Cyan-Biologist

Cornu aspersum Garden snail

ft. Maxime Dahirel

In a world where people fly across oceans and commute on bullet trains, Maxime Dahirel’s subjects moved at a much slower pace.

“I do research on dispersal. Basically how, why, and what individuals leave their current place to live or mate elsewhere. Snails are a really neat group to work on that because it’s not too hard to run after them to study them.”

His subjects in particular were the common garden snails. Each one of them sporting a number painted on their shell.

“That’s one of the advantages of working with snails, compared to slugs or any smaller animal. It’s easy to follow them individually, you just paint or glue a number on their shell! And when you can identify individuals, you can start following them through time and asking questions about differences between individuals,” Maxime explained his choice.

Silly as it may sound, the snails may help researchers see how other species move in an environment that we humans keep altering to fit our needs.

“You can easily tie up dispersal research to nature in cities, invasive species or species moving in response to climate change.”

Native to the Mediterranean, the garden snails now live all over the world thanks to the food and cosmetic trade. They are able to thrive even in the smallest gardens in cities and survive without food or water for months. But in times of trouble, even the slowest animals must move no matter how exhausting it may be.

Regarding his snails, Maxime has observed that their personality is correlated with their likeliness to move. “You can predict which snails are going to disperse if you know where they are on a bold-shy spectrum, measured by how long they take to resume activity after they’ve been scared by a fake predator attack.”

Except in his study, Maxime was the fake predator. “We pinched them on the side so they believe they are being bitten.”

“You can’t help feeling bad for them when they’re like “nope enough of this shit, back in my shell” in a cloud of mucus bubbles.”

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Maxime Dahirel is a Research and Teaching Associate at Rennes 1 University. Get to know Maxime and his snails. Twitter

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The Cactaceae : descriptions and illustrations of plants of the cactus family 

by N.L. Britton and J.N. Rose. 

Published 1919

Hi all! It has been some time, hasn’t it? My life has been a rollercoaster the last few months, both academically as well as personally. I didn’t have much time to do art, did not write posts for a very long time and generally just neglected my almost 6k followers on here. But let’s be honest, Tumblr is not the best medium for #Scicomm, but choosing a social media account for that proves to be a difficult task. Let me explain the situation of this blog and what I’ve been up to the last couple of months.

First of all, I just got back from my first solo-trip to the other side of the world! I’m currently doing my second Masters internship at my homebase at the Naturalis in Leiden, working with the supervisor I worked with during my Bachelors thesis. Little heads-up: the shrimp article is going to get published in Zookeys this year, so hyped! But now I’m working on shame-faced crabs or “box” crabs in the Caribbean. I just got back from collecting and observing the crabs in their natural habitat, and I will be doing next-gen metabarcoding the stomach contents of my crabs in order to find out what they are eating! I’ll probably make a post about that later.

Thanks to this project and getting my degree; my job as a PR-worker for the university; finding Scicomm jobs and voluntary work for the Naturalis, I did not have the time and energy to keep an eye out for Tumblr. In addition, I got into a relationship and got out of that same relationship in a couple of months time, leaving me very, uhm, broken. I did however move to easier-to-reach social media like Twitter and Instagram (both @Werner_deGier), which appear to be more tempting for me to post on!

So for the stuff which is more important for you guys, the followers, I think I have some bad news. Since my amounts of work will not decrease in the coming few months (even have more fieldwork planned for the end of this year), I think I will use Tumblr not anymore for reblogging posts and more for just my own content, so articles and art in general. All my own content will be posted on twitter and instagram first though; so if you guys want to stay up to date you are free to follow me over there!

Tumblr was and will always be the place where I met a lot of international friends/colleagues (looking at you guys at @252mya, @eartharchives, and of course @lwhittie @skyekathryn @todropscience and much, much more) and the place I got to practice and develop my interest in invertebrate biology, as well as all other fields of biology. I say with a little bit of regret that I have to put Tumblr on a third place behind newer and more “interactional” social media; but do not be sad if you just have a Tumblr-account, I will be posting original content on here as well!

Thanks for everything guys,

-Werner (Cyan Biologist)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Werner_deGier

plus six or seven people who just….can’t figure out what a frog paper could possibly be. (guys it’s…a scientific paper. about frogs.)

and this one

which made me laugh despairingly because i mean

Devil rays are a lesser known cousins of manta rays, they are also sometimes called ‘flying rays’ because of their ability to leap out of water as if in flight. Compared to the manta rays devil rays have much broader heads and sharper looking extremities. Unlike manta rays most devil rays do not have tail stinger or the stinger is enclosed. Recent genetic studies, however, have suggested that both mantas and devil rays should be classed in the same genus Mobula. 

I’ve heard of it but not overly familiar. But if I get this right, he basically hypothesized that extinction happens and puts evolution through filters. That means, lots of the weird critters in the past must have represented body plans from lineages that are long gone and don’t fit anywhere in our current tree of life, correct?

I believe he originally referred to Burgess Shale’s fauna, which at that time, was full of unidentified weird critters like upside-down spiky worms and giant murdershrimps (which turned out not to be a shrimp). But since then, many weirdos, whether from Burgess Shale or not, have been successfully identified.

For example! Some pre-Cambrian stuffs are downright WTF, but some researchers I’ve talked to said that Haootia might be an early cnidarian. Like, almost jellyfish, but not quite jellyfish. Yeah this is what happens when I try to make jellies in a party hat instead of a store-bought mold.

Then there are lots of weird, still puzzling critters like Tullimonstrum, which was in 2016 claimed to be a fish then 2017 said lolnope.

“Don’t even get me started on tullimonstrum,” said Thomas Clements, the guy who wrote the 2016 paper when I casually mentioned it in our chat.

He then followed up with this emoji:

Yeah, it’s quite a trigger for some. Pls tag your Tullimonstrum posts accordingly.

There’s also Nectocaris, which might be a shrimp or a squid, depending on who you’re talking to (it might start a war, maybe better not talk about Nectocaris).

A squid? src

or a shrimp? src

Even today, there are lots of outlier critters that make me go FULL CAPSLOCK WHAT THE HELL. Even well-studied groups can still produce hellspawns that look like a bastard child from their secret affair with critters from James Cameron’s AVATAR.

Like, you know what sea cucumbers normally look like, right?

Behold, Pelagothuria, also a sea cucumber.

Excuse me that’s not what my cucumbers look like.

And you know what crustaceans normally are like, yeah? Crabs and shrimps and stuffs. They all look the same, yeah?

Last night @cyan-biologist sent me this unholy abomination that is a parasitic crustacean (Sphyrion lumpi, a copepod to be precise).

Like how in the hell is that a shrimp’s cousin. Where is the head. Where did the feetsies go. How can I eat that. Let me speak to the manager.

Ok I’ve gone off-tangent here but in short, I think evolution tends to produce wacky things that throw our primate brains off-guard and screw up our obsession with putting things in neat boxes.

But luckily we’re getting more data and getting better at identifying things so… maybe in the future we’ll get to know our long lost weird cousins better.

Snowdrops

You never know what you’ll find in a tide pool! 🐙 

Dr. Nancy Foster Scholar Sarah Kienle got a treat when she spotted this feisty red octopus while exploring the shores of Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

Barn owl

Geosesarma dennerle, or the purple vampire crab, is a species of small land-living crab which is found on Java, Indonesia. Described by scientists in 2015, it is already popular in the aquarium trade, in which all species of Geosesarma crabs are often called vampire crabs. (x x x x x)