Humans sit firmly at the top of the food chain pyramid. Are there any natural enemies on the earth? Who are they?

Man has been king over the earth for tens of thousands of years. With the development of modern science and technology, human energy is getting bigger and bigger, and the earth can hardly put it down. So do humans have natural enemies? Today we will discuss this problem.

Any animal has natural enemies, and human beings are also animals, of course, no exception.

In the biological world, it seems that human beings are already at the top of the food chain. Humans have come from ancient times, from apes to people, becoming more and more powerful, and finally becoming invincible masters of the earth. The reason why people are at the top of the food chain is not how strong and powerful individual human beings are. When you talk about this, people can't beat elephants, lions, tigers, or even German shepherd.

What is unique to mankind is wisdom. With intelligence, language and logical thinking, human beings can unite enemies and make advanced tools, thus becoming animals standing at the top of the food chain pyramid, ignoring everything. But is there really nothing that human beings can restrain? No, it's early.

Children in some places like to play a poker game called fishing. The game is simple. Divide the card into two or more parts. Everyone plays one card at a time, and the big card will eat the small card. In the end, whoever eats all the cards loses. They rank the playing cards from 3 to13 (11~13 is j, q, k), and above k is 2 and king of size, which means that anyone can eat the smallest 3 cards, but 3 has the privilege to eat the king of size. This trump card is like a person. Although it is the biggest, it will be eaten by a junior. However, this mistress is not a mistress, and everyone can clearly distinguish it.

Although this is a child's game, it illustrates a great truth, that is, nothing in this world is invincible. This is the truth that everything in the world is mutually reinforcing, and it contains the dialectics of harmony between yin and yang and extremes meet.

Everything has weaknesses. It's called Gaimen in martial arts. No matter how high the martial arts in martial arts novels are, no matter what gold bell and iron cloth shirts are, everyone is not afraid to bump into them, but everyone will have a cover door, which is the weakness. He will die only if he hits his hood (soft rib).

So where is the face door? It is also a very small thing, too small to be seen by the naked eye, nor by a high-power optical microscope, but only by an electron microscope.

This time, COVID-19 ravaged the world. Up to now, more than 40 million people have been infected and 1 ten thousand people have died. Although the number of casualties is less than that of World War I and World War II, it seems that there are no such heavy casualties in any modern war of mankind, which shows how powerful the virus is.

Why is the virus so powerful? One is too small, the other is too big, the third is changeable, the fourth is difficult to kill, and the fifth is that the origin is still a mystery.

The virus is small and unpredictable.

Because the virus is very small, it can't be seen by ordinary microscopes. It was not recognized by humans until the end of 19, but it was still invisible. 1892, when Russian plant physiologists were studying tobacco mosaic, they filtered the diseased tobacco juice enough to filter out bacteria, and then rubbed it on healthy leaves, which would cause disease. So he thought that there was a microorganism smaller than bacteria, and it was this tiny thing that infected tobacco leaves.

Although this little thing was invisible at that time, people still called this invisible pathogen by imagination. Virus? , also called what? Viral virus? . At this time, people have discovered bacteria through the microscope for more than 100 years. Viruses are small, can parasitize in bacteria, and rely on the cell body nutrition of bacteria for self-reproduction, so viruses are also called phages.

Because the virus is very small, it was not until the invention of the electron microscope came out in the 1930s that people saw the vague appearance of the virus through the electron microscope. The original virus is only a few tens to 100nm (nanometer), and the largest virus is only 300nm. 1m (m) = 1000mm (mm)， 1mm = 1000mm？ M (micron), 1? M= 1000nm, so that everyone can intuitively understand the size of the virus?

There are too many viruses to count.

There are viruses everywhere in the world. There are millions of known viruses, and countless viruses have not been discovered, and new viruses are being produced. Some people estimate that there may be more than 100 million kinds of viruses.

Among them, there are more than 6.5438+0.7 million kinds of parasitic viruses such as vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, mosses, mushrooms and brown algae, 320,000 kinds of mammalian host viruses, and thousands of known human host viruses. The world, whether it's beautiful flowers, proud lions, towering trees and reptiles in the soil, will inevitably become victims of the virus.

The most troublesome thing is the changeable face of the virus.

From SARS virus and COVID-19, we can see that when people haven't figured out their toxicity at a certain stage, they will mutate again, which makes it impossible to prevent. Why is the flu vaccine invented a long time ago and widely used among the people, but the flu is still prevalent every year? This is because there are many kinds of influenza viruses, such as influenza A, influenza B, influenza C, HIN 1, H5N 1, H7N9, etc., as well as human influenza, avian influenza, swine influenza, equine influenza, bovine influenza and so on. Generally speaking, people will not cross-infect other animals, except swine flu.

The spread of viruses between hosts often changes. For example, in COVID-19, what is an intermediate host has not been clarified. It is generally believed that the original host of this virus is bats, but bats will not directly infect people, but will only mutate into sensitive virus strains through intermediate hosts, which will eventually become a terrible disaster for human beings. But the intermediate host will also change. It may be pangolin this year, but I don't know whether it will be snake, mouse or tortoise next year.

When the virus strikes, human beings are unable to cope.

Because the virus itself has no viability, it is difficult to prescribe a specific drug. It lives in host cells and reproduces by absorbing cell nutrients. If you want to cut off the nutrition of the virus and kill it, it will damage healthy cells. Such drugs are difficult to study. So basically, the treatment of virus infection is to improve the patient's own immunity, and rely on the patient's immune system to fight the virus at the micro level, killing one thousand enemies and losing 800. Therefore, it is difficult to determine who will die in the battle. Many people's immune system collapsed in the struggle against the virus, and eventually the virus killed important organs of the human body, leading to patients' failure and death.

Therefore, the most important means to deal with virus infection is epidemic prevention. In addition to anti-infection measures such as disinfection and isolation, the key and decisive role is to invent antiviral vaccines. Since the advent of vaccines, some viruses that seriously endanger human survival have been effectively extinguished? Plague? Spread, such as measles and smallpox.

The mechanism of antiviral vaccine is actually to stimulate the body's resistance. The main way is to inactivate the virus or weaken its toxicity, and then inoculate the patients with mild infection in human body to give a warning or reminder to the human immune system. After being warned, the human body will start the immune mechanism to resist these viruses. By fighting the virus, it knows the weakness of the virus, thus producing more fighters against these viruses, that is, antibodies.

In this way, after a simulation exercise, the human body built the Great Wall of Defense. When the real virus invades, we will definitely keep them out of the country, or gather them together and destroy them. But because the virus is very? Smart? What will happen after touching human weapons to deal with them? Research and development? New armor or weapons are produced, which is the mutation of the virus, thus invalidating the human epidemic prevention system. Therefore, viral infection is difficult to prevent and treat.

Where the virus came from is still a mystery.

Organisms have three domains and four boundaries, namely bacterial domain, archaea domain and eukaryote domain. Protozoa, fungi, plants and animals. The virus jumps out of three realms and four realms and belongs to a world where ghosts and gods don't care. We all know that magic beyond the three realms is the most terrible and difficult to deal with.

A virus is such a thing that comes back from the dead, so it is both biological and abiotic. When it is in the host cell, it becomes a living parasite. When it leaves the host cell, it becomes an incomplete thing and cannot survive on its own.

What is a host? It is to provide accommodation for these viruses, which is not only free, but also consumes its own biological cells. In the face of these subtle invisible things, the host is a very unlucky soft egg.

People have been trying to fight viruses since they knew that they existed in this world. But so far, it is not clear where these things, which are also life and death, come from and where they come from. They seem to be everywhere, but they only have a piece of DNA or RNA, just like a broken limb of a person, sleeping anywhere, unable to eat or move, without any signs of life. Once they find a breakthrough in biology, they will show their teeth.

Some people think that they are actually fragments of life, genes abandoned by life, excreta of life and disabled living beings. However, how they came into being, why they died, and why they prayed for the resurrection of their hosts have not been fully understood yet, and may never be understood.

These viruses are the third playing card. Are they specially used against the king of size? Is it a natural enemy set by nature to suppress human predation? Will human beings be destroyed by viruses in the end? No one can say for sure.

However, in addition to viruses, there are many disasters that can be killed, such as huge celestial events, geological and climate disasters on the earth itself, and dramatic changes in the sun. These are not the topics to be discussed today, and we will break them down next time.

That's it. Welcome to participate in the discussion. Thanks for reading.

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