Not often does a day go by when I’m not deeply inspired by an animal. There was the famously dumb horse who had a proclivity for dramatically falling to the ground. And the aggressively flirty pig. And today, the obstinate cave salamander that has refused to move from her nook in a pitch-dark cave for more than seven years.
According to The Independent, a team of scientists at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary came across the sedentary amphibian while studying rare aquatic cave salamanders, known as olms, in a cave in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Olms, as a whole, are a pretty lazy species. “They are hanging around, doing almost nothing,” lead scientist Gergely Balázs told The New Scientist. But one olm in particular stood out: According to their findings, published in the Journal of Zoology, one salamander didn’t budge for 2,569 days.
I suspect you may have a few questions: Didn’t this olm have shit to do, like eat and hang out with her friends and I don’t know, move? As it turns out, not really. According to The Independent, olms can go years without eating, and no other animals find them appetizing; also, they hate socializing. In fact, according to the original study, olms are only really motivated to move when it comes time to mate, which they do about once every 12 and a half years throughout their approximately 100-year lifespan.
So presumably, our slothful queen hasn’t had the desire to reproduce in the past seven-plus years. Or perhaps she has shunned procreation altogether! I mean, I probably would too if it meant I could go years without moving.