Fire Eel (Mastacembelus erythrotaenia), family Mastacembelidae, order Synbranchiformes, found in freshwater habitats in SE Asia
This species is not a “true eel”, but is in a group called the spiny eels.
photograph by Stan Sung

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Fire Eel (Mastacembelus erythrotaenia), family Mastacembelidae, order Synbranchiformes, found in freshwater habitats in SE Asia
This species is not a “true eel”, but is in a group called the spiny eels.
photograph by Stan Sung

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The larval stage of the Mealybug Destroyer Ladybird. The name is very literal. Both the larval stage and adult beetle hunt down and consume mealybugs and will also eat soft scale so they’re a very beneficial insect in the garden. As larvae they create that white waxy filament structure as a disguise to make themselves resemble a large Mealybug. This allows them to evade the ants that often farm and protect Mealybugs for the sweet ‘dew’ they produce. Photos 1 & 2 are taken with a macro lens to show it in detail. Photo 3 is without the lens. This individual was on a Black Wattle tree where it was feeding on a group of mealybugs.
She's ethreal- and so tiny!
World’s most dangerous bird has bizarre, glowing headgear
Structures on cassowaries’ skulls fluoresce under UV light, hinting at a hidden visual signal
Often labeled “the world’s most dangerous birds,” cassowaries just got even more intriguing. The aggressive, flightless birds have structures on top of their heads called casques, the purpose of which has long confused scientists. To the human eye, casques look fairly plain—but new research published last month in Scientific Reports finds this headgear fluoresces under ultraviolet (UV) light, possibly aiding the birds’ visual displays...
Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-most-dangerous-bird-has-bizarre-glowing-headgear
Polychaete of the day is a strange tentacle-y Ophelina acuminata.
Photo from Florida Museum of Natural History
Although ceratopsian dinosaurs were widespread around the northern continents during the Cretaceous, for a long time they appeared to have been completely absent from Europe. A few possible fragments were found – but their identification as ceratopsians was highly disputed, with some paleontologists instead identifying the remains as belonging to ornithopods.
But this year some new fossils have given more support to the ceratopsian interpretation, suggesting that a whole diverse European branch of these dinosaurs was there the whole time. They'd just been misidentified as rhabdodontids due to the convergent anatomy of their teeth, jaws, and limbs.
One of these newly-recognized ceratopsians was Ferenceratops shqiperorum (previously known as Zalmoxes shqiperorum), which lived during the late Cretaceous (~72-66 million years ago) on the subtropical Hațeg Island, in the region of what is now Romania.
It was a small species, about 2m long (6'6"), and seems to have lacked the elaborate frills and horns seen in many other ceratopsians, despite being closely related to both protoceratopsids and stem-ceratopsids.
Its new genus name references Ferenc, the birth name of Baron Franz Nopcsa, the gay Transylvanian paleobiologist-adventurer-spy who originally found some of its fossil remains.
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please post the naked geckos
Back in 2017, @leotide posted this incredible piece, which is easily one of my favourite scientific illustrations of all time.
An actual photo of a skinless Geckolepis (here a never-before-posted photo of a G. cf. maculata, not G. megalepis) is below the cut. There is no blood or gore, but I could see how this would make some uncomfortable, so I have hidden it.
Today’s echinoderm is Pseudocolochirus axiologus,commonly known as the Australian sea apple.
Image source: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/316190240
Today's wasp of the day is Baeus seminulum!
Credits: photo 1, photo 2
Or as I like to call her, the Jellybean. And yes, this crumb of a creature is in fact a wasp— albeit a very tiny one. Oh, and a lady. The males of this genus are winged and have much more typical wasp appearance. Meanwhile, the females use their tininess to go undetected and hitch rides on spiders, waiting for them to lay their eggs so that she can lay her own within them.
(And if you want to see them in motion, I recommend checking out photo 2's source as the photographer has multiple clips of one preening!)
PSA (public spider announcement): beware of tiny stowaways
Collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu/Pecari tajacu) with leucism amongst a squadron of regular peccaries
Captured by Ramiro Gonzalez, CC BY-NC 4.0
(x)
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Blue and green land snail, Antidrymaeus stramineus, Bulimulidae
Found only in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean
Photo 1 by josh_2396, 2 by floydh, 3 by peterzik, and 4 by islander784

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Waukartus muscularis was a small marine arthropod that lived during the early Silurian, about 437 million years ago, in an equatorial inland sea covering what is now Wisconsin, USA.
It was a member of the myriapods, related to modern centipedes and millipedes – but it represents a very early offshoot of this lineage, with its ancestors branching off sometime before the amphibious euthycarcinoids.
Growing up to about 3cm long (~1.2"), Waukartus had a head with four pairs of small appendages and what may be a pair of small stalked eyes, eleven body segments each with one pair of legs, and a telson with a pair of blade-like projections.
It appears to have been fully aquatic, but its unbranched limbs closely resemble those of terrestrial myriapods, suggesting that these arthropods initially evolved their walking legs for use on the seafloor and only later exapted them for land.
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There's a new T. rex in the fossil record, only this one terrorized the ancient seas. New research led by scientists at the American Museum
S. snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus, to which it bear
SNUFFLEUPAGUS REAL
Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!
It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey
They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!
Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!
Hooray for science and hooray for S. snuffleufagus !
This deep-sea fish has one of the best strategies for hiding in the deep-sea 🖤✨️
The California slickhead (Alepocephalus sp.) is often found below 1,000 meters (about 3,300 feet). Their name was inspired by the lack of scales on the fish's head. Those large eyes give the slickhead an edge in an environment where food can be scarce. It can glimpse even the faintest flickers of bioluminescence—the “living light” produced by deep-sea animals.
Deep-sea animals have a variety of remarkable adaptations to help them hide in the midnight zone, but this species uses the shade of their skin to hide from predators and prey in this dark expanse. Ultra-black fishes have unique structures in their skin that very efficiently trap and absorb light. Melanin—the same pigment found in human skin—is densely packed into super-thin layers on the outermost surface of their skin. While most light photons are immediately absorbed, the specific shape, size, and configuration of these melanin layers scatter any missed photons into neighboring skin cells, where they are subsequently absorbed. Ultimately, ultra-black skin absorbs 99.5 percent (or more) of the visible light with virtually none reflected.
I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.
Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A
https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)
Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un
Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though
That should be enough

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Red-tailed Twigsitter Heteropogon phoenicurus
A robber fly from North America. It preys on beetles and other insects.
image by Rick Nirschl
Malayan Slug-Snake (Asthenodipsas malaccanus), family Pareidae, Yala, Thailand
photograph by Leah Khananashvili