Feelings Wheel❤️

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.

My science teacher writes a joke on this board every week, they are so bad that they are funny and I love it

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/?

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.

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!

Why did I think anyone would like this?

Antonio Frilli, “Sweet Dreams”, Marble sculpture (𝟣𝟪𝟫𝟤).

Yves Pires: "The Kiss" (2012)

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.

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The Swamp (1900) by Gustav Klimt