In The Fish Tank Straight Up "grisping It" And By "it", Haha, Well. Let's Justr Say. My Rok.

pretty princesses

we all know people who go out of their way to be rude on bug appreciation posts are annoying as heck but sometimes they manage to read the room so absurdly poorly that it's just funny. You'll see a photo with 200 notes by someone called "flylover4ever" with the caption "look at this beautiful blowfly I found on my morning bug hunt 😊" and every comment note and tag is something like "look at that coloring!" "what beautiful eyes you have 😍" "KISSING HER ON THE TERGAL PLATE" and then there's just one rando person being like "EWWW kill it with fire 🤮". And it's like how did you even get here. are you lost, where did you even come from

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

their hair makes them look so round and fat

been getting really into rockhounding lately and the subreddits are great

This was from a 2015 study by Fossette et al. which observed wild Rhizostoma octopus jellyfish, aka barrel or dustbin lid jellfish, and found that they actively orient themselves and swim against the current, contrary to the popular image of scyphozoan jellies as passive directionless drifters! Based on these observations, they (the scientists) ran computer simulations of virtual jellyfish moving through ocean currents demonstrating that this active swimming is probably really really important for allowing them (the jellyfish) to form and maintain large blooms while avoiding getting stranded alone or ashore

thinking about that time scientists put tracking collars on jellyfish

oh oh speaking of fruit fly behavior, I hadn't seen it when I reblogged this post before but someone mentioned it in the tags— just last month there was a super super neat paper published describing play behavior in fruit flies! Basically they put a bunch of fruit flies in containers with food and a rotating carousel embedded in the floor (which they could walk on and off at will) and then used motion-tracking software to quantify how much time the flies spent time in different parts of the container and how they moved between them. The researchers found that while most of the flies avoided the carousel, quickly leaving after going on it, about a quarter of them would repeatedly walk onto the spinning carousel and stay there for extended durations, while spending less time visiting the food patch; in further trials, where the containers had two carousels which alternately spun and stopped every few minutes, carousel-seeking flies would often stay on one carousel until it stopped and then move to the other. (I don't think it'll embed here but see the link for a video of a fly going back and forth between the two carousels!)

The researchers interpret this as the flies having individual preferences for going on the carousel, and those who did go on it were doing so voluntarily and deliberately (as opposed to e.g. accidentally walking into it and getting trapped), seemingly just because they liked it. The really suggestive thing here is that the carousel-seeking flies would do this over food: as depicted in figure 2 of that paper, the researchers found that both the control-group flies (for whom the carousel was stationary) and the carousel-avoiding flies spent around 40% of their time visiting the food patch; in contrast, the flies who rode the carousels spent only half that time at the food patch, and instead spent 24% of the observed time riding the carousel. Obviously we don't know what emotions the flies might be feeling (the authors mention that a good line of follow-up research would be to look at how dopamine/reward pathways are involved in this behavior) but it appears that there is some kind of generally positive feeling that motivates them to do this, cuz yknow food is obviously something they need and want and yet they're choosing to do this instead. They hypothesize that this kind of “passive movement” play-like behavior observed in flies and other animals could functionally serve to ‘train’ their perceptive abilities (specifically, their sense of proprioception) by providing external sensory stimulation

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 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

“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