Phoronopsis - Actinotroch

these are the miserable remains of a chestnut weevil (Curculio elephas) who will never again feel the joy of a freshly drilled acorn after unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated upon her by me

this is her thirty seconds later. the atrocities that she miraculously recovered from included "being gently scooped up from a branch"

(September 1st, 2024)

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.

During the storm, I've had a wasp sheltering on my window.

It's been two days now, and she's still there, so I gave her some honey

Lookit her! slurping away!

@onenicebugperday

sensitive white boys

I heard a commotion of buzzing in the long grass, so I went in there in my pajamas because I thought it might be a wasp attacking something (cool), but it was just a bottlefly getting upset because there was a sticky seed on his wing

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)

Oftentimes I see people just make shit up about bugs and other invertebrates. People will say stuff like "actually it's been scientifically proven that insects are physically incapable of cognition" with no source, and then you look it up and in fact there is tons and tons of literature reporting results on this exact thing. A while back after getting into an argument with people online about wasps, I decided to try compiling sources on invertebrate cognition out of spite and I had to take a break at some point because there is so much literature out there, it is actually overwhelming. Just with fruit flies alone, there's studies on how they form stable social networks and fight to establish hierarchies; how they make group decisions and act differently in crowds; how they pay attention to what other flies are doing and teach and learn from each other, even with other species. When subjected to pain out of their control, they can develop depression and respond to SSRIs to the point that they are literally used as animal models to study how to treat depression in humans. And that's just like, one animal!

Even with all the research there is though the truth is that we just haven't studied things like cognition, perception, behavior, sociality, etc. for the vast majority of invertebrates (i.e. the vast majority of animals). Most behavioral research (honestly, just bio research in general) is focused on vertebrates -- particularly mammals -- and the research that has been performed for invertebrates has still only been done for a small handful of species and lineages. Fruit flies are one of the single most studied organisms in the world (and there's still a lot we don't know about them). If idk, clams felt emotions, do you think you would be able to tell by just looking at them? (I have no idea if they do or not, I don't think anyone has studied this. we do know scallops can see.) But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and given the small glimpses of insight we have gotten into the vast world of unknowns, I think yeah it's pretty obvious that there is way more going on with a lot of animals than people think. Scala naturae my behated

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

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 🙄😤

TWO INJURED SEA COMBS CAN FUSE INTO A SINGLE ENTITY, AND THRIVE

In a surprising new discovery, scientists have found that two injured individuals of Mnemiopsis leidyi, a species of comb jellies or ctenophores, can fuse into a single entity. This phenomenon, which challenges our typical understanding of biological processes, reveals just how remarkable these planktonic creatures truly are.

Ctenophores, known for their translucent beauty and delicate movement in the ocean, appear to lack a mechanism called allorecognition—the ability to distinguish between self and non-self. This means that, when two comb jellies are injured and placed close together, they can merge, not just physically, but also functionally. Their nervous systems combine, allowing them to share nerve signals (or action potentials), and even their digestive systems become one.

The discovery was made by Dr. Jokura and his team, who were observing comb jellies in a seawater tank. After removing parts of their lobes and placing them side by side, they were astonished to see 9 out of 10 injured comb jellies fuse to form a single organism. Even more fascinating, the newly formed organism survived for at least three weeks, with its muscle contractions fully synchronized within just two hours. The digestive system also fused, enabling food taken in by one mouth to travel through their shared canal and exit through both anuses—although not at the same time!

While the exact benefits of this fusion are still unclear, the researchers believe that studying this phenomenon could provide valuable insights into how organisms integrate nervous systems and even how tissue regeneration occurs. It may also offer clues about immune system functions in species where the lines between individual organisms become blurred.

This discovery offers a glimpse into the hidden potential of the ocean’s lesser-known inhabitants, challenging what we think we know about biological boundaries and cooperation.

Video: Kei Jokura

Reference: Jakura et al., 2024. Rapid physiological integration of fused ctenophores. Current Biology

The first image linked is not actually a priapulid but a sea cucumber in its spawning posture! It was misidentified on iNaturalist and went viral before it was corrected— see the original observation here. (It gets kinda heated which I think is kinda funny. Penis worms are serious business!) I have always said before that I want internet fame specifically for two reasons: to make PSAs about Anomalocaris’s head carapace which everybody always leaves out of drawings because of that one inaccurate museum model, and about the incorrectly identified sea cucumber photo about which is now like the first image result you get when searching for penis worms and is my NEMESIS 😠 (the misinformation, not the photo or the sea cucumber, those are great)

For all the worm fans— priapulids are super easy to identify; there are as of the time of writing only 22 recognized species, and for many of them the only photos of them are from articles in scientific journals. Over half the species are microscopic, and the macroscopic ones are mainly found in polar regions, often in the deep sea, where they are usually burrowed in sediment and thus are little-encountered by people. The only one of them that is commonly photographed (and studied) is Priapulus caudatus, which is broadly found across the northern northern hemisphere even in shallow waters and I think probably has to be the most accessible species in general. They look like this:

image by Thomas Trott

This species accounts for probably 99% of the images of priapulids out there, and its relatives look rather similar, such as its southern hemisphere counterpart Priapulus tuberculatospinosus or the two-tailed species Priapulopsis bicaudatus. The intricate, feathery tails (referred to in the literature as “caudal appendages”) are probably the most distinctive feature of this group; they are believed to be involved in respiration, though as with many things about the phylum it is not known for certain. (See this recent paper for a review of macroscopic priapulid morphology.) In the zoomed-out photos of that sea cucumber you can see on the iNat page, it lacks a tail which is a dead giveaway that it is not any of these; also note that while it has some longitudinal striations along what sorta looks like a proboscis, they don’t actually bear any teeth! The spined, toothed proboscides of priapulids are indeed super cool and are their most distinctive feature setting them apart from other proboscis-bearing worms like peanut worms or spoon worms, which are often also misidentified online as priapulids. A fun fact is that the shape of their teeth varies across species in a way that appears to be closely correlated with their diet, see this paper for a neat study that uses tooth shapes to examine the different ecological niches occupied by extant priapulids and their Cambrian relatives!

The only other macroscopic priapulids that don’t look much like Priapulus are the two species Halicryptus spinulosus and Halicryptus higginsi, the latter of which I believe there are literally like two full-body photos in existence of it, one of which is from a login-walled journal article from 1999 and the other of which is one of the specimens from that 1999 article photographed after 25 years preserved in a museum. There’s a decent number of photos floating around of H. spinulosus (though still not as many as P. caudatus); they look like this:

image by Claude Nozères

As you can see, Halicryptus lack tails and have a much less prominent proboscis than Priapulus and its relatives, which you can only see the spines of on the very tip; H. spinulosus in particular has a rather short and small body that distinguishes it a lot, while H. higginsi is the largest known species of priapulid in the world (see this paper for a review of both of them). They’re maybe less distinctive-looking but idk, I don’t know off the top of my head if there’s super anything else you would mistake them for, and images of them are pretty uncommon anyway. In any case as far as macroscopic priapulids go, these are the only ones you have to look out for; if you’ve got those down you’re all set! As stated before, most priapulid species are actually microscopic; just for fun here’s the tropical meiobenthic species Tubiluchus corallicola:

image by Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

look at that squiggly tail!

And yeah in conclusion priapulids are super cool and underrated and I wish there were more people paying attention to them; there’s soooo many neglected taxa that we’re still only just discovering basic aspects of their biology and priapulids are one of them! If you want to see their amazing extensible proboscis in action, linked below is by far the best priapulid video out there, I highly recommend it. And most of all remember everybody THAT PHOTO IS A FRICKING SEA CUCUMBER, NOT EVERY WORM THAT LOOKS LIKE A PENIS IS A PENIS WORM AAAAAAA 😭😭😭

Can't believe any real animal has teeth as awesome as penis worms have.

They are meat eaters :)