Organisms
pharyngula | April 22, 2013My wife tells me I ought to feature a fish that's actually called the Sarcastic Fringehead on the blog — it's a natural. I wonder if she was being sarcastic, but she looked so innocent when she told me.
pharyngula | April 20, 2013The coelacanth genome has been sequenced, which is good news all around…except that I found a few of the comments in the article announcing it disconcerting. They keep calling it a "living fossil" — and you know what I think of that term — and they keep referring to it as evolving slowly
The slowly evolving coelacanth
The morphological resemblance of the modern coelacanth to its fossil ancestors has resulted in it being nicknamed ‘the living fossil’. This invites the question of whether the genome of the coelacanth is as slowly evolving as its outward appearance suggests. Earlier work showed…
pharyngula | April 17, 2013At least, that's what I keep telling myself as yet another snowstorm bears down on us.
(source)
pharyngula | April 15, 2013It's a frog tadpole with an eye surgically grafted to its trunk!
Wait, this is an old story — similar experiments were done at least 20 years ago. You can transplant developing eyes to the tadpole, but the cool thing is that the donor optic nerves will grow into the sensory tracts of the dorsal spinal cord and grow anteriorly to the optic tectum, where they will make functional connections. Not, as I recall, adequate for image formation, but at least good enough that the tadpole will startle if a light is flashed at the eye in its tail.
I did kind of go "ugh" at the spin the story put on it…
pharyngula | April 10, 2013Sorry, I was looking at this Akebia flower, and for some reason I felt a compulsion to count the number of carpels, and I did it out loud in the voice of Sesame Street's Count. It's been a long day of proofreading and I'm home all alone, and I think I'm getting punchy. I should probably just go to bed.
(via Scienceray)
pharyngula | April 8, 2013This is a very special bird from Arkansas that will become much more common with more oil pipelines running through the middle of the country. Won't it be great to be able to readily make an entry in your birding book, soon enough?
pharyngula | April 5, 2013
(via the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Hey, I just realized that it's been about 25 years since I've been to Monterey Bay…I should go again.)
pharyngula | April 1, 2013You know those deep icy fields of methane hydrates Japan wants to tap for natural gas? (One of the worst ideas ever, by the way.) They're inhabited, by polychaetes like Hesiocaeca methanicola.
(via NatGeo, which is a bit too uncritical of the idea for my taste.)
pharyngula | March 29, 2013
This pretty pink photo that accompanied the article has nothing at all to do with the contents; this can't be the species involved. But that's appropriate to the devious nature of the story.
A squid was caught in China that had swallowed a three pound bomb — a live explosive that was later detonated by the local bomb squad.
Just keep that in mind next time you order calamari. If you hear a loud boom from the kitchen, you'll know the suicide squid have struck again.
pharyngula | March 27, 2013I'm queuing this up ahead of time, and I presume I'm in Washington state today, for this talk. You residents of Washington, Oregon, and Northern California will recognize this familiar flower.
(via NatGeo)
pharyngula | March 23, 2013Can we all just pretend that vipers and serpents are hairless, limbless cats?
pharyngula | March 22, 2013
(Found on a site called The Cephalopodiatrist. I wish I'd thought of that name.)
pharyngula | March 20, 2013What with all the bad weather around here, my wife is staying at an apartment near her workplace. And every time she does that, she starts sending me these kinds of photos. Should I be concerned?
(via petitchef)
pharyngula | March 18, 2013Bees get caffeinated at coffee flowers? But of course they do.
(via NatGeo)
pharyngula | March 8, 2013Last year, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium caught a paper nautilus that survived long enough to lay a few tens of thousands of hatchlings.
It must be nice to be a member of a species that's beautiful at every stage of life, rather than none.
pharyngula | March 6, 2013"TRI-LO-BIIITE!"
Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You'll only know what the heck I'm talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it's such a pathetic joke it's only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you're a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you'll appreciate the reference. How many of those are reading this right now?
Maybe this will work better. Here's a small chip of shale I keep at my desk.
My son Alaric and I collected that on a trip to Delta, Utah over 20 years ago. We had permission from the owner of a commercial dig site to rummage…