Biology
Exploring "Why" questions about Biology
483 articles
Why do sapling trees not lose their leaves in the winter while adult trees of the same species do?
Some like beeches hold onto dead leaves to collect snow at their base for added water when it melts. Saplings in general hold onto their leaves longer than the larger trees to get some last minute sug
Why it’s not good to leave chicken or beef on the counter for too long because bacteria grows, but hungarian sausage and other sausages are left out on purpose to dry out. Why doesn’t that meat spo…
It's salted. There is a term called "curing" for meat, which involves adding salt or sometimes smoking it to partially cook it. Both of these will decrease the rate at which food spoils at room temper
Why do genes want to reproduce?
They don't "care" about anything at all. But if you have a gene that just tended to reproduce, an done that didn't, the one that didn't would die off and all you would have are genes that reproduce. T
Why do women live longer than men? I’d expect the opposite, since post-menopausal traits are the only traits that can never be subject to natural selection- and those are the years that make up the…
The "grandmother hypothesis" is one that has been put forward to explain why women go through menopause and spend a significant portion of their lives post--menopausally. That is, grandmothers do a lo
Why is no one talking about the indonesian forest fire? So many Species of animals and so many humans are dying?
It's far away, at least from "most of us" here on Reddit. Indonesia is across a massive massive ocean or a massive massive continent, and both for some. There's probably not a lot of Indonesian reddit
Why are bees so important and what would happen to our world if they went extinct?
_URL_0_ Above link to Wikipedia is a list of crops that are pollinated by bees. Pollination is necessary for the flowers of the plant to become fruit rather than just dying off. And, of course, the fr
Why do viruses undergo evolution way faster than humans?
Speed of evolution is linked to how quickly an organism reproduces. Viruses reproduce literally *millions* of times faster than humans; so quickly that we can observe their evolution.
Why can we see bacteria in a petri dish but not on ordinary surfaces?
Petri dishes aren't just a clean piece of glass, they have [agar in them](_URL_0_) - a clear, gelatinous substance full of food & nutrients for the bacteria to grow on. Since the agar starts steri
Why haven’t pandas developed bacteria specifically for digesting cellulose like a true herbivore?
Evolution is purely random. It doesn't choose to have features but if features do randomly occur and nature favors those features over the current ones, then a species may evolve to enhance that featu
Why do couples that are having trouble getting pregnant want a biological child so much when there are many children in need of adoption?
It is the innate human drive to carry on the individuals own genetic heritage. If you adopt, you and your partners DNA is not passed to future generations. This also plays into an individuals want/nee