Phoronopsis - Actinotroch

In the fish tank straight up "grisping it" and by "it", haha, well. Let's justr say. My rok.

been getting really into rockhounding lately and the subreddits are great

I saw this one paper where they made an artificial neural network based on the actual neural architecture of the fruit fly and trained it on pictures of flies to show that 1. individual fruit flies are visually distinct 2. they are probably able to differentiate between each other visually despite their vision being terrible. And as a comparison they had a bunch of experienced fly scientists (aka “flyentists”) try to identify the same pictures of flies and they failed miserably which I thought was really funny

This ability to re-identify flies across days opens experimental possibilities, especially considering that this performance was achieved with static images (16fps yields around a thousand estimates of ID per minute, allowing high confidence in the parsimonious correct identification). This is in contrast to the human ability to re-identify flies, which at low resolutions is barely better than chance.

Clearly, all models can learn to re-identify flies to some extent, underscoring the individual-level variation in D. melanogaster. Re-identifying flies is in fact easier for DCNs than CIFAR10 (at least with centred images of flies acquired at the same distance). Even the model that rivals, in some sense, the representational performance of humans does ten times better than humans. Why humans can’t tell one fly from another is not clear. Regardless of whether it was evolutionarily beneficial to discriminate individual flies, humans do have incredible pattern detection abilities. It may simply be a lack of experience (although we attempted to address this by only using experienced Drosophila researchers as volunteers) or a more cryptic pattern-recognition ‘blind-spot’ of humans. In either case, these findings should spur new experiments to further understand the mechanisms of human vision and experience and how they fail in this case.

these CRINGE scientists FAILED to identify flies that all our models could smho 🙄😤

“Measuring sea cucumber body dimensions and weight and determining their relationship is notoriously difficult.” — Prescott, Zhou & Prasetyo 2015

“Tagging sea cucumbers is notoriously difficult because of their plastic nature and autolysis capacities.” — Gianasi, Verkaik, Hamel & Mercier 2015

“Nevertheless, marking and tracking sea cucumbers is notoriously difficult and represents a serious challenge.” — Rodríguez-Barreras, Lopéz-Morell & Sabat 2016

“Obtaining accurate but non-destructive mass and morphology measurements of holothuroids is notoriously difficult because they readily change shape and retain water in their body cavity.” — Munger, Watkins, Dunic & Côté 2023

the notoriously difficult cucumber

image by Amaury Durbano

Penis worms is serious business! been no-joke half-considering making an account to make a PSA about it (and other invertebrate stuff) for a while ^^; I like priapulids a lot, they’re a really underrated (and understudied) phylum

Hi, created an account just to let you know the photo you posted earlier is not a priapulid but a spawning sea cucumber, likely genus Paracaudina. It was misidentified on iNaturalist and went viral before it got corrected, and now it comes up on the search results along with a bunch of other worms like spoon and peanut worms that people misidentify as priapulids. The only priapulid that there’s good photos of is P. caudatus which is very distinctive if you know what it looks like. Love the blog!

Ah!!! Thank you very much for letting me know friend (even going as far as to make an account about it), sucks that these incorrect images have spread so far x(

Conch snails actually do have some of their own tricks up their shells— their foot bears a sharpened operculum that they use to push themselves around much faster than a lot of slow predators (including cone snails) can move, or even to fight back. It's believed that their high-resolution vision, which is some of the best among all known gastropods, allows them to detect and react to predators in advance (source 1, 2)

Here's a video of a conch snail in action:

How are conchs even real

their hair makes them look so round and fat

Met this cool guy outside and then he broke into my house later that night

This is a robber fly known as a hanging thief so you know what he was doing in your home!! (Thieving)

Jumping spider mimic planthoppers in the genus Rhotana

Photo 1 by tenebrionidfan, 2 by gancw1, 3 by budak, and 4 by deeqld

:)

:D

:3

:V