all the feels

The crabs will force the anemones to clone themselves if one dies OR steal others’ anemones if both die

They haven’t found these anemones in their free-living form, so, as far as we know, this anemone species is these crabs’ slave species—it’s only known in association with pom pom crabs

Cool paper on this: Schnytzer, Y., Giman, Y., Karplus, I., & Achituv, Y. (2017). Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft. PeerJ, 5, e2954. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2954

Their anemones aren’t a unique species, they are only visually distinct because the crab farms them in a very specific way - making a fragment of a larger hawaiian anemone, or finding a newly spawned one. When they carry it around, they force the anemone to adapt to an entire new lifestyle. The crab’s nocturnal behavior slowly kills the anemone’s photosynthetic symbionts, from which it gets its color. After that, the crab can control how much food the anemone actually gets by using it to mop up food off the sea floor, and take excess out of its mouth. Since it doesnt have to reach for sunlight, or reach to catch food, this encourages dense, but short tentacles.

The shortcoming of this study was just that its very hard to get the anemone away from the crab without killing both, and its equally hard to get an anemone to bounce back from this state.

1) they reproduce asexually and the children are clones of each parent OR

2) Kermit and Miss Piggy are members of the same sexually dimorphic species, hence the split between their male and female children

In which Captain Amelia (left), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic cat, had hybrid babies with Doctor Doppler (middle), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic dog, whom also gave birth to the babies

ladies invented your favorite science fiction subgenres

My Brain: You are worthless and everyone is making fun of you.

Me: Uhh, no? I just had an extremely minor, low stakes misunderstanding, and everyone was very cool about it. It's fine. No need to panic.

My Brain: [immediately dousing itself in cortisol] You don't get to decide that. Now I'm cancelling all of the dopamine and serotonin. You can just sit there and think about your unforgivable error.

I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond. 

Only Murders in the Building (2021-present) Dirty Birds (S05E04)