Seeing UV Colors Is Common For Butterflies, But In Some Species, It Is A Female-only Power

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.⁠

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

Why did I think anyone would like this?

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

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 Swamp (1900) by Gustav Klimt

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.

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

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.

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.