"With flowers at thy breast... Creatura del Cielo!"

Siracusans' movie night

arthropoda (crustaceans, bugs, etc)

there's a joke i've heard among biologists that goes, "if there is a god, he must really like beetles". arthropods are by far the largest animal phylum, comprising eighty fucking per cent of all known animal species. insects alone comprise half, and beetles along comprise a quarter. to clarify: one in four known animals is a beetle. do you understand how insane that is ? and this isn't, like, copy-pasted species, there's an incredible variety of them. crabs, spiders, scorpions, sea spiders that look nothing like land spiders, dragonflies, ladybugs, weevils. copepods ! have you ever looked at the sea ? whatever you looked at was swarming with copepods, guaranteed. i cannot think of a phylum that has more successfully colonized all of earth's habitats, from the abyss to the sky. most insects can fly ! it's literally the only time any invertebrate has developed the ability to fly ! and this isn't even counting extinct taxa. the palaeozoic saw some truly bizarre arthropods, like the swimming sea scorpions that flourished for over two hundred million years, the massive insects and myriapods of the carboniferous, and who could possibly forget the radiodonts of the cambrian ? you may not know that name of the clade, but you do know anomalocaris, and will be pleased to know that it had dozens of relatives, all beautiful and powerful in their own way. even apart from their own beauty, many insects are vital to plant ecosystems and agriculture. of course you know about bees and butterflies, but have you heard of the hummingbird hawk-moth ? it's gotta be one of my all-time favorites, a real cult classic. arthropods are the most successful phylum there is, and that's why you should vote for them.

vs

platyhelminthes (flatworms)

look, i'm gonna be real with you for a moment. i honestly, truly thought that tardigrada would make it to the semifinals. i was so fucking confident that tumblr users would vote for the epic meme phylum so i could write 250 words about how epic meme it is, but they didn't, so now i have to write 250 words about flatworms. really i brought this on myself, i really should have seeded the bracket so that cnidaria or echinodermata would end up here. platyhelminthes are a real coughing baby of invertebrate phyla. how can i convince you to vote for a phylum that's mostly parasites ? how can i convince you to-- actually i probably need to explain some biology for this. nephrozoa is a clade of bilaterally symmetrical animals whose existence is disputed but i'm on its side so i'll write like it's unambiguously real. it contains all of the phyla that have made it this far, and is practically synonymous with the phrase "complex animal". the ancestral nephrozoan has a coelom (a body cavity containing its organs), a through-gut (food is ingested through a mouth and expelled through an anus), and probably had gills (i.e. dedicated respiratory structures). chordates, arthropods, and molluscs all have these things, but flatworms just don't. and this isn't because flatworms were an early-splitting group -- they're pretty nestled in there, next to molluscs and annelids. what we must assume happened, then, is that flatworms lost all of these features. they decided, nah, actually it's better to just rawdog my internal organs. it's actually better to shit through my mouth. it's actually better to just get so flat that i don't need to breathe anymore. now let me bring you close and ask you this: isn't that fucking hilarious ? doesn't it tickle you that they had all of these features that had allowed other phyla to be so complex and diverse and then just lost them ? also they do penis fencing. look it up. platyhelminthes are the funniest phylum there is, and that's why you should vote for them.