Organisms
pharyngula | May 16, 2011No matter what kind of dump you live in, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you don't live in an echinoderm cloaca.
Although…it really does look quite nice on the outside.
pharyngula | May 12, 2011Inbreeding is bad. It increases the frequency of homozygosity for deleterious traits.
There's this little thing called pleiotropy. Selection is a powerful tool, but traits can have multiple effects, and extreme selection for peculiarities can have unpleasant side effects — you may think a pug's curly tail is adorable, but it comes with all kinds of spinal ailments. And cute little doggies with cute little heads may have skulls too small for their brains, leading to syringomyelia.
If you've got an hour, this video is worth watching. Add pedigree dog shows to puppy mills as examples of animal…
pharyngula | May 11, 2011It's beautiful. If it had more lesbian sex, I'd give it an Oscar.
(via BoingBoing)
pharyngula | May 4, 2011As long as I'm heading out to the Pacific Northwest again this weekend, let's look at big trees.
(via UBC Botanical Gardens)
pharyngula | April 25, 2011It's just too bad we didn't have this customization option when we were having kids.
pharyngula | April 22, 2011Uh-oh. It turns out that Iowa is even more remote from the ocean than Minnesota (we at least have a great lake connecting us to the Atlantic, sorta), and it's darned hard to find an Iowa-Cephalopod connection. Except, of course, that once upon a time the great inland sea stretched up this way, and mighty ammonoids would have been swimming about my hotel room. Oh, well, in honor of our absent shelled cephalopods, here's a nautilus.
It's going to take an awful lot of global warming and some major geological activity to submerge Iowa again, you know.
pharyngula | April 20, 2011Let's turn this into a kinky porn blog with a titillating photo of a gecko servicing a Trochetia flower.
What do we call this? It can't be bestiality or zoophilia, since this is actually trans-kingdom.
You know that I'm on a slippery slope here…once you start flashing photos of Animalia getting it on with Plantae, the next step in degeneracy is dirty talk about horizontal gene transfer between whole domains.
pharyngula | April 18, 2011Mary likes the lovely images at the Kahi Kai site, so maybe we'll see more marine invertebrates appearing here.
pharyngula | April 16, 2011Those of you who've been to a poster session at a science meeting know that they're noisy and chaotic and entirely reliant on interaction to work…so I'm not even going to try and describe it. Instead, I strong-armed Eric Röttinger into describing his poster on video for me, and here it is. He's describing his work on Kahikai, an online database for collecting information about the development of marine invertebrates.
pharyngula | April 15, 2011I'm on a small island in the middle of a great big ocean full of exotic and beautiful invertebrates. It feels good.
pharyngula | April 6, 2011I'm going to Hawaii next week, while snow is still on the ground here in Morris, so I have to think tropical.
(If you're wondering, I'll be attending and speaking at the West Coast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology.)