local fish populations starting to become smaller as well. This is because mayflies play a key role in the aquatic food chain.

Mayflies are "consumers" in the water, but they are at the front of the food chain and almost always feed on bacteria and debris, so many fish will feed on them. So when the mayflies become fewer, the fish population will naturally become less full.

After reading this article, do you still think that "the meaning of life is related to the length?" Each thing has a different definition of reincarnation, for example, cats and dogs have the life span of cats and dogs, people have the life span of people, and turtles have the life span of turtles.

They all have different lengths of existence in this world, but is their meaning defined according to their lives? Not. When you are wondering whether the life of a mayfly has meaning, is it the same way that a turtle sees a human being?

Life has gone through many billions of years of evolution before there are intelligent beings like humans, so we should cherish our lives all the more and not go wasting time on the so-called meaning.

The day people will always shine, just like the Puya flower, although it will go through a long wait, will experience loneliness, through trials and tribulations, but "effort is not deceiving" when you shine the day, I believe that no one can cover your light!