Organisms
pharyngula | July 22, 2010
I'm one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They're related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better.
My path to opening up to wider horizons is to focus on what I find most interesting about animals, and that is that they are networks of cells driven by networks of genes that generate patterned responses of expression by cell signaling, or…
pharyngula | July 14, 2010Alonsoa unilabiata
These are the only flowers I want in my garden. Thanks to Meg for sending it along!
pharyngula | July 7, 2010Never mind the chaos going on behind the scenes! We need a pretty distraction, stat!
pharyngula | July 7, 2010You're reading this over breakfast, right? Just want to be sure I've caught you at an appropriate moment.
The story is simple: scientists have figured out how deep sea squid, which lack a modified arm for sex, copulate. It's obvious now — the males have an enormous penis, as long as their whole body. It just hasn't been easy to notice in the typically dead, flaccid, often somewhat decomposed state of many deep sea squid specimens.
The morbid part is that scientists caught a live specimen of Onykia ingens — well, dying specimen, actually — and they started cutting open the mantle, which…
pharyngula | June 21, 2010People are always asking me, "Why squid?" Here's why.
The cool thing about biology, though, is that you could pick any taxon and make a video about how awesome its members are. Squid just have the advantage of the exotic, living in environments unfamiliar to humans, and so they leap out at us as particularly weird and alien.
(via Success is not an option)
pharyngula | June 18, 2010Sepioteuthis sepioidea
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.