Art Imitates Life

Insects are criminally underrated animals in many ways, including their behavioral complexity.

While applying human intelligence standards to animals is not correct or even sensible, based on current research the bugs with the most complex problem-solving abilities appear to be bees, ants, and cockroaches.

Like many over these past few months of lockdown, I have found the call of the natural world a taunting ghost disrupting my attempts to settle into the routine of being indoors. All I wanted was for something to transport me out of my bedroom and into vast deserts or thick jungles- but the flower aisle on my weekly supermarket trips would has had to do.

An area of solace, a safe haven from monotony, came in the form of my personal discovery of a fantastic, albeit spineless, little beast: the velvet worm.

As I discovered watching the beautifully shot Netflix documentary Our Planet, these Panarthropods are not only funky looking, practically unchanged since the Cambrian and highly social (I KNOW RIGHT? SOCIAL WORMS??), they have a feeding mechanism which blew my mind so much that I must have lost at least three friends because I just wouldn’t shut up about it.

Glue. Webs. How cool is that?

Aspicilia filiformis

God I love that the description I found for this lichen as “creeping.” Creeping suggests movement–and considering how sloowwwly lichens grow, it might just be the slowest creep ever. A. filiformis grows in terete, filiform lobes in tangled mats on detritus, soil, and old grass mounds. The surface is brown, gray-green or olivaceous, turning black toward the forked lobe tips (described as looking like little snake tongues which is so precious). Apothecia are rare and small, with a flat or slightly sunken dark reddish-brown or black disc. So far, this creepy, snakey pal has only been found in shrub-steppe and grassland habitats in the western U.S. One of my favorite ecosystems! Unassuming but teaming with a wealth of highly adapted life forms! Like A. filiformis, who I have probably seen before and just assumed they were a dead tumbleweed or something. Oops, sorry pal. 

images: source | source

[Species] | Horned grebe

The horned grebe (Podiceps auritus) is a comparatively small waterbird that is distributed throughout North America and Eurasia, there being two respective subspecies. In length it reaches 31 to 38 centimetres, its wingspan is 55 to 74 centimetres and it weighs approximately 300 to 570 gram.

In comparison to the breeding-plumage, the non-breeding plumage is rather dull and boring, being greyish-black and white. The cheeks, chest and belly are coloured in a pale white tone, whereas the back and crown are black.

The breeding plumage of the horned grebe has bright erectable horns (which is how the species has gotten its name), black fan-shaped cheek feathers and an overall red and black colour. The neck, flanks lores and upper chest are chestnut brown, while the crown and back are black. Males and females look very similar, but males are a bit larger and brighter.

The habitat changes with season, but horned grebes always live in either lakes, ponds, or the ocean. During the summer they greatly prefer lakes with some open water and a bit of marsh vegetation, whereas in the winter they mostly occur in oceans, and more recently some large lakes and reservoirs as well. 

Much like their habitat, the diet of horned grebes also changes seasonally, but generally consists of aquatic insects, fish and crustaceans. In the summer insects, crustaceans, salamanders, leeches and small amounts of plant material make up the majority of their diet, but in the winter it is dominated by fish, with molluscs and some insects making up only a small part of their prey.

Like other species of grebe, the horned grebe also regularly swallows its own feathers, so much that its stomach usually contains a matted plug of them. Parents also feed their feathers to their chicks so that they get this plug early. This may function as a filter for fish bones, to hold them in the stomach until they can be fully digested. 

The female lays 3 to 7 whitish or pale green eggs, which are incubated by both males and females. Almost immediately after hatching (which takes about 25 days) the young are capable of swimming, but usually ride on their parents back, even diving with them sometimes. Although the horned grebe usually has one only one brood in a year, that number can change and be up to two. If there are two broods it’s common for the chicks of the first brood to help raise and feed the second.

Due to a lack of solid data, it is difficult to say whether or not horned grebes are declining or not, but that is believed to be the case. Current population estimates suggest that there are about breeding 620000 individuals currently alive, about 250000 of which are in North America. The IUCN rates this species as Vulnerable.

and how many deep-sea creatures evolved to be red as a stealth adaptation, making them near invisible when there’s little to no light present

and it makes me think. If there’s never any visible light present in these animals’ lifetimes, if no ROV shines a little flashlight in depths that would otherwise not have light, would these animals ever get the opportunity to actually be red? that might be a stupid question.

Well, lie is a bit of a strong word, but scientists have known since 2014 that those special colors that mantis shrimp can see actually Aren’t A Thing.

Mantis shrimp (which aren’t a shrimp but a “stomatopod” which are more closely related to krill) have 12 types of color receptors in their eyes compared to our measly 3 receptors. We used to think this meant they could see a whole range of dazzling colors beyond our comprehension.

Some people were (rightfully) jealous.

However, it turns out that mantis shrimp probably have so many color receptors because they don’t blend colors the way we do. When you look at something purple, your red and blue receptors are strongly stimulated while your green receptors are not and your brain synthesizes this information into purple. When a mantis shrimp looks at something purple, they have a specific purple receptor that is stimulated.

Why this weird system? Probably because it is faster and more efficient. Mantis shrimp need to distinguish between prey species and react extremely quickly (some species can punch 50x faster than the blink of an eye), so they don’t have time to do the mental calculations to blend colors.

Not only is the Forbidden Shrimp Color Knowledge a sham, but mantis shrimp can actually see fewer colors than we can because they can’t distinguish as many shades between colors. They also can’t see those cursed Imaginary Colors.

“Conservation-induced extinction” is certainly a strange term. Isn’t the entire point of conservation to prevent extinction? 

Let’s start with the venerated conservation success story of the California condor. In 1987 there were only 22 California condors left in existence, and all 22 birds were brought into human care for the purpose of starting a captive breeding program that would eventually save the species from extinction.

As part of bringing the last California condors into human care, all 22 birds underwent anti-parasitic treatment. As a direct result, in the spring of 1987, Colpocephalum californici–a unique species of louse known to only host on the California condor–was driven to extinction.

It bears mentioning that this extinction was a result of negligence, not intentional destruction; it simply did not occur to the people running the California Condor Recovery Plan to account for parasite conservation. There is no evidence that the California condor louse was harmful to its host or that driving it to extinction was in any way helpful to the captive breeding program.

Now at this point you may be thinking, “Oh, well it was only a parasite, I don’t really care if they go extinct”. However, if you subscribe to the ecological notion that every scrap of biodiversity is precious, why is the California condor louse any less valuable than the California condor?

every living thing on earth is in a neverending game of Chicken with natural selection, staying juuuuust enough ahead of the curve to avoid extinction. this minimum-effort strategy breeds a LOT of weird-but-fairly-effective designs, but the Pipefish is objectively just pretty terrible.

they’re basically just straightened-out seahorses that get the worst of both worlds, lacking the seahorse’s strong grabbing ability while also being such a weak swimmer that they can’t deal with any kind of current at all! 

they SUCK, is what I’m getting at here.

but you know what? they’re also POSTIVELY DELIGHTFUL.

Giant katydid (Stilpnochlora couloniana) enjoying a piece of squash

Something neat about katydids that you can clearly see here is that they have ears in their front legs- that’s what those slits just below his elbows are.

Scientists working off the western coast of Mexico say they have found a previously unknown species of whale.

Three beaked whales were spotted last month by a team of scientists working with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society near the San Benito Islands, some 300 miles from the US border, according to a press release published Tuesday.

The team had set out to try to find out what kind of whales were making an unidentified acoustic signal previously recorded in the area.

Beaked whale experts working alongside Sea Shepherd’s scientific department managed to take photographs and video recordings of the three whales, and also recorded their acoustic signals using an underwater microphone.

Special post for reaching 1000 followers on instagram! 

While Darwin is often credited as the father of the Theory of Evolution, it’d be more precise to say that he was the father of the Theory of Evolution “by Natural Selection”. 

Darwin’s genius was not in realizing that animals change over time, but in identifying the mechanisms by which these changes occur. 

Pink Helmet

Aglantha digitale

The Pink Helmet is a mini hydromedusa that comes in a variety of vibrant colors. The tiny jelly is only 4 cm in size and is found towards the surface of the ocean. The purple and blue hues we see in its bell are caused by a phenomenon known as iridescence, when light strikes the jelly’s thin tissue at different angles  (similar to what we see in a soap bubbles). It also has orange pigmentation near its mouth; this pigmentation helps attract prey and mask luminescence. Furthermore, females tend to be more colorful than males.

Photo  credit:    https://biolum.eemb.ucsb.edu/organism/pictures/aglantha.html