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There's a fish so 'romantic' it absorbs into its mate and people can't stop talking about it

"So I'm out here single with a pool of men with 'trust issues' while Mother Nature is fusing fish couples together."

Nat Geo Wild|YouTube

The mating habits of anglerfish are capturing the internet

Have you ever heard of the anglerfish? It's one of those profoundly unusual looking deep water fish that live towards the bottom of the ocean. You know the kind of fish that's almost translucent with a squished head that nightmares are made of? Well, it turns out the unique look is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the anglerfish.

There's been a viral post going around social media explaining all about this fish's mating habits and It's giving people the willies. Well, while it's giving some people the creeps, there are a select few that wouldn't mind if humans had similar mating rituals. Though, with this fish's habits, mating only happens once and then the male ceases to exist.

This isn't some sort of black widow or preying mantis situation, no one's heads are being eaten. But according to the infographic, and science, the anglerfish male attaches to the female and fuses with her body unable to survive without her.

Yep. That's a thing. The male fish is a lot smaller than the female fish so she can have multiple males fuse onto her at the same time. After the male fuses to the female, the female essentially begins to absorb them, sharing their skin and circulatory system.

This level of intimacy seems to be a bit on the excessive side and likely not what was meant by becoming "one with your partner," which is why people finding out this information for the first time are having some uncomfortable feelings. But aside from all of the "ewws" were hilarious jokes from commenters trying to work out the relationship mechanics."That's way more than I want to do," one person jokes.

"This is the kind of love that humans describe when they say when you get married, your bodies become one. But, we didn't mean it literally," someone says.

"So glad humans don't do this. It would really complicate divorce proceedings," another added.

'“Hey I know we just met and all, but I’m really feeling a connection here. How bout I merge into your body, and share your bloodstream. Whaddya say?”,' someone writes.

The nonscientific fish experts may just now be finding out this information, but this isn't new and the reason behind them even being able to fuse together is interesting. There are multiple species of anglerfish and while most mate without fusing, some species are quite literally stuck together once they've picked a mate.

This is because there's something missing in their immune system that tells the female there's something foreign in her body to fight it off. Since her immune system doesn't recognize the invader as an invader, the male anglerfish becomes parasitic in a more literal way than the ex that won't get off of your couch.

It doesn't sound like either fish has much of a say so in what happens to their bodies when they mate. And since there's no fish interpreters, there's really no way to tell if the male anglerfish understand that once they mate they can never let go. What a wild ride through science that sadly for the male anglerfish, they can never get off. No pun intended.

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Feel better after being outside? There’s a scientific reason for that.

Throwing shade at mental health. But, you know, the nice kind of shade.

True

As long as humans have been reading and writing, thinkers and researchers have been studying trees and their immense impact on our world.

We know they're powerful carbon sinks, sucking up carbon emissions and helping purify our air and limiting runaway climate change. We know their extensive root systems act like giant sponges, helping to sop up rainwater during storms and prevent erosion. At all stages of their life cycle, they provide habitats for other living things — from moss to lichen to insects to birds to delightful Disney-esque woodland creatures.

Nature is adorable! GIF from "Bambi."

With all of the things trees do for the world, it's easy to wonder: What other ways do trees influence our lives? When people say they feel better after a long walk in the woods, is there a psychological, or even physiological, reason for that? According to scientists: yes. There really is.

The physical health benefits of trees are hard to deny.

A 2014 study in Environmental Pollution tried to quantify the health benefits of trees in America. Looking at data from 2010, they determined that each mature tree removes 17 metric tons of air pollution, and collectively, trees prevented 670,000 cases of respiratory problems like asthma and 850 human deaths. A 2015 study of residents in a Toronto neighborhood found that people who reported better health lived on streets with more than 10 trees. Researchers were able to equate those improved health perceptions with an income increase of $10,000 or a relative age of seven years younger.

Image via iStock.

Being around trees isn't necessarily the only way to reap their benefits — sometimes just having the ability to look at them can help.

A famous study of surgical patients recovering in a Pennsylvania hospital in the 1970s found that persons whose rooms overlooked trees recovered faster than those who didn't have that view. Japanese healers advocate for the health benefits of shinrin-yoku, ("forest bathing"), where people take long walks in the woods while inhaling complementary aromatherapy scents. A peer-reviewed study of shinrin-yoku found that it helped people lower levels of stress hormones and decrease their blood pressure, with benefits lasting up to one month.

Image via iStock.

Whatever it is that's going on in our brains at the time, it really seems that just being in the presence of trees can leave us happier and more content.

Maybe they remind us that life grows and goes on and flourishes in the toughest places. Maybe there’s something about leaves, about vibrant colors, about the smell of strong wood, or the way sunshine looks dappled through summer leaves. Psychologists believe there's truth to that idea. They call spending time in nature attention restoration theory, or ART. The theory behind it is that natural environments demand so much less of our attention than cities do and that being in nature allows our brains time to rest.

Image via iStock.

Whatever it is about trees that improves our mental health, it’s powerful and potentially transformative. Even city planners are taking notice.

In the past decade, major cities, including Barcelona, New York, and Vancouver, have made increasing green spaces and their urban canopy a big priority. For Vancouver, this includes planting lots of new trees, legislating protections for older trees, protecting parklands, and encouraging residents to spend time outside.

Chances are, though, that you're not reading this while you're outside. Maybe you can't even get outside right now. In that case, maybe a few minutes spent looking at photographs of particularly lovely trees can give us some of the same calm, fuzzy feelings? Let's try!

Worried about your taxes? This beautiful tree has been around for 250 years — longer than every American dollar in circulation.

This gnarly pinyon pine is estimated to be between 80 and250 years old. Image via Grand Canyon National Park/Flickr.

Feeling alone? Let this beautiful moss-covered oak remind you that living things can thrive together — and then call a friend to tell them you care.

Image via iStock.

Ex got you stressed? This tree has withstood winter storms for decades. Its boughs have adapted to weather them, just as you can and you will.

Image via Anatakti/Flickr.

Hal Borland famously said, "If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees."

He's right, of course. Though we'd also add in "peace of mind" too.

Female bonobos shut down violent males. Here's what humans can learn from them.

Who run the bonobos world? GIRLS!

Hey ladies, you know that uncomfortable moment when you're at a bar with your girlfriends and some sketchy dude comes over to hit on one of you?

Maybe this dude elbows his way into your conversation or maybe he leans too close and tries to buy a round of drinks. Then maybe he not-so-subtly drapes a sweaty hand on one of your shoulders? Yeah, it sucks.

Image via iStock

If that sounds familiar to you, then you'll probably recognize what happens next because it's kind of awesome: Your friends close ranks and block the dude's unwanted approach.

Even more awesome? This behavior isn't limited to humans.

Scientists at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University have observed female bonobos employing similar behaviors when a female in their group feels threatened by a male.

In fact, according to a four-year study on bonobos (cousins to chimpanzees) conducted in the Congo, female bonobos purposely form all-female groups to keep aggressive males at bay.

Females of all ages from different families would come together in these groups, with the older bonobos looking out for the younger ones by keeping them in the center of a protective circle. Researchers even found that female bonobos from different families were incredibly tolerant of one another, and that female-on-female bonobo aggression was surprisingly rare.

Bonobos females holding each other. Photo via Georges Gobet/Getty Images.

Nahoko Tokuyama, the leader of the study, believes this ability to get along is the key to female dominance in the bonobo population.

In species that display what humans might call "stereotypically gendered behavior," males are more often observed using aggressive tactics to coerce copulation and/or acquire higher social status. This could be anything from a male trying to mate with a female to a male bonobo feeding on a tree that a female bonobo has claimed as hers.

Sound familiar? Yeah.

But in the Kyoto University study, researchers noticed female bonobo grouping together to prevent this kind of male aggression. They called these groups "female coalitions," but you or I might describe them as "deep female friendships."

If there's one thing males in pretty much every species know, it's not to mess with a group of angry women. Photo by Mark Dumont/Flickr.

If one female in a coalition attacked a male for any reason, the rest would follow suit and come to her aid.

According to Tokuyama, 69% of these female coalitions were observed forming after or during an incident of aggressive male behavior.

What's more, female coalitions rarely (if ever) lose to a male aggressor, and because the male bonobos know they can't win, they're less prone to acting out with aggression or violence in the first place.

"Males frequently direct display and charge toward females, but they seldom attack females physically, even though males are bigger," Tokuyama told Upworthy.

A coalition of female bonobos attacking an offending male. GIF via animal coalition/YouTube.

Of course, meeting aggression with aggression might not sound like the best approach to conflict resolution. And this isn't to say that bonobos of all genders are inherently violent either. But these female coalitions have been so effective that they've virtually eliminated violent outbreaks in the bonobo population.

GIF from "Game of Thrones."

Another reason researchers think bonobo groups are less aggressive than their chimp cousins? Sex. Lots of it.

Researchers have observed bonobos engaging in all kinds of sexual acts — not just heterosexual intercourse. They're down with everything from same-sex sex to masturbation to oral sex to group sex and also, uhhh, rubbing each others' genitals as a form of casual greeting when a new group comes into the area.

We humans might be inclined to call that "kinky." But to them, it's just a very, very friendly way of saying, "Hello, how are you today?"

Self-explanatory. Photo by Jaume F. Lalana/Flickr.

Of course, we can't know for certain whether bonobos are actually engaging in this behavior for pleasure.

But whatever the reason, it has helped to decrease the number of tense confrontations between individuals and groups. When everybody's gettin' it on on the reg — for pleasure, not for force — then the whole group is generally calmer and less violent.

Contrast this to the observed behavior of their chimpanzee cousins. They have plenty of sex, but theirs appears to be more about power and dominance than personal or shared pleasure. They're known to engage in rape, murder, and infanticide, and they are more likely to have violent interactions with newcomers.

(Again: sound familiar?)

Anthropological data analyzed by neuropsychologist James Prescott suggests societies that are more sexually open are also less likely to be violent. The key to understanding this correlation, however, is that it's the society as a whole that is more sexually open and not just a small percentage of individuals.

Photo by Ted/Flickr.

So, to bring it back to that guy approaching a group of women at the bar: is there anything we as humans can learn from bonobos?

It's pretty clear the combination of female coalitions of bonobos defending their own, and bonobos of all genders engaging in casual sex seems to have resulted in a less violent ape society. (In this case, let's assume that "sex" means "pleasure and fulfillment.)

While bonobos' behavior doesn't exactly translate to modern human society, it is an important reminder that if humans work to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to feel fulfilled and to feel pleasure on a regular basis, we may find ourselves living in a less violent, less aggressive society.

It's really as simple as that.

Heroes

In the '80s, they called Gaetan Dugas the patient zero of HIV/AIDS. Except he wasn't.

U.S. doctors first noticed the disease that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s.

The story starts with a group of doctors, who noticed an outbreak of a rare skin cancer called Kaposi sarcoma in young gay men in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. We now know that Kaposi sarcoma is linked to HIV/AIDS, but at the time, those doctors didn't know what was causing the rare form cancer.

CDC researchers, suspecting that whatever was causing this disease was sexually transmitted, started asking patients to name their partners. And, through this work, the researchers started to build out a map of cases.

That's where a man named Gaetan Dugas comes in.

Photo from Anonymous/Assoicated Press.

Dugas was a Canadian flight attendant, and he was named by several of the patients as one of their sexual partners. Soon enough, the scientists started talking to him. It turned out he was sick too.

Dugas' case started the phrase "patient zero," which you may have heard of. But the term — and its tie to Dugas — was more or less an accident.

Dugas did end up near the center of their map, which some people took to mean that he was the original source of this new and rare infection in the United States. But the scientists didn't mean to imply that.

A re-creation of the 1984 "map" of infections. Dugas' spot is highlighted in red. Image from Niamh O'C/Wikimedia Commons.

Even the term, "patient zero" was an accident. Dugas was originally anonymized as Patient O, for "out(side)-of-California." It was only later, in a misunderstanding, that Dugas became "patient zero."

Dugas was originally anonymous, but once the media learned who he was, they turned him into the great HIV/AIDs villain.

Dugas' name first appeared in the book "And the Band Played On," by Randy Shilts. And the media, once they got wind of who he was, painted Dugas as some sort of purposefully malicious villain — the man who "brought" HIV/AIDS to the U.S.

"Gaetan Dugas is one of the most demonised patients in history, and one of a long line of individuals and groups vilified in the belief that they somehow fueled epidemics with malicious intent," said Cambridge's Richard McKay in a statement.

But not everyone believed this was true, so scientists investigated. And they may have just cleared his name.

There have been previous suggestions that Dugas did not deserve the dubious moniker of "patient zero," but now a team, including McKay and led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, may have definitive evidence that Dugas was not the original carrier of HIV.

To do this, the scientists got a hold of old blood samples containing the virus from Dugas and eight other patients. They then used sophisticated genetic techniques to sequence each HIV infection's genome, effectively building a kind of family tree of the virus.

If Dugas was really the first infectee (or what scientists more properly call the "index case"), his sample should have been at the root of the tree. But that wasn't the case. Instead, their research suggests that the disease actually entered the United States from the Caribbean sometime in the 1970s. It turned out he was simply another patient with a really tough disease.

This study will help us better understand how HIV/AIDS entered the United States. But it also shows why the idea of a patient zero can be so problematic.

We often want someone to blame when big things go wrong — a scapegoat makes things a lot easier. The idea of a patient zero provides an all-too-easy target.

"Blaming 'others' — whether the foreign, the poor, or the wicked — has often served to establish a notional safe distance between the majority and groups or individuals identified as threats," said McKay. And Dugas, an unashamed gay foreigner in the 1980s, was, to many in America, one of the "others."

Though we have a much better grasp on HIV/AIDS today than we did in the 1980s, we continue to see this vilification with other diseases.

Take the stigma the family of Emile Ouamouno, the 2-year-old patient zero of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, has had to live through.

An aid workers sets up beds in Liberia in 2014. Photo by Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Scientifically, this vilification can be problematic as well. Identifying the origin of a disease is an important step in understanding how it spreads, but solely focusing on that can obscure other, larger contributing factors that contribute to how a disease spreads, such as unequal access to health care, said McKay in The Guardian.

In the end, the idea of a patient zero can also eclipse the human cost.

Rather, we can get so wrapped up in our obsession with blaming a patient zero, that we can lose sight of the very human cost of the disease itself, which often plays out right in front of us.

"It is important to remember that, in the 1970s, as now, the epidemic was driven by individuals going about their lives unaware they were contracting, and sometimes transmitting, a deadly infection," said McKay.

The early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were a terrible, dark time for everyone who lived through them, and reducing that story to blaming just one man is a grave mistake. McKay said they hope this research will give people pause before using the phrase again.

Dugas died in 1984 of AIDS-related complications.

Family

What habitual liars should know about their brains.

They say each lie is easier than the last.

Let's try it out.

I had a bagel for breakfast this morning. I am completely happy with my diet. My loan and rent payments are — deep breath — entirely reasonable. I am totally fine with ... how this political season ... has ... gajsdfasdjfklsadf.

Photo from iStock.

Damn it. I can't do it.

But there is a well-known idea that little white lies can eventually snowball into giant ones. (For reference, consider any romantic comedy movie, ever.)

So scientists from University College London decided to see if lies really spin out of control like we think they do.

To test this, they made people play a lying game, and scientists watched their brains.

The game was pretty simple: The player's task was to look at a jar of pennies and try to tell a friend how many pennies there were. They'd each get a prize based on their guesses. Sometimes the prizes would be better if they cooperated, but sometimes the player would get better prizes if they lied to their friend.

While this was all happening, the scientists used a type of brain scan called an fMRI to watch the activity in the person's brain.

If the player lied, a region of their brain called the amygdala would light up on the scans.

The amygdala is kind of like an emotional control booth in our brains. It lights up whenever something makes us feel an intense emotion, such as learning your child bought an alligator.

Photo by iStock.

The scientists saw that same emotional center light up when a person told a lie.

But the amygdala didn't always stay lit up and that's the interesting part of this story.

Each time a person told a self-serving lie, their amygdala reacted a little less. And larger drops in activity predicted an increase in the size of the person's lies.

So if the amygdala controls emotion, and we see less activity after repeated lying, that means...

Repeated lies might blunt the brain's emotional response.

At least, that's what the scientists are speculating. (They're a little cautious about making a big statement just yet.) They think that the first time we lie, our amygdala produces a strong emotional response, such as shame or guilt. The more you lie, however, the less the amygdala protests. Basically, the more you lie, the easier it is for you to keep lying.

However, the scientists didn't see the same pattern when the lie actually benefited the player's friend — just when it screwed them over.

So those little white lies we tell to protect our friends? Those stay with us. But the lies we tell to serve ourselves? Those can get so easy, we don't even feel them.

Scientists think this could also teach us new things about decision-making in general too, but they need to do a bit more research on that line of thinking.

"We only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as risk taking or violent behavior," study author Neil Garrett said in a statement.

Let's try this lying thing again...

I did not eat pizza last night. I am definitely not currently bingeing my way through Luke Cage. The traffic in my city is — eye twitch — fine. Just fine. And I am definitely not freaking out about climate change. Nope. Not at all.

I did it! Take that, amygdala.

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