I saw a small green caterpillar ballooning today over a parking lot, though I can't be sure it wasn't a sawfly larva. I didn't know that caterpillars could balloon.

Taxonomist Appreciation Day post

I am in freakin' AWE of people doing primary taxonomic work.

To do it well, you need deep scholarship to track past naming (and misnaming) efforts.

You may need to hunt down specimens only to discover they are damaged, misindentified, or lost.

1/3

Biodiversity - our strongest natural defense against climate change | United Nations Biological diversity — or biodiversity — is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms, from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems such as forests or coral reefs. The biodiversity we see today i...

Instead of listening to a rambling #SOTU address, why not read about the state of global biodiversity and how so many people are working to conserve nature around the world 🌎:

www.un.org/en/climatech...

The spider is Mecaphesa sp.

Six weeks ago: tied my shoes too tight and tore a ligament. I had tied and pulled the laces of my shoes, when a lace broke. After rummaging around, I found a spare pair, but after putting them on, I found them too short to tie. So I pulled them tight enough to squeeze out another inch and tie a bow.

I just saw a glitch in the matrix. I put a bowl on the kitchen counter and dropped a handful of kibble in from a few inches up. One kibble rebounded up two feet to the height my eyes and landed behind the sink. That kibble had more kinetic energy than the potential energy of its drop would provide.

#Crabmas is nearly upon us! Reposting "The 12 Days of Crabmas" is my new holiday tradition 🦀🎄
#throwback #12daysofchristmas #crab

Our market got cancelled tomorrow (😭) so we have a bunch of these left now!

They're beautiful! You can learn about animals!

So many people in the last 2 weekends have said "Oh we should get this for your mom", and then they get one for the other person's mom. Just sayin'

SquidFacts.net

This is so much fun to watch!

I've been avoiding casein because it's supposed to be the ingredient of dairy that promotes mucus production, giving me sinus headaches when my allergies act up. I'm pretty sure cheese and yogurt make things worse for me, but you have me wanting to investigate further.

Panel 01: A ball drawn on a whiteboard. The ball has two eyes on its "sides", the sides not facing you. A wooden teaching pointer is pointed at it, and someone is speaking from off-panel, saying "prey animals have eyes on the SIDES of their head, like this." Panel 02: The teaching point now points to another part of the whiteboard, where a ball has two eyes on its front. The off-panel speaker says "predator animals have eyes on the FRONT, like THIS." Panel 03: We zoom out and reveal the speaker to be Shen, who is holding the teaching pointer and asking the class ahead of him, "any questions?" Panel 04: It's 3 characters at tables in a classroom: A sheep with side eyes on one side, a tiger with front eyes on the other, and a shark raising his fin in the middle.

Every once in a while I have to remove a large Pholcus phalangioides spider from my bathtub before my morning shower, but this morning I have to relocate three!

Every time I read about insect trachea, I think of grasshoppers. I vaguely recall having read something about the efficiency with which oxygen delivers to the cells that power flight.

We know this specifically for the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Insect hemolymph does not supply the insect with O2. Instead, trachea branch from spiracles to provide O2 to the proximity of every cell. During development, cells deficient in oxygen release the signal protein FGF to draw the forming trachea nearby. (Alberts et al., Molec Bio of the Cell, 7th ed)

It blew me away when I first learned this too. The next amazing thing is that transcription factor concentration gradients cause each region of nuclei to specialize into different cells, thereby dividing the insect into segments. I'm still trying to understand how gradients accomplish this.

A fertilized insect egg doesn't repeatedly divide like a vertebrate egg. Instead, its nucleus duplicates itself thousands of times (6000 in fruit flies). These nuclei migrate to the cell periphery, where the membrane folds around them to form cells. (Alberts et al., Molec Bio of the Cell, 7th ed)

"Some of the early microscopists imagined the entire shape and structure of the human body to be already present in the sperm as a 'homunculus,' a miniature human; after fertilization, the homunculus would simply grow and generate a full-sized person." (Alberts et al., Molec Bio of the Cell, 7th ed)

This digitally painted piece honors the survivor spirit of the coyote by tracing its lineage from the first cells of life to the animal trotting our landscapes today. Below the horizon, carefully chosen ancestors mark pivotal moments in adaptation, each contributing to the form and survivor we see today. Above the horizon, Coyote stands alert at the center, framed by both Denver’s skyline and a mountain backdrop, symbols of their ability to thrive in cities as well as wilderness. Embedded in the ground are the skulls and bones of carnivores whose lineages ended long ago, emphasizing Coyote’s persistence in contrast.

"I Contain Multitudes"

This digitally painted piece honors coyote by tracing its lineage from the first cells of life to the animal trotting our cities and the wilderness today.

The thread gives descriptions of all the extinct organisms shown in this piece (not to scale)

And that's how you integrate digital elements into an exhibition. Part of the temporary "China's Dinosaur World" at the Shanghai Natural History Museum, China. Closing this November.

Video source: Shanghai Let's Meet

The question of how DNA encoded proteins "stimulated great excitement. Here was a cryptogram set up by nature that, after more than 3 billion years of evolution, could finally be solved by one of the products of evolution—human beings." (Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, 7th ed.)

A hermit crab crawling across red sand. This one is pale pink with an unornamented white and brown shell that's very weather worn.

A hermit crab crawling across red sand. This one is pink with a spiky black and orange shell.

A hermit crab crawling across red sand. This one is very pale with a white and brown shell that looks like a frilly, oversized tricorn hat.

A hermit crab crawling across red sand. This one is pink with a brown shell with frilly ornamentation.

Let's appreciate the hermit crabs of Simpson Beach.

I had a dog who had three mast cell tumors removed over two years. Visits to the vet were so stressful for her that I decided I wouldn't put her through that again -- and she never had another mast cell tumor. She died years later at 16.5 from some autoimmune condition acquired from a dead Opossum.

This is Google Docs. I still have tremendous trouble with Word even for more common words.

A is my clear fav. I'd rank B as the least readable.

The mispelling "phospohdiesterase" is underlined in red, and the correct spelling "phosphodiesterase" is recommended instead.

I'm taking notes in Google Docs, and I've been impressed with how it recognizes all the technical jargon of molecular biology.

DNA nucleotides appear to average a mutation rate ranging from 1 to 3 out of every 10 billion copied. This likely restricts organisms to having at most 30,000 genes that are "essential," placing an upper limit on the complexity of organisms. (Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, 7th ed.)

LOL! The book isn't arguing for random chance though. It lists six ways nucleotides can change.

Your point is valid, but I don't believe the quote make any claim about what persists.

Right. The text talks much about conserved regions. The claim isn't that the base pairs we have now have all changed in that time, only that replication has failed for each base pair during that time during some attempt at replication.