#yes the angler thing does have implications for transplant science it’s really nifty

[laurelnose]

stealing these tags off @roughentumble’s post to talk about something totally unrelated. this reminded me of my friend who works on anglerfishes and a couple of papers he told me about once regarding the immunological factors in anglerfishes that let male anglers face-fuse to females without her immune system, like, melting him. some anglers literally have NO immune system whatsoever which is WILD but also sort of makes sense in an environment where you mostly just. don’t encounter other living creatures. communicable disease who? there’s nobody down here to communicablize! but there’s a spectrum of immune system adaptation here, not all of them ditched the whole thing. i need to go find the papers again bc I don’t remember the details.

point being. i have immunological questions here. what ARE the immunological factors for a guy with super healing even like. probably you don’t really need a super immune response. if you have a normal guy’s immune response and can also do super healing of viral and bacterial damage that’s already better than the normal guy. plus if you do have a super immune response you’re vulnerable to Super Autoimmune Diseases too, and that sounds wretched. so you prob just want a normal immune system? maybe? depending on what kinds of super viruses the villains are putting out these days? though super immune systems also have concerning implications for an arms race, like how anything that makes the jump from bats to humans specifically is bad fucking news because their basal body temp is pretty close to the temp we raise our own bodies to in order to kill stuff.

anyways. toxic enmeshment step 2: you fused with a second guy with super healing and have created the world’s most fucked-up autoimmune situation in the world. fighting your own body AND his body even if you detach yourselves again. or not! maybe you can do the anglerfish thing, whatever the anglerfish thing is, I’m on gscholar right now looking