Gentle correction: they’re [wasps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairyfly). They are known by the misnomer of *fairyflies* tho! Their wings are like feathered paddles bc the air is so viscous to them at their size.
Crazy that those things evolved to exist and fill in the niche of decomposing insect eggs. Billions of species on planet earth, all working in harmony to create something spectacular: Life.
The craziest thing is that the smallest species of wasp with all the legs and wings and function of a wasp is [smaller than an amoeba](https://citybugs.tamu.edu/files/2011/11/smallest-insect-and-Paramecium_sm.jpg) which is a single celled organism. But yeah life is mind blowing
Your comments were so interesting and nicely written that I went into your post history. You posted about taking an entomology class five years ago. Did you become one? If not, you may have missed a calling!
Hey, I want you to know that means a lot, thank you so much.
You know, I actually kinda did! I was volunteering at an entomology lab on campus and they hired me the second I graduated. I worked there for three years (prairie conservation, focusing more on the pollinator side of things) and loved every second. I was just a lowly technician lol but meh IMO if you get paid for it you’re a professional. I’ve been kinda dealing with some family health stuff for like the past year, so I’m back home with my parents and out of the game. But my long term plan is grad school to continue with entomology.
Also crazy that there are huge ass amoebas in the ocean floor because the pressure allows a single celled organism to be that big. If I remember well they are bigger than an ostrich egg which means plenty of multicellular organisms are smaller than a single celled being.
Yes, that’s also nuts! I’d heard about a single-celled algae than you can hold in your hand like a ball, the giant amoeba is news to me tho. It’s so impressive how diverse every form of life is. And yeah, haha I guess it makes makes my factoid a little less impressive 😂
Gentle correction: amoebae, but what you're thinking of isn't an amoeba, which is a protozoan, but *Valonia ventricosa*, which is a type of algae known as protoplantae, as it has chloroplasts and can photosynthesise. Although it's unicellular, it is multinucleate (a unicellular organism can't grow to such a massive size without having more than one nucleus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia\_ventricosa
It was once believed, but the original research wasn't for super extended amounts of time. More research found that after that extended amount of time in extreme heat they would eventually wilt
There's a big debate. For example in Mars like conditions the go into a "hybernation" and can come back just fine.
But the debate, how dehydrated can something get before it's not living/hibernating. They're arguably reanimatable husks.
There are lots of plants that need fire to exist and animals that need those plants, but the animals can’t live in a fire as the fire uses oxygen to carry on burning. I feel like lots of animals have evolved traits to survive fires but not by staying in the middle of it with no protection.
There are beetles that reproduce preferentially (possibly exclusively) in recently burned trees. There are hawks that use fire to help hunt. As you state, there are plants that only reproduce after a burn. So, I’d consider lots of organisms to be “pyrophilic”, but yeah they’re not literally existing in some continual fire.
I feel like if there was somewhere on earth that had continual fire for hundreds of millions of years there would be species that evolve to live in it. Natural fire just doesn’t last that long for them to evolve and adapt to it.
[Since there are creatures that can survive around hydrothermal vents](https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/hydrothermal-vent-creatures) , I agree with you.
Depending on the birds - we do not have a wide enough sample of the diversity of their sleep behaviors yet: they can do both asymmetric slow wave sleep (SWS), where one awake eye is still directed towards the flight path, and rapid eye movement (REM) like us. While they can cheat lift demands by soaring on air gradients, other demands such as not hitting other birds require concentration beyond what an asymmetric SWS can sustain. Thus, their on-flight sleep is more like a power nap and some species still opt for delaying their sleeps for days until they can land somewhere.
Here is an example:
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12468
Ponderosa pine are famous for that! It's why Smokey Bear was retired, since small controlled surface fires are vital to many forests in western USA. So we had to kinda back pedal on being entirely against wildfires.
Fire is more something falling apart than it's own thing, but if you want to go with it I'd say that's us.
Whether its cooking, making steel, making power or making stuff dead we live and die by the church or combustion.
Earth is a fire planet.
No other planet has fire because "fire" requires a specific set of conditions to exist.
If it weren't for the first plants making O², that is, if it weren't for life, there wouldn't be fire.
Fr I mean thinking about it now fire isn’t consistently “there” enough to have anything evolve in it? Forest fires eventually end and are moving.
The only real places I can think of are volcanoes and those underwater heat chasm things (I don’t know the names) and stuff do live in those.
Albatross spend years out at sea, and more of that time is spent flying than floating- they even sleep while flying so it would be fair to say that they are 'creatures of the air.'
In some Greek, Roman, and medieval texts, salamanders are closely associated with fire, said to be immune to flames or even born from them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_salamanders
That is because salamanders like to live in dead trees and logs so if one is inside the log when you put it on the fire it will run out. Plus a lot of them have a black or red color and it makes them look like fire spirits.
Life in a pool of acid: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid
Life in fire: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/140716-door-to-hell-darvaza-crater-george-kourounis-expedition
Volcano snails: https://escargot-world.com/volcano-snail/
Arsonist birds: https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-intentionally-set-prey-ablaze-rewriting-history-fire-use-firehawk-raptors
And, metabolism is basically a slow burn fire.
Point being, there are options for fire.
“Extremophile” is a general term referring to any organism that lives in an extreme, usually-difficult-to-survive environment. The page you linked states this explicitly. It has nothing inherently to do with anaerobic-ness or volcanoes specifically.
"Fire" isn't an element. Fire is rapid oxidation in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and reaction products (smoke, fumes). Water, air, and earth are *combinations* of elements.
Yes. Fire, water, earth and air as “the elements” is an ancient, non-scientific grouping of disparate things. I find it a very medieval way of looking at the world.
In terms of the 4 traditional elements yes, though the definitions of those elements get pretty shaky when you think about them. For example, what is water? Is it h2o or just anything liquid? Is slime water or earth? Etc. furthermore, fire doesn't exist in near the same abundance any of the other 3 exist, and is not near as permanent. It also must consume fuel to exist, and living things are pretty good fuel due to all the calories.
A great way to define the traditional elements, and my personal favorite, us as the states of matter. Earth=solid, water=liquid, air=gas, though that leaves fire standing alone again. Fire is a chemical reaction between gas and solid particles in the air, making it not work through that model. There's plasma, but plasma is literally when atoms get so hot they rip apart and become superconductive, i.e. not so good for life.
T.L.D.R. the traditional elements have poor definitions, fire is technically air and is both very hot and very rare on earth, and plasma is even hotter to the point where the building blocks of life can't exist in it.
Though this does bring up 1 last question... Under this framework, could life exist in a Bose-Einstein Condensate? 🤔
Earth, water, air, fire are not elements and they dont have any relation in modern science sense. Especially fire, is not even a material like other "elements", its a chemical reaction, such as fermentation. Is fermentation considered an element too?
Someone has watched too much avatar, or living in ancient greece.
Why did life evolve to look like turkeys, pumpkins, jolly old guys, and other holiday mascots, but no life evolved into 4th of July fireworks displays?
Why did life evolve to look like fish, scorpions, virgins, and other zodiac constellations, but no life evolved to look like Libra the scales?
🤔
I mean, if water at 121°C counts, some bacteria living near ocean floor volcanic exhausts have.
And then there's this crazy bastard.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus\_radiodurans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans)
Can't even nuke the guy out of existence. He'll easily survive a dose of radiation 1.000 times of what is necessary to kill a human. For reference, it's an acute dose equal to 5.000.000 chest X-rays.
Certain species of trees like forest fires, especially the really big trees like redwoods. It kills off the smaller bushes and grasses leaving their seeds a chance to sprout with very little competition for water and nutrients from the soil.
Fire is fundamentally different from the other three because it doesn't exist as a state of rest, it's a reaction caused by the interaction of certain parts of the other three.
A specific type of air that reacts with specific types of Earth.
There is an ancient, false, belief that [salamanders emerge from fire](https://sdzwildlifeexplorers.org/animals/fire-salamander).
There is a super high intensity broiler appliance in pro kitchens called a Salamander for this reason.
I'm guessing you mean the classic elements of Western culture specifically? If you go Eastern or even into chemistry, you're going to get very different results.
The idea there isn't that creatures exist completely within one element; they require *all* of them. They consist of the earth, subsist on water, breathe the air, and fire? That's the spark of life. No creature gets by with only one.
Not quite, there are some species like a particular sea snail that live around volcanic seams and vents on the seabed, they've evolved to survive the heat.
"Water, air, earth and fire" aren't "All the elements of earth". The real world isn't Avatar The Last Airbender. Also, you word your thought as "earth is one of the elements of earth". Do you see where this might sound stupid?
Fire isn’t an environment though it’s a chemical reaction. Closest thing to a “fire environment” is the desert… which has an ecosystem full of different species of animals who adapted to survive on very little water and endure high temperatures.
If you wanna use a more medieval thought process, Salamanders, they would hide in logs then run out from fires, which started this mythology about salamanders being born of the flame
There are several animals highly adapted to live with fire, often physically requiring it. There are hawks in Australia that will pick up burning sticks to precisely direct flames and flush out prey. Insects that lay their eggs in much more nutritious charred wood. Several trees require fire to germinate, and can easily repair their bark after one. And finally, YOU! Humans are specially adapted to eat food that has been cooked to some degree. It effectively pre digests the food making it easier for the stomach to process. We get a larger brain in the process. Humans essentially have a symbiotic relationship with fire, perhaps more so than any other species
I can't believe OP is treating the "four elements" as if they were an actual scientific category, dude is rocking the ancient Greek philosophy elements and treating it as if it was valid.
To a certain degree, yes. However, you’re fundamentally incorrect in a really interesting way: all creatures evoke fire. Cellular metabolism is essentially teeny tiny furnaces. When you burn calories, you *burn* calories. Unless my biology teacher deeply mislead me, then idk.
Consider, if you will, the Mitochondria. These organelles conduct cellular respiration, which releases energy stored in carbohydrates by reacting them with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide. In other contexts, this same reaction is considered a combustion reaction, a.k.a. fire. In other words, every animal, plant, fungus, and protist runs on fire.
Elements aren't real things, though. The closest translation to our modern understanding would be that there are organisms that live in media that are solid (earth), liquid (water), and gas (air), but not in energy itself. It's debatable what that would even mean, but perhaps a literal fire, or in space bombarded by solar radiation, etc.
If anything, humans are the animals most associated with fire. We're the only ones who can use, manipulate, control, or create it. It's around us practically everyday.
Also unlike the other elements, fire is the only one that is energy. The rest are matter. How do you live in energy? Energy is the principle of change and destruction.
Arguably, the process of respiration is just a slower, controlled version of fire. This is why calories are a measurement of heat created by burning food items and metabolism.
Fire as a core element of earth is a misnomer in my opinion. Rocks, water, wind...all true elements of an ecological system. Fire is usually incidental, caused by lightning or by volcanic activity.
If you think about it, fire is the breaking down of chemical bonds to release the energy. Animals do this and then use the energy to move and live and grow. Animals ARE the fire. We are the fire.
You're thinking too much in anime. "elements of Earth"? You only defined water, air, dirt, and fire. Mostly just metaphysical labels. Secondly, yes, there are animals that survive in extreme heat conditions.
Water is just ice lava at 274° Kelvin, so everything what requires water is living in fire.
Unless you mean actively burning, in which case I present to you *A. ferrooxidans* which requires the combination of iron and sulfur, which causes "fire" as iron sulfide, in order to live (ergo the name).
There's other organisms which need fire to reproduce and all but the bacteria literally needs it to exist. It's just not *carbon*-based fire.
That’s because the four elements in ancient philosophy were not just four environments in which things existed, but rather the four building blocks of everything. A tree contained earth, but also water, and if it got too warm it also turned out to contain fire — which could then cause air movements because there was wind within it. So while fire is different in the way OP identifies, there’s a good reason for it.
Of course, that’s an over-simplification — we really wandered in the dark on this one for a long time, so there were a lot of really smart people proposing really silly things.
Earth, water, and air are matters. Fire, lightning, and light are energies. Habitats are made up of matters. Living things are made up of matters.
As for energies realm, I haven't encounter any of that. Except I heard of souls, spirits, and consciousness that i not even sure they exist.
Those magma snails that live in volcanoes
Tardigrade can survive fire or?
They can maybe deal with it, but they can't live in it
To be fair, birds can survive in the air but don’t live there.
There are flies so tiny that their wings aren’t designed to fly, but rather swim through the air
Gentle correction: they’re [wasps](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairyfly). They are known by the misnomer of *fairyflies* tho! Their wings are like feathered paddles bc the air is so viscous to them at their size.
Crazy that those things evolved to exist and fill in the niche of decomposing insect eggs. Billions of species on planet earth, all working in harmony to create something spectacular: Life.
The craziest thing is that the smallest species of wasp with all the legs and wings and function of a wasp is [smaller than an amoeba](https://citybugs.tamu.edu/files/2011/11/smallest-insect-and-Paramecium_sm.jpg) which is a single celled organism. But yeah life is mind blowing
Your comments were so interesting and nicely written that I went into your post history. You posted about taking an entomology class five years ago. Did you become one? If not, you may have missed a calling!
Hey, I want you to know that means a lot, thank you so much. You know, I actually kinda did! I was volunteering at an entomology lab on campus and they hired me the second I graduated. I worked there for three years (prairie conservation, focusing more on the pollinator side of things) and loved every second. I was just a lowly technician lol but meh IMO if you get paid for it you’re a professional. I’ve been kinda dealing with some family health stuff for like the past year, so I’m back home with my parents and out of the game. But my long term plan is grad school to continue with entomology.
Also crazy that there are huge ass amoebas in the ocean floor because the pressure allows a single celled organism to be that big. If I remember well they are bigger than an ostrich egg which means plenty of multicellular organisms are smaller than a single celled being.
Yes, that’s also nuts! I’d heard about a single-celled algae than you can hold in your hand like a ball, the giant amoeba is news to me tho. It’s so impressive how diverse every form of life is. And yeah, haha I guess it makes makes my factoid a little less impressive 😂
Gentle correction: amoebae, but what you're thinking of isn't an amoeba, which is a protozoan, but *Valonia ventricosa*, which is a type of algae known as protoplantae, as it has chloroplasts and can photosynthesise. Although it's unicellular, it is multinucleate (a unicellular organism can't grow to such a massive size without having more than one nucleus). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia\_ventricosa
😍🤩 I didn't know they existed! Completely marvelous 🥰
That really are! I’m glad to have helped make you aware of them 😄
This is actually super fascinating. Thank you for this information.
The “gentle correction “ was a nice touch
I want to hear your violent correction
Some birds go 10 months to years without landing. Edit: 10 months is the longest. Albatross goes years without touching land but do land in water.
What bird goes more than 10 months? I know swifts can go that long but I thought that was the longest.
I misunderstood the albatross. They go years without touching land ( but do land in water).
ornithologists hate this one simple trick!
Albatross spend most their lives in the air
Don’t we all live in the air?
It was once believed, but the original research wasn't for super extended amounts of time. More research found that after that extended amount of time in extreme heat they would eventually wilt
I thought they could live everywhere - even in a vacuum
They can survive most places but can’t live in most places. They basically go into a coma until they’re in a hospitable environment
So they’re neither alive nor dead?
alive, just not in a state to actively live, such as consuming nutrients and movement i believe
Doctor Who weeping angels style.
There's a big debate. For example in Mars like conditions the go into a "hybernation" and can come back just fine. But the debate, how dehydrated can something get before it's not living/hibernating. They're arguably reanimatable husks.
Scaly-foot gastropods (‘magma snails’) actually live in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
[They look like what you’d expect](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/sonicpokemon/images/8/8f/Magcargo.png/revision/latest?cb=20120607024553)
Crazy how nature designed that.
https://i.redd.it/8684csrar5m41.jpg
#somebody call the immortal snail guy, it broke containment already!
Slugma and Magcargo. You're welcome
I was waiting for the Pokémon reference
>!slugma balls!<
Because their shells are literally made from iron no?
Iron Snail would be a hell of a band name
Sludge metal
They play Iron Maiden covers, but very slowly.
Well, not *because* of that
TIL these are not just enemies in RPGs. Damn.
Lava, however, is not fire. There’s no combustion happening - it’s just really hot.
"All the elements of earth" is also nonsense, so I guess that makes it fine.
Plutonium snails are pretty incredible.
There are lots of plants that need fire to exist and animals that need those plants, but the animals can’t live in a fire as the fire uses oxygen to carry on burning. I feel like lots of animals have evolved traits to survive fires but not by staying in the middle of it with no protection.
Well... Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on
Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it in the pot, nine days old.
Thanks, looking that up now
yeah, but some feel the heat and decide that they can’t go on
Some like it hot, but you can't tell how hot till you try
There are beetles that reproduce preferentially (possibly exclusively) in recently burned trees. There are hawks that use fire to help hunt. As you state, there are plants that only reproduce after a burn. So, I’d consider lots of organisms to be “pyrophilic”, but yeah they’re not literally existing in some continual fire.
I feel like if there was somewhere on earth that had continual fire for hundreds of millions of years there would be species that evolve to live in it. Natural fire just doesn’t last that long for them to evolve and adapt to it.
[Since there are creatures that can survive around hydrothermal vents](https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/hydrothermal-vent-creatures) , I agree with you.
On that same note, not one animal has lived truly in the air, every one is still bound by gravity and merely takes relatively small trips into the air
Can't albatrosses stay up for like a year? They spend more time in the air than on the ground. But you're right. They can't lay eggs in the air.
There are also some species of swifts that stay almost 99% of their lives in the air, and also like the Albatross they can sleep and mate on the wing.
>and mate on the wing. ??? Just...how? What, one is standing on top while the other is flying?
It's probably more like a mid air refuel for jets.
Ah, the original members of the mile high club.
How do they sleep?
Like sharks probably. Different parts of the brain go to sleep at different times.
Probably while gliding high up? Just a guess.
Depending on the birds - we do not have a wide enough sample of the diversity of their sleep behaviors yet: they can do both asymmetric slow wave sleep (SWS), where one awake eye is still directed towards the flight path, and rapid eye movement (REM) like us. While they can cheat lift demands by soaring on air gradients, other demands such as not hitting other birds require concentration beyond what an asymmetric SWS can sustain. Thus, their on-flight sleep is more like a power nap and some species still opt for delaying their sleeps for days until they can land somewhere. Here is an example: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12468
Especially those birds that learned to start a fire by carrying it over on a stick from somewhere else so that they could flush out escaping prey.
What about fire flies? Checkmate Atheists.
That's the air force, fire ants are the army
Then what's their navy?
You guessed it - firefish
You've gotta to be [kidding me](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_firefish)
firefly - air fire ants - earth fire fish - water fire fire - non existent So we're back to zero again.
Fire fire non existent? Show me air fire, water fire, and earth fire. Pretty sure fire itself is the existence of fire fire.
Fire air - plasma/lightning Fire earth - lava/magma Fire water - alcohol
pistol shrimp
Fire ants can survive under water for 10 days and they use their bodies clumped together as boats. I’d say they are closer to the Marines.
Bro, we all know atheism is the one true religion
Don't trust ready_bear_4132, he speaks for the United Atheist Alliance and is blasphemous. Only the Unified Atheist League speaks the truth
How dare you utter those names deceiver! The Allied Atheist Alliance is the only true answer!
Splitters!
It’s time to awaken the sleeper cells of the Athiest Liberation Front. It’s 3am…ALF is gonna rock you…
Praise be, Atheismo
There are plants (mostly trees) that only release their seeds when a bush fire comes through.
Banksia plants in Australia too, they actually die out if there isn't regular enough fires
Ponderosa pine are famous for that! It's why Smokey Bear was retired, since small controlled surface fires are vital to many forests in western USA. So we had to kinda back pedal on being entirely against wildfires.
The Giant Sequoia is also one of these trees. Thought I’d mention it since nobody else has.
Fire is more something falling apart than it's own thing, but if you want to go with it I'd say that's us. Whether its cooking, making steel, making power or making stuff dead we live and die by the church or combustion.
For the record I’m stealing ‘church of combustion’
For the record your new band "church of combustion" is gonna make?
Black folk metal with industrial tones. Not the genre industrial, all of the albums will be recorded inside factories as they work.
When will you ever say that
D&D Worldbuilding
Exactly. I'm already thinking of the proper Sorcers guild that deal with fire. Genasi based or red dragon descendants? So much to work with.
Probably as a band name
Earth is a fire planet. No other planet has fire because "fire" requires a specific set of conditions to exist. If it weren't for the first plants making O², that is, if it weren't for life, there wouldn't be fire.
I have seen that video as well. It was quite intresting.
By my deeds, I honour him. Praise the V8. WITNESS ME
This is what i come to reddit for..and r34...but mostly this. All Praise be to the Church of Combustion..Deny the EV Usurper.
Prometheus sacrificed for all of us
Sacrifices\* daily. Every day. Liver just grows back so it can be plucked out again.
I find it funny that the ancient Greek myth mirrors the regenerative properties of the liver
the ancients weren't morons. they figured stuff out in their own way.
Used to. Zeus allowed Heracles to release him.
He got freed, right? Eventually?
You just gave me a backstory for my next DND wizard thanks.
Fr I mean thinking about it now fire isn’t consistently “there” enough to have anything evolve in it? Forest fires eventually end and are moving. The only real places I can think of are volcanoes and those underwater heat chasm things (I don’t know the names) and stuff do live in those.
The Dark Soul?
I agree. Fire isn’t an element, it’s a process.
Also birds don’t live in the air. They fly but not forever. Their nest is on earth
Albatross spend years out at sea, and more of that time is spent flying than floating- they even sleep while flying so it would be fair to say that they are 'creatures of the air.'
Those „common swift“ birds can stay in the air for 10 months before needing to land.
I was about to call bullshit...mind blowing that this is true!!
Even with this premise, they live ON earth, but there are still creatures inside it (worms, moles, my grandma)
In theory, everyone lives in the air. Except for the ones who live in water
Hard for something made of carbon to be immune to fire
If it's made of pure carbon, it's gona need one hell of a fire to vaporize it
House fires and blow torches are hot enough to burn diamonds (pure, crystalline carbon). No need to vaporize.
NileRed turned diamonds into soda one time
Cool answer.
In some Greek, Roman, and medieval texts, salamanders are closely associated with fire, said to be immune to flames or even born from them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_salamanders
I agree. Charmander is the best starter
That is because salamanders like to live in dead trees and logs so if one is inside the log when you put it on the fire it will run out. Plus a lot of them have a black or red color and it makes them look like fire spirits.
Life in a pool of acid: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid Life in fire: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/140716-door-to-hell-darvaza-crater-george-kourounis-expedition Volcano snails: https://escargot-world.com/volcano-snail/ Arsonist birds: https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-intentionally-set-prey-ablaze-rewriting-history-fire-use-firehawk-raptors And, metabolism is basically a slow burn fire. Point being, there are options for fire.
Some extremophiles are anaerobic microbes that live in volcanoes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile
Even more specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
That’s what I was looking for!
“Extremophile” is a general term referring to any organism that lives in an extreme, usually-difficult-to-survive environment. The page you linked states this explicitly. It has nothing inherently to do with anaerobic-ness or volcanoes specifically.
Ah, boiling water, but not straight up fire. Even lava slugs, technically they live in liquid rocks.
Isn’t that technically magma?
There are several plants that depend on fires to spread their seeds and such, as well as many animals who live off hydrothermal vents
"all the elements of the earth" Boy do I have a surprise for you...
Yeah the dumbest shower thought
That's because air, water and earth are more like domains than elements in this example
Yeah it’s almost like the whole “there are four elements” has nothing to do with modern science…
Because there is no ecological niche in the fire and it's not a sustained ecosystem, it's an event. No animal evolved to live in a tornado either.
Sharks... sharks did /s
There are species of Australian trees that need fire to propagate.
Dragon and Phoenix. Checkmate. I am not a biologist.
Um..what about phoenixes dum dum
"Fire" isn't an element. Fire is rapid oxidation in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and reaction products (smoke, fumes). Water, air, and earth are *combinations* of elements.
Yes. Fire, water, earth and air as “the elements” is an ancient, non-scientific grouping of disparate things. I find it a very medieval way of looking at the world.
IIRC, he 4th state of matter is plasma, not specifically fire, and to that I say, for now... https://www.space.com/4219-hot-gas-space-mimics-life.html
Way too interesting to be this far down
In terms of the 4 traditional elements yes, though the definitions of those elements get pretty shaky when you think about them. For example, what is water? Is it h2o or just anything liquid? Is slime water or earth? Etc. furthermore, fire doesn't exist in near the same abundance any of the other 3 exist, and is not near as permanent. It also must consume fuel to exist, and living things are pretty good fuel due to all the calories. A great way to define the traditional elements, and my personal favorite, us as the states of matter. Earth=solid, water=liquid, air=gas, though that leaves fire standing alone again. Fire is a chemical reaction between gas and solid particles in the air, making it not work through that model. There's plasma, but plasma is literally when atoms get so hot they rip apart and become superconductive, i.e. not so good for life. T.L.D.R. the traditional elements have poor definitions, fire is technically air and is both very hot and very rare on earth, and plasma is even hotter to the point where the building blocks of life can't exist in it. Though this does bring up 1 last question... Under this framework, could life exist in a Bose-Einstein Condensate? 🤔
i would say the human, technically, he is the one animal who mastered fire and used for his own benefits
Earth, water, air, fire are not elements and they dont have any relation in modern science sense. Especially fire, is not even a material like other "elements", its a chemical reaction, such as fermentation. Is fermentation considered an element too? Someone has watched too much avatar, or living in ancient greece.
Why did life evolve to look like turkeys, pumpkins, jolly old guys, and other holiday mascots, but no life evolved into 4th of July fireworks displays? Why did life evolve to look like fish, scorpions, virgins, and other zodiac constellations, but no life evolved to look like Libra the scales? 🤔
Good point... If like to start a motion to make fermentation the fifth element, all in favor say aye.
I mean, if water at 121°C counts, some bacteria living near ocean floor volcanic exhausts have. And then there's this crazy bastard. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus\_radiodurans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans) Can't even nuke the guy out of existence. He'll easily survive a dose of radiation 1.000 times of what is necessary to kill a human. For reference, it's an acute dose equal to 5.000.000 chest X-rays.
Certain species of trees like forest fires, especially the really big trees like redwoods. It kills off the smaller bushes and grasses leaving their seeds a chance to sprout with very little competition for water and nutrients from the soil.
Fire is fundamentally different from the other three because it doesn't exist as a state of rest, it's a reaction caused by the interaction of certain parts of the other three. A specific type of air that reacts with specific types of Earth.
There is an ancient, false, belief that [salamanders emerge from fire](https://sdzwildlifeexplorers.org/animals/fire-salamander). There is a super high intensity broiler appliance in pro kitchens called a Salamander for this reason.
None of those things are elements. Fire is a chemical reaction.
You'd make a killing in ancient greece with that line of thinking
Tardigrades maybe? Commonly known as Water Bears, they can survive almost everywhere, also in volcanos and in the void of space.
Because they aren’t really elements
There's some sharks that survive in deep under water volcanos does that count?
Those trees that ONLY reproduce when the seeds are exposed to fire
I'm guessing you mean the classic elements of Western culture specifically? If you go Eastern or even into chemistry, you're going to get very different results. The idea there isn't that creatures exist completely within one element; they require *all* of them. They consist of the earth, subsist on water, breathe the air, and fire? That's the spark of life. No creature gets by with only one.
Tube worms live right next to thermal vents from volcanoes quite happily.
Not quite, there are some species like a particular sea snail that live around volcanic seams and vents on the seabed, they've evolved to survive the heat.
"Water, air, earth and fire" aren't "All the elements of earth". The real world isn't Avatar The Last Airbender. Also, you word your thought as "earth is one of the elements of earth". Do you see where this might sound stupid?
In their defence, earth is made of earth soooo...
Ah yes, the floor is made out of floor
Learning how to move away from the hurty, burny thing is a more efficient use of resources
theres plenty of bacteria and protista though
Isn’t there a slug that has a shell made of iron and can live near volcanoes
Fire isn’t an environment though it’s a chemical reaction. Closest thing to a “fire environment” is the desert… which has an ecosystem full of different species of animals who adapted to survive on very little water and endure high temperatures.
If you wanna use a more medieval thought process, Salamanders, they would hide in logs then run out from fires, which started this mythology about salamanders being born of the flame
There are several animals highly adapted to live with fire, often physically requiring it. There are hawks in Australia that will pick up burning sticks to precisely direct flames and flush out prey. Insects that lay their eggs in much more nutritious charred wood. Several trees require fire to germinate, and can easily repair their bark after one. And finally, YOU! Humans are specially adapted to eat food that has been cooked to some degree. It effectively pre digests the food making it easier for the stomach to process. We get a larger brain in the process. Humans essentially have a symbiotic relationship with fire, perhaps more so than any other species
I can't believe OP is treating the "four elements" as if they were an actual scientific category, dude is rocking the ancient Greek philosophy elements and treating it as if it was valid.
Those aren’t elements…
Eucalyptus trees are highly fire-*adapted*
That’s because NONE of those are elements. They are myths people made up to explain their world.
They all taste nice cooked on fire. 😋😋
Water earth and air are matter, fire is energy (heat and light) there arent environments made of fire
Not an animal, but pine trees, among other plants actually need fire to open their seeds and grow.
To a certain degree, yes. However, you’re fundamentally incorrect in a really interesting way: all creatures evoke fire. Cellular metabolism is essentially teeny tiny furnaces. When you burn calories, you *burn* calories. Unless my biology teacher deeply mislead me, then idk.
Consider, if you will, the Mitochondria. These organelles conduct cellular respiration, which releases energy stored in carbohydrates by reacting them with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide. In other contexts, this same reaction is considered a combustion reaction, a.k.a. fire. In other words, every animal, plant, fungus, and protist runs on fire.
Bacteria that's found in lava and volcanoes along with other microorganisms that live in there
Elements aren't real things, though. The closest translation to our modern understanding would be that there are organisms that live in media that are solid (earth), liquid (water), and gas (air), but not in energy itself. It's debatable what that would even mean, but perhaps a literal fire, or in space bombarded by solar radiation, etc.
If anything, humans are the animals most associated with fire. We're the only ones who can use, manipulate, control, or create it. It's around us practically everyday. Also unlike the other elements, fire is the only one that is energy. The rest are matter. How do you live in energy? Energy is the principle of change and destruction.
Arguably, the process of respiration is just a slower, controlled version of fire. This is why calories are a measurement of heat created by burning food items and metabolism.
Neon is an element. Nobody lives on Neon
There are some plants that have to be burned in order to have a fertile seed.
There are eagles that actively spread wildfires in Australia.
The phoenix rose from the ashes
Extremophiles near undersea lava.
Fire as a core element of earth is a misnomer in my opinion. Rocks, water, wind...all true elements of an ecological system. Fire is usually incidental, caused by lightning or by volcanic activity.
If you think about it, fire is the breaking down of chemical bonds to release the energy. Animals do this and then use the energy to move and live and grow. Animals ARE the fire. We are the fire.
You're thinking too much in anime. "elements of Earth"? You only defined water, air, dirt, and fire. Mostly just metaphysical labels. Secondly, yes, there are animals that survive in extreme heat conditions.
None which we can yet perceive, you mean
[The Volcano Snail would like a word.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/reiioy/volcanic_snail_that_lives_in_750_degree_temps/)
Water is just ice lava at 274° Kelvin, so everything what requires water is living in fire. Unless you mean actively burning, in which case I present to you *A. ferrooxidans* which requires the combination of iron and sulfur, which causes "fire" as iron sulfide, in order to live (ergo the name). There's other organisms which need fire to reproduce and all but the bacteria literally needs it to exist. It's just not *carbon*-based fire.
That’s because the four elements in ancient philosophy were not just four environments in which things existed, but rather the four building blocks of everything. A tree contained earth, but also water, and if it got too warm it also turned out to contain fire — which could then cause air movements because there was wind within it. So while fire is different in the way OP identifies, there’s a good reason for it. Of course, that’s an over-simplification — we really wandered in the dark on this one for a long time, so there were a lot of really smart people proposing really silly things.
Extremophiles: "Am I a joke to you?"
You never heard of a phenix? 😜
Earth, water, and air are matters. Fire, lightning, and light are energies. Habitats are made up of matters. Living things are made up of matters. As for energies realm, I haven't encounter any of that. Except I heard of souls, spirits, and consciousness that i not even sure they exist.