Organisms
pharyngula | September 15, 2006We just had one of these!
Mendel's Garden #6
Friday Ark #104
Well, just to flesh it out a little more with some random links, here are some photos. I was told the second one made someone think of me (warning: body modification!). And, jebus help me, for some reason I thought this photo was very sexy. Or appetizing. I don't know, something in the midbrain flickered.
Oh, and several of us sciencebloggers were interviewed for an article by Eva Amsen on "Who benefits from science blogging?" It doesn't mention the benefit of people sending you pictures that tickle the cingulate.
pharyngula | September 15, 2006Nautilus pompilius
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 14, 2006A few carnivals have popped up:
Carnival of Education #84
Skeptics' Circle #43
I & the Bird #32
Carnival of the Liberals #21
Also, Mendel's Garden #6 is looking for submissions — it will be hosted at The Voltage Gate tomorrow!
pharyngula | September 14, 2006
We are all familiar with the idea that there are strikingly different kinds of eyes in animals: insects have compound eyes with multiple facets, while we vertebrates have simple lens eyes. It seems like a simple evolutionary distinction, with arthropods exhibiting one pattern and vertebrates another, but the story isn't as clean and simple as all that. Protostomes exhibit a variety of different kinds of eyes, leading to the suggestion that eyes have evolved independently many times; in addition, eyes differ in more than just their apparent organization, and there are some significant…
pharyngula | September 13, 2006
Everyone knows the story of Konrad Lorenz and his goslings, right? It was a demonstration of imprinting: when young animals are exposed to a stimulus at a critical time, they can fix on it; Lorenz studied this phenomenon in geese, which if they saw him shortly after hatching, would treat him like their mother, following him around on his walks. Similarly, many animals seem to experience sexual imprinting, where they acquire the sexual preferences that will be expressed later on.
I just ran across a charming short letter about imprinting in cephalopods, and somehow the story seems so…
pharyngula | September 12, 2006Stop it! Some misguided people are killing stingrays in apparent retribution for the death of Steve Irwin.
A fisheries department official says up to ten of the normally docile fish have been found dead and mutilated on Australia's eastern coast since Steve Irwin was killed by one last week. At least two had their tails lopped off.
As the article goes on to say, this is the antithesis of what a conservationist like Irwin would have wanted.
pharyngula | September 10, 2006
I've been tinkering with a lovely software tool, the 3D Virtual Embryo, which you can down download from ANISEED (Ascidian Network of In Situ Expression and Embryological Data). Yes, you: it's free, it runs under Java, and you can get the source and versions compiled for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It contains a set of data on ascidian development—cell shapes, gene expression, proteins, etc., all rendered in 3 dimensions and color, and with the user able to interact with the data, spinning it around and highlighting and annotating. It's beautiful!
Unfortunately, as I was experimenting with…
pharyngula | September 9, 2006I got this email from Alan Kazlev, one of the main fellows working on the Palaeos website (a very useful paleontological resource), which I had previously reported as going offline. Plans are afoot to bring it back, and the answer seems to be to wikify it and build it anew, with a more distributed set of contributors. How Web 2.0! I've included the full email below the fold if you'd like more details.
Hi everyone
For those who don't know me, I was the co-author of Palaeos, until I got
caught up in other projects that consumed all my time. Toby
White of course continued to work on the site (…
pharyngula | September 9, 2006Life is cruel and brutal, I guess.
Ya Ya, a seven-year-old panda and new mother of twins, "appeared tired" when nursing the younger cub in a patch of grass, the paper said.
Her head sagged, her paws separated and her baby fell to the ground next to her. The panda then rolled on to her side and crushed her baby beneath her.
I remember that chronic exhaustion when our kids were piping hot and fresh from the uterus, too.
pharyngula | September 8, 2006Every week, someone finds something that reminds them of me, and they send it off in an email. I think that every day someone strolls through a fish market and the PZ-spot in their brain lights up like a Tesla coil, triggering odd associations that can only be relieved by grounding them out in an email message. Some examples are below the fold.
A reader got a nice 60s vibe off this image, and thought it was perfect for me. Or maybe it was the octopus…
This is a jigsaw puzzle spotted at COSI:
Phil saw an episode of Cthulhu's Clues on his hotel TV, and of course he thought of me.
Hillary…
pharyngula | September 8, 2006The latest issue of Science has a fascinating article on Exotic Earths—it contains the results of simulations of planet formation in systems like those that have been observed with giant planets close to their stars. The nifty observation is that such simulations spawn lots of planets that are in a habitable zone and that are very water-rich.
(click for larger image)Final configuration of our four simulations, with the solar system shown for scale. Each simulation is plotted on a horizontal line, and the size of each body represents its relative physical size (except for the giant planets,…
pharyngula | September 8, 2006Perusable blogaliciousness for your Friday morning:
Carnival of Education
Friday Ark #103
Mendel's Garden #5
The Hairy Museum of Natural History has put out a call for submissions to the Tangled Bank, with an early deadline. If you want a shot at maybe seeing your link with a custom illustration, send it in by Sunday evening. He'll try to accept stuff up through Tuesday, but make life easy on the guy, OK?
pharyngula | September 8, 2006Go ahead, count 'em. Since there were some comments about octopuses with an odd number of arms, here's an example. Males of this species have a highly modified arm (the one they use for sex) that is tucked away in a pouch, so they have the appearance of a seven-armed octopus.
Haliphron antlanticus, the seven-arm octopus
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | September 7, 2006I was reading a review paper that was frustrating because I wanted to know more—it's on the evolution of complex brains, and briefly summarizes some of the current confusion about what, exactly, is involved in building a brain with complex problem solving ability. It's not as simple as "size matters"—we have to jigger the formulae a fair bit to take into account brain:body size ratios, for instance, to get humans to come out on top, and maybe bulk is an inaccurate proxy for more significant matters, such as the number of synapses and nerve conduction velocities.
There's also a growing amount…
pharyngula | September 6, 2006
I got a request to identify this beastie washed up on a beach in Russia—there's a whole gallery of pictures, if you don't mind looking at rotting cadavers.
Anyway, this one's easy. Everyone with kids will know the answer: sing along with Raffi and me…
Baby Beluga in the deep blue sea,
Swim so wild and you swim so free.
Heaven above, and the sea below,
And a little white whale on the go.
Of course, this one isn't a baby, so when you bring your kids in to show them the rotting mess of a dead whale while singing the song, you'll have to explain that it is Mommy or Daddy Beluga, and Baby…
pharyngula | September 2, 2006Darren Naish writes about a mysterious carcass and a serpentine sea beast, and most interestingly, about how not to do cryptozoology.
pharyngula | September 1, 2006One of the other consequences of our broken water main is that our cat, Midnight, fled the house during the ruckus, and he has not returned. This is a very lazy, timid cat who has been declawed (not by us—we do not approve of such barbarity), so he's not exactly going to thrive out there. And it's raining. Midnight always freaked out at getting wet or being exposed to weather. If any Morris people should spot him, let Skatje know. He does have a collar with a tag and his name, address, and phone number.
pharyngula | September 1, 2006Octopus sp.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
pharyngula | August 29, 2006A reader from Stillwater sent in a few photos of this lovely creature. They thought it was just some plant debris until it started crawling. Can you guess what it is?
Obviously, the important clue is that they're from Stillwater. This must be a larval spawn of Michele Bachmann.
Seriously, though, I know exactly what that is: they're very distinctive. It's a hag moth caterpillar.
pharyngula | August 28, 2006
Somebody has a weird obsession with hybridizing terrestrial and aquatic animals, but even more strangely, there isn't a single cephalopod in the whole collection.