Conch Snails Actually Do Have Some Of Their Own Tricks Up Their Shells— Their Foot Bears A Sharpened

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 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

SEA TOAD MY BELOVED

"anger fishes are nightmare fuel from the deep"

OK smarty pants then how do you explain THIS:

From this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tMQhyATzQA

[Image Description: A red anger fish with big round eyes and a cute pouting expression she is bright red and textured.]

also I want to append to this, we shouldn't necessarily assume that animals will be like humans; in scientific research you want to be careful with your preconceptions and personal biases, and in dealing with animals in person over-anthropomorphizing them can even be dangerous, for you and for them. But I think dismissing it out of hand in the other direction is just pretty ignorant given all the things we do know and all the things we know we don't, dubious from a moral perspective (if a creature looks like it's in pain, uh should not the null hypothesis be that it is in pain?), and stems from a really anthropocentric philosophy that has plagued even certain areas of biology itself (if you've read about like, human brain evolution you know what I mean) in a way that is soo frustrating and just is like, augh stop the ghost of Aristotle haunts you

Also I picked those fruit fly examples because they demonstrate ways in which insects are like us, but there's also by no means anything lesser about animals or other organisms that aren't like us either! Not everything is going to be like us and I think there's value and respect-worthiness in that too.

also there's evidence that white garden snails can distinguish numbers up to five

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

been getting really into rockhounding lately and the subreddits are great

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

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

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

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 🙄😤

One small step for leeches, one giant leap for leechkind! For the first time, we have concrete evidence that at least one species of terrestrial leech in Madagascar can jump. Mai’s work is important to conservation efforts because leeches are increasingly being collected to survey vertebrate biodiversity. By analyzing their blood meals, researchers are able to identify other animals living alongside the leeches, ranging from wildcats to frogs to ground-dwelling birds. Read more about Mai's research in our latest blog post.

Have you ever seen a leech jump? Let us know in the comments!