endless-bloomelle
"Endlessly blooming, even in the quiet seasons."29 - F - The Pyrenees, Spain.⋆｡‧˚ʚ♡ɞ˚‧｡⋆
24 posts
Latest Posts by endless-bloomelle
Museum dates where she stares at the art and I stare at her.
When MBARI’s exploration meets @MontereyBayAquarium’s innovation 🤩✨️
Bloody-belly comb jellies, Lampocteis cruentiventer, are ctenophores, not true jellies. Like other comb jellies, they navigate through the water by beating their shimmering, hair-like cilia. These crimson beauties are found in the twilight zone, using their blood-red stomachs to hide a belly full of glowing (bioluminescent) prey. At these depths, red is nearly invisible, turning their vibrant color into the perfect camouflage.
This species was first observed off the coast of San Diego in 1979, but MBARI researchers, including Senior Research and Education Specialist George Matsumoto, officially named and described it in 2001. The Aquarium’s husbandry team worked for years to decode the mystery of caring for these jellies, becoming the first to display them. Aquarium experts like Senior Aquarist Evan Firl have been able to extend the captive longevity of this species by reducing oxygen concentrations and mimicking the bloody belly’s deep-sea habitat. By combining our deep-sea and animal care expertise, the Aquarium and MBARI have made it possible for everyone to see these tiny translucent treasures in person and learn more about these captivating denizens of the deep.
Hey... what the fuck???
So I read the article, and this is super cool. Basically what happened is that they let a drop of butyl alcohol out from a syringe onto the surface of another liquid, and it just... hung out there? For a very significant amount of time, too. In the past, this type of "droplet levitation" has only lasted a few milliseconds max, but this droplet was staying levitated without any external forces applied for tens of minutes.
The reason this happens is because of Solutocapilllary convection, which as far as I can tell essentially boosts the surface tension of that one spot in the underlying liquid using vapor molecules, so that the butyl alcohol molecule can't sink in.
Also, the reason why I specified that the reason this was cool is because it was done without external forces is that APPARENTLY we've been able to levitate things using sound waves since like... the 1930s. And it makes sense that you can do that, in principle, but it still looks absolutely wild to see.
Millipede under UV light. Many species of arthropods fluoresce, or glow, under ultraviolet light due to due to fluorescent compounds in their exoskeletons. At least one millipede genus, motyxia, is actually bioluminescent, meaning it can produce light on its own.
🐛 b.seahphotography on IG
My science teacher writes a joke on this board every week, they are so bad that they are funny and I love it
AFRICAN PENGUINS IDENTIFY PATNERS BY THEIR CHEST DOTS
Birds are known to be highly social and visual animals, and penguins are not the exception, as they live in dense colonies. Yet no specific visual feature has been identified to be responsible for individual recognition in birds. Now, researchers demonstrate that african penguins (Spheniscus demersus) can recognize their each others using their ventral dot patterns.
Researchers placed a experiment at the Zoomarine Marine Park, in Rome, Italy, to test how penguins will react to a model with plain with no dot penguin, and to penguins with dots, to find out penguins actually could visually recognize the dots of their lovers and friends in the zoo.
Penguins rely strongly on their ventral dot patterns for individual recognition, and may have holistic representations of other penguins in the colony. In this video below, an african penguin named Gerry appears to recognize his mate, Fiorella (left), in an individual recognition experiment.
These findings suggest that african penguins may rely on a more holistic visual representation of their partner, which includes both the ventral dot patterns and their partner's facial features. Notably, these abilities are not dependent on the ability of a pair to produce offspring together. Nemo and Chicco, male partners, showed the same preference for each other as other penguin partner pairs, suggesting that the ability to distinguish the partner from others is driven simply by the special bond developed between nesting partners.
Photo: Few members of the Zoomarine Italia penguin colony. Unique ventral dot patterns are visible on each penguin's chest. Photo: Cristina Pilenga.
Baciadonna et al., 2024. African penguins utilize their ventral dot patterns for individual recognition. Animal Behaviour.
Seeing UV colors is common for butterflies, but in some species, it is a female-only power
So, you may or may not know that many butterflies can actually see in UV light. It is very cool and I'm definitely not jealous that they get extra colors. It's helpful to them because many flowers have UV patterns on them (invisible to us) that let the butterflies know that they're a good source of food. The plants get pollinated and the butterflies get to eat. Everybody wins. This is a simulated version of what butterflies might see when they look at a flower.
Some butterflies, such as the zebra longwing pictured above, only display this trait in females. Because of this, male and female butterflies will tend to visit different types of flowers. But scientists have just recently figured out how this difference came to be, evolutionarily speaking.
Obviously many species have sexually dimorphic traits, some more prominently than others. There are also cases in which one sex develops a trait that is just... less useful than the other, like this case with the UV vision. Almost all butterflies can see in the UV spectrum, so it follows that at some point in the evolutionary line the male zebra longwing butterflies lost that particular ability. There are multiple ways that this sort of thing can happen, and the article covers them briefly, but after sequencing the genome for these butterflies they found that none of those previously seen explanations were the case.
Basically, we already know the gene that causes UV vision in butterflies. It is called the opsin gene. In zebra longtail butterflies, this gene occurs on the chromosome W, which is the female sex chromosome. That means that sometime in history, this gene just jumped from a normal chromosome onto the female-only chromosome, and has locked the male butterflies out of this ability ever since. This is the first time we have seen a gene do a jump like that, and it is pretty cool.
But anyway, appreciate the girlpower of zebra longwing butterflies getting all the UV vision, and take a look at the study! It's free to read, which is really nice to see.
Wake up, babe. New MBARI species just dropped. 🤩
MBARI researchers have discovered a remarkable new species of sea slug that lives in the deep sea. Bathydevius caudactylus swims through the ocean’s midnight zone and lights up with brilliant bioluminescence.
With a voluminous hooded structure at one end, a flat tail fringed with numerous finger-like projections at the other, and colorful internal organs in between, the team initially struggled to place this animal in a group. Because the animal also had a foot like a snail, they nicknamed this the “mystery mollusc.”
The team first observed the mystery mollusc in February 2000 during a dive with the institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon offshore of Monterey Bay at 2,614 meters (8,576 feet) deep.
They leveraged MBARI’s advanced and innovative underwater technology to gather extensive natural history information about the mystery mollusc. After reviewing more than 150 sightings from MBARI’s ROVs over the past 20 years, they published a detailed description of this animal.
Learn more more about this dazzling new denizen of the deep on our website.
Photosynthesis is one of those things that you usually learn about in a simplified way when you're little, that we grow up kinda taking for granted that we "know how that works."
But the process is actually so spine tinglingly bizarre, that if you heard about it for the first time as an adult, you wouldn't even believe it.
Plants are just transmuting light beams into highly complex molecules of sugar. By using the light as a fuckin' battering ram to shatter molecules of water apart. And we're just like "oh yeah, they do that, no big deal" as if that's not a seven layer bizarro dip of what the fuck.
Antonio Canova (1757-1822) Psyche Revived By Cupid's Kiss. Musée du Louvre
Feelings Wheel❤️
In order to discuss your feelings and emotions, you must know how to appropriately name them.
Putting a name to what you're feeling helps you to gain clarity and move forward with identifying your next step toward healing or resolution 💜
Slime Molds and Intelligence
Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.
This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:
Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.
Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.
Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...
To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.
Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.
The more I hear people talk about race, the more I see the need to teach. People actually believe that skin colors represent race for humans without even thinking about it, how dumb and ignorant can humans be?
What in the hell do skin colors have to do with races to start with? I really would appreciate it if people would take the time to educate themselves about scientific racism and teach their children that races don't exist on earth, we are all Black Africans who inhabit earth 🌍.
Love Letters from Space
Love is in the air, and it’s out in space too! The universe is full of amazing chemistry, cosmic couples held together by gravitational attraction, and stars pulsing like beating hearts.
Celestial objects send out messages we can detect if we know how to listen for them. Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us scour the skies for all kinds of star-crossed signals.
Celestial Conversation Hearts
Communication is key for any relationship – including our relationship with space. Different telescopes are tuned to pick up different messages from across the universe, and combining them helps us learn even more. Roman is designed to see some visible light – the type of light our eyes can see, featured in the photo above from a ground-based telescope – in addition to longer wavelengths, called infrared. That will help us peer through clouds of dust and across immense stretches of space.
Other telescopes can see different types of light, and some detectors can even help us study cosmic rays, ghostly neutrinos, and ripples in space called gravitational waves.
Intergalactic Hugs
This visible and near-infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures two hearts locked in a cosmic embrace. Known as the Antennae Galaxies, this pair’s love burns bright. The two spiral galaxies are merging together, igniting the birth of brand new baby stars.
Stellar nurseries are often very dusty places, which can make it hard to tell what’s going on. But since Roman can peer through dust, it will help us see stars in their infancy. And Roman’s large view of space coupled with its sharp, deep imaging will help us study how galaxy mergers have evolved since the early universe.
Cosmic Chemistry
Those stars are destined to create new chemistry, forging elements and scattering them into space as they live, die, and merge together. Roman will help us understand the cosmic era when stars first began forming. The mission will help scientists learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies.
Did you know that U and I (uranium and iodine) were both made from merging neutron stars? Speaking of which…
Fatal Attraction
When two neutron stars come together in a marriage of sorts, it creates some spectacular fireworks! While they start out as stellar sweethearts, these and some other types of cosmic couples are fated for devastating breakups.
When a white dwarf – the leftover core from a Sun-like star that ran out of fuel – steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance and lead to a cataclysmic explosion. Studying these outbursts, called type Ia supernovae, led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Roman will scan the skies for these exploding stars to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.
Going Solo
Plenty of things in our galaxy are single, including hundreds of millions of stellar-mass black holes and trillions of “rogue” planets. These objects are effectively invisible – dark objects lost in the inky void of space – but Roman will see them thanks to wrinkles in space-time.
Anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time. So when an intervening object nearly aligns with a background star from our vantage point, light from the star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer object. The object acts like a natural lens, focusing and amplifying the background star’s light.
Thanks to this observational effect, which makes stars appear to temporarily pulse brighter, Roman will reveal all kinds of things we’d never be able to see otherwise.
Roman is nearly ready to set its sights on so many celestial spectacles. Follow along with the mission’s build progress in this interactive virtual tour of the observatory, and check out these space-themed Valentine’s Day cards.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
The shape of a fish's caudal tail can tell you a lot about how fast the fish moves! A rounded tail is the slowest and a lunate tail is the fastest! The lunate tail has the most optimal ratio of high thrust and low draw, making it the fastest.
Ichthyology Notes 2/?
