Tenchi Souzou Design-bu could easily be shown to high school biology classes and they’d get more per-hour from it than most of their lectures, I’d venture to say.  This series has a genius when it comes to illustrating complicated evolutionary processes in straightforward and understandable ways.  And that, for the record, is one of the hardest things there is to do – it’s why the smartest people don’t always make the best teachers (or writers).  But apparently the mangaka is an exception, since she’s both of those things.

• I didn’t go to naked mole-rats for the “Queendom” right away.  I started out on bees, then went to ants.  It’s easy to forget there’s a mammal with that hive-insect social structure.
• I had no idea mole-rats did that “rebel against the queen” thing.  I also had no idea they acted as living beds for their babies.
• Getting longer when pregnant?  Another flash of ignorance for me.  I’m trying to grok how that even works physiologically.
• Creating a familiar for Hell must be a fun change of pace.
• As soon as I heard about an order for rejuvenating creatures, I thought of lizards who jettison their tail when a predator grabs it.  But there are a ton of examples even I’m aware of, including the jellyfish of course.
• That whole box thing with the dots and squares was just brilliant.  What a clever and entertaining way to demonstrate an incredibly important biological process.
• Yes aging is, evolutionarily speaking, a blessing rather than a curse.  But tell that to my back when I (try to) get out of bed in the morning.
• Ditto the brilliant comment about the keyhole-virus metaphor.  I’m sure this series isn’t the first to use it but it really is a stark reminder of how crucial genetic diversity is to a species’ survival.

So now we have our first multi-episode arc – what a level-up.  Given the number of years Tsuchida-san lost I would have expected the others to be babies, but the preview suggests otherwise.