Pretty Princesses

their hair makes them look so round and fat

This crab is under construction! Read more on the Aquarium's website. 🦀🦺

aquariumofpacific.org

Caring for Crustaceans with Creativity

An aquarist cares for crabs in need of new shells in a new, inventive way, by using non-toxic epoxy, molding, and paint.

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(

“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

I want to play "let's ___ with mama" with the shrimp I study, but they generally do not meet their offspring because of how their life cycle works. The shrimp put their eggs in the mud and then the young may not hatch for years, until some obscure shrimpy conditions are met. They live with a mixed group of strangers and relatives, some of which may be literal decades older, but not mama.

Leeches, on the other hand, carry their young on their underside. Let's remain safely attached to mama

I like making bets about things that happen in the far future and being like “if I’m wrong you can bring me back from the dead and say I told you so”, except haha sucker I’ll be long-eaten by flies by then, and those flies will have been eaten by toads and those toads will have been eaten by more flies; can’t bring me back when my atoms are already recycled and scattered all across the web of life, feeding and being fed upon, fluttering through countless existences before inevitably moving on; how many lives I have lived, how many lands my substance has visited, I am in the air and the water and the rock, how can you bring me back when I am already here

if you do bring manage to bring me back though you’ll have to also bring back a bunch of flies and toads and stuff so have fun with those

If your girl has

bulbous eyes

piercing-sucking mouthparts (beak)

raptorial legs

cogwheel-like structure

that’s not your girl that’s wheel bug!

(photo from this article)

Submitted comment: “I wanted to submit this paper from 2021 which is like. one of the single most aggressive academic papers I have ever seen; for context there are as I understand currently two main strains of thought as to where life first evolved— in submarine alkaline hydrothermal vents, or in above-water volcanic hot springs. The author here I believe is one of the original proponents of the hydrothermal vents hypothesis, defending it against some recent publications from the hot springs camp criticizing it for lacking evidence, and it gets. heated. The whole thing is kinda nuts but this paragraph in particular actually had my jaw actually drop reading it”

Here we counterface all the arguments made in recent papers from the very well-funded and promoted groups militantly opposed to AVT. One of these papers offers the advice “Don’t try to prove an idea is right. Instead, try to falsify it”. Fully cognizant of Popper’s “Reason and Refutation”, this has long been our own mantra, though notably unshared across the community. As an example of good faith, Branscomb and colleagues wrote, “arguably the key virtue of the alkaline hydrothermal vent (AHV) model as a scientific hypothesis regarding the initial steps in the emergence of life is its essentially unique vulnerability to disproof. It places all of its chips on the claim that certain naturally arising, but experimentally reproducible, geochemical circumstances do produce castles of mineral ‘cells’ in which three key, undeniably life-like chemical disequilibria are ‘abiotically’ generated and maintained. If it proves not to be possible to experimentally substantiate these conjectures, then we may expect interest in the theory to wane.” Furthermore, falsifiable predictions of AVT were listed in Russell that would, if demonstrated, “reveal embarrassing missing links, or even leave the AVT as just one more casualty of the general theory of natural rejection.” We look forward to similar commitment and clarity from the wet-dry polymerizing pond people. However, we do admit to being impressed over the one prediction made by this group—viz., Dimitar Sassalov’s promise that Harvard University “will soon have the equivalent of a living thing in the lab at the chemical level”. We will be particularly interested to hear what bearing such an artifact might have on the putative ‘first universal ancestor’, its evolving progeny and the geochemical/geophysical disequilibria responsible for its emergence?

The “Water Problem”(sic), the Illusory Pond and Life’s Submarine Emergence—A Review (Russell, 2021)

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