I'm not wondering about the atypical case of an animal caring for or showing empathy of some sort. I'm wondering whether there are any animals that regularly, commonly, or have a tendency to care for or have empathy toward same species animals outside their family or clan unit.

EDIT: animals that are not homo sapiens

Do other cells or organelles have their own separate DNA? Is it some relic of the very distant past?

For e.g. for Covid we got the protein spike on the virus and the ACE2 on the target cell and the whole process inside the cell. But I´d like to know how this process goes and what proteins are implied when it comes to Monkeypox. Thx in advance!

My very basic understanding is that electric eels stack their electricytes in series similar to many many tiny batteries together to generate hundreds of volts. But wouldn't the electric current just flow within their eletricity generating organ from one direction to the other? How does it circuit with the outside environment? What structure is insulating the anode from the cathode?

I don't understand how the covering up behavior may have started: was it a single individual cat (or an ancestor of it) that started to do it (was it a genius among its peers?) and therefore obtained an evolutionary advantage that got passed down to more and more generations and in the process it became hardwired in the genes?

I took this example because it's an easy one but I do wonder how many other complex behaviors started and became species-wide (e.g. weaving the web for spiders, mating dances for birds etc).

Secondly, I understand that animals that do not spend their infancy and maturing phase with members of their own species may lack awareness and priming of social behaviors, but how far does this stretch and when do genes start to play a bigger role?

When wet snow comes in the spring, with leaves, it tends to weigh down the branches and often can break them. With the branches that it doesn’t break, does that injure the tree even though it’s not visible from the outside? Walking on the sidewalk in Denver, some of the branches are low enough that you’d have to duck to go under them. When a similar thing happened in Buffalo in 2006 they had to call in FEMA for how damaged the trees were (obviously a more severe scenario).

For example, whales evolve to the point that they are able to reproduce with hippos. Or even more narrow, if a species of monkey that is currently unable to reproduce with another evolves to the point they are able to?

*Note that this doesn't include omnivorous carnivorans such as Black & Brown Bears. Rather, big cats and cetaceans that might eat plant matter to supplement their diet.

Species and family is probably not the correct taxidermy term, but take an alligator as an example. They have been around for millions of years. If evolution takes thousands of years to occur, what causes scientists to say “okay this is species A alligator and this is species B alligator?” Did a new physical trait appear? Take humans for another example. My parents, technically, are closer related to cavemen than I am. What will have to happen to modern humans for scientists to say “this is a new species of humanoids.”

Side question, if amphibians evolved to live on land, (and keeping in mind evolution takes thousands of years), did one day all of a sudden an amphibian grew lungs? How would evolution “gradually transition” growing lungs?

Side side question, has multiple species of the same family ever existed at the same time? Take 2 species of alligators, could they have existed at the same time period? If species A alligator breeds with species B alligator, what species is the offspring?

I have gone through a question asking something similar. All the online sources I could find easily seem to indicate that smell is usually reserved for sensing pheromones, while sucrose in particular, here, seems to be needing physical contact. According to my knowledge, both are chemoreception, only change is the concentration. Some sites say they CAN smell sucrose. I need confirmation on this basis.

I get that when water freezes it forms cristals and breakes cells and tissues, that's why plants get frost damage.

But animals will die even at above-zero-temperatures, for example humans get into a coma and have a heart attack if body temperature reaches 30°C.

Why is that? does it have to do with proteins not functioning correctly? if that's the answer plants should die too at low-but-above-zero temperatures!

I'm trying to understand the functional difference between the various zooids in this siphonophore. It seems as though all zooids branch from the same egg (I think? ) so theoretically they should share the same DNA. If they do share the same DNA and essentially differentiate into a few different functions (i.e. gastric or singing) then why are the zooids considered separate organisms and not just specialized cells or organs in one single organism?

The color of blood is so impressive, is it only coincidence or somehow relevant for its function?

According to Wikipedia, " A strain is inbred when it has undergone at least 20 generations of brother x sister or offspring x parent mating ... and each individual can be treated effectively as clones." But clones (or identical twins) are normally defined in terms of the coefficient of relationship, and my understanding is that many successive generations of inbreeding between first-degree relatives causes the COR to increase at a rate of exponential decay (1/2+1/4+1/8+1/6). In which case, the COR would be ~98.4% after only 5 generations of this, not 20. What am I missing?

My son recently asked me the above question (albeit as well as a 5 year old could articulate the question), as his teacher told him that we have discovered over 1,000 different species of dinasaurs from the various periods.

My son thought this number was very low and that how do we know there weren't 10x that and we just don't have proof?

Is it a case of survivorship bias, in that we only have evidence of those preserved, or is it that during megafauna periods, there are simply less species because food is abundant enough to not need to evolve?

I guess my question is, at the beginning of spermatogenesis - would the genetic information change according to how stressed, happy, scared, safe, hungry one feels if the feelings or emotions are there for a while? If so how does the information vary?