My Science Teacher Writes A Joke On This Board Every Week, They Are So Bad That They Are Funny And I

J. M. W. Turner - Fishermen at Sea (1796)

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 🌍.

Antonio Canova (1757-1822) Psyche Revived By Cupid's Kiss. Musée du Louvre

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.

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/?

Crescent Moon and Venus

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.

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.