Our busy schedule keeps us moving all the time but being stressed out has a negative impact on our health.
Maybe we can all learn a thing or two from this rare salamander that knows exactly how to rest after a long, tiring day.
A long-term study of an aquatic cave system in Herzegovina and Bosnia found that one of the rare salamanders did not move at all for seven long years.
“The observed individuals were typically in the open, and even if some individuals were within metres of each other, they showed no other sign of grouping behaviour. In these caves, at least when diving is possible, currents seemingly cause no problem for P. anguinus and the lack of predation makes hiding pointless,” the study reads.
“On the other hand, the movement patterns revealed by the present study strengthen the previous observations that these animals are frequently associated with certain locations they know well.”
“The surprisingly low movement activity revealed by recaptures adds another facet to the extreme lifestyle of the species.point 382 |
Out of 37 recaptures in the extended dataset, only 10 represented a longer than 10m and only three longer than 20m movement, with always more than 100 days having elapsed between sightings.point 158 | One individual was found at the same location after 2,569 days.point 211 |
”point 3 | 1
The only thing that compels these creatures to move is the urge to reproduce and they only change position an average of less than 10 meters every 10 years!
It continued: “We cannot present any strong argument about the benefits of being sedentary or the costs/risks of moving over larger areas in the studied environment, especially considering the lack of predators and interspecific competitors.
“We can only speculate that animals feeding on a very low food supply (and as consequence, resistant to starvation), reproducing sporadically (females reproducing on average once in 12.5 years) and living for a century are very energy cautious and limit their movements to the minimum.”
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Replaced!