There’s scientifically accurate illustration and then there’s charming. These images are from "A Voyage to New Holland" by William Dampier, published in 1703. We’re glad that he took some time to ensure that these creatures 🐙 were captured for posterity!
➡️ www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/50441252
Sleepy time bear
It's Friday night baby
I'm glad you enjoy it as much as I do 😂
Micropathus ditto (female) in profile sitting on a cave wall. Superimposed in the corner is a sprite of the Pokemon Ditto. Image credit Tim Rudman, source: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/71119620
Macro photos of the morphology of Micropathus zubat, showing the head, ovipositor, and genital plates. Superimposed in the corner is a sprite of the Pokemon Zubat.
Say hi to Micropathus ditto and M. zubat, two #NewSpecies of cave cricket from forests in southern Tasmania! These crickets are threatened by climate change, land clearing, and logging. Giving them names is an important step towards their conservation. But why did we choose these ones? #bugsky 🧵 1/6
"A public call to the researchers and stakeholders [...] with an ambition of widening novel groundwater-based research beyond well-known global biodiversity hotspots."
Advancing subterranean conservation through Global Research on eDNA in Groundwaters (GReG) subtbiol.pensoft.net/articles.php...
How a small number of authors can cause chaos in biology’s system for naming species and what can be done about it. #taxonomy #bugsky thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-fe...
In what may be one of Earth’s craziest forms of mimicry, researchers in 2023 reported a species of rove beetle that grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it.
Learn more during #InsectWeek: scim.ag/40mj1S8
Congratulations Perry!!
Holy smokes! I've got the male too! I'm tearing up. Just heard from the scientist that described the new species and this handsome lad is the male. So awesome!
(Chrysometa chuchaqui)
There are Powder Blue Isopods (Porcellionides pruinosus) of various sizes on a pastel pink background. All of them are hanging with large and small ribbons. Happy and lovely atmosphere.
Blue isopods with ribbons🎀
This is an awesome lab and everyone should definitely check it out! (yes I'm totally biased ☺️)
2/2 Tragically, this species is now extinct. Its habitat, a groundwater-fed spring, was completely lost due to changes in water availability - linked to groundwater extraction from industry in the region.
A large glass jar with a white label and filled with yellowish ethanol containing 1,000 preserved isopods
Close-up of the ethanol-preserved isopods, which are grey-pinkish in colour and curled up
1/2 Ever wondered what 1,000 slaters in a jar looks like?
These tiny isopods were once abundant near Marree, south of Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre in South Australia.
#southaustralianmuseum #conservation #katithanda #lakeeyre
A digital drawing with dark blue text above saying “protect the” and the bottom text saying “weirdos”. There are four animals in between the text. The top left is a green and brown horned frog (aka Pac-Man frog). The top right is a pink and white flea beetle. The bottom left is a yellow slug. The bottom right is a kingsnake with grey and red scales. The background is light blue.
Last day of #invertefest so let’s end with one of my most popular pieces of art!
linktr.ee/squishyfauna
#invertebrates #bugsky #bugs #entomology #insects #herps #frogs #snakes #sciart #bsnm
I've never seen Barnacles being this active.
#InverteFest 🦑 #Nature #TidePool
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🍄🍄🌱🌱🌱🍄🍄🌱🐢
🍄🌱🌱🍄🌱🌱🍄🌱🍄
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🍄🌱🌱🥗🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄
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5/ Some wings have evolved strategies to help reduce damage resulting from collisions. For example, we learned a few years ago that wasp wings have a flexible joint that acts like a reversible crumple zone, allowing the wing tip to easily bend out of the way when it hits things...
Harry Potter $ helped pay for this ruling #boycott
I'm definitely biased, but it always feels like a fun little journey saying Phreatomerus latipes. It's an isopod native to desert springs in South Australia and is the focus of my master's project.
A colossal squid — the largest invertebrate in the world — has been photographed alive in its habitat for the first time. And it's just a baby. www.newscientist.com/article/2476...
The mnemonic on top reads "chewing bits in muck, crustaceans process debris." The text underneath lists leg segment names "coxa basis ischium merus carpus propodus dactylus" and in the centre is a line drawing of an isopod leg. The background is a murky green pond.
I kept forgetting isopod (slater) leg anatomy so I made a handy image to help me remember all of the segments in order. Credit to chatGPT for creating the mnemonic itself 😆 #isopods
Shrimps is bugs? No, it’s kinda the other way around. Insects are technically crustaceans, which highlights the importance of systematics in understanding how evolution unfolds. My latest for @smithsonianmag.bsky.social.
A plate of six photos of cave crickets from throughout the Southern Hemisphere: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Chile. All of the crickets are spindly and spider-like, with elongated legs and antennae for sensing in low-light environments. While they share the same body plan, each of the images has a slightly different colouration or pattern; some are mottled and sandy, others are dusky and appear almost covered in peach fuzz (setae). The species from Chile is almost jet black and matte. Images © Jessa Thurman, Keith Martin-Smith, Greg Tasney, commoncopper via iNaturalist, Peter Swart, and Benjamin Silva Ahumada. Photographs reproduced under Creative Commons licences.
A phylogeny (evolutionary tree) with groupings of species coloured by their geographic location. In the tree are four different, unrelated groups from Australia, two from New Zealand, and one from South America. To the left is a zoomed-out schematic of the phylogeny showing that only half of the tree is shown in this figure.
📣 New preprint! We reconstructed the cave cricket family tree and found the Australian biota have not 1, but >5 independent evolutionary origins. 🇦🇺 is at the centre of a radiation in the S. Hemisphere that began in the Lower Cretaceous ~119 million years ago. 1/ #bugsky
Paper: tinyurl.com/bddev8kn
If you want to read one more dire wolf take this week, i can thoroughly recommend @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social's deep dive on what scientists make of the announcement, just why it broke like it did, and what that means for conservation work more broadly.
@cenmag.bsky.social 🧪
Gouache painting of a spaniel, beagle, and german shepherd. They're holding in their mouths a tennis ball, library card, and rope toy respectively. The beagle looks very proud, while the other two stare at them.
Happy National Library Week!! A great time to ask everyone you know if they have a library card.
#art #nationallibraryweek
In addition to the reasons mentioned here, I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that the genomic imprinting could not have possibly been the same as from a real dire wolf. They are really dire wolf/grey wolf/dog hybrids.
Oil painting of a scene with a prehistoric feel featuring dinosaurs and jungle plants surrounding a McDonald's, under a hazy sky
Vestige (Golden Arches) by Michael Kerbow
This project gives a really cool overview of how diversity of all sizes contributes to the stability of an ecosystem. It features awesome critters including ostracods, springtails, isopods, and blind fish! #troglofauna #inverts
Megazosteria patula is just one of Australia's many beautiful native cockroaches. The species is found in a range of habitats, from deserts to caves to under seaweed. Look at that gorgeous iridescence! #bugsky
📸: Ryan T Hughes, Nick Volpe via iNaturalist
