Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes
Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.
DM ME FOR BUG TALES
Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes
Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.
I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.
(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)
I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/
That study has a great diagram:
Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones
The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it’s heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn’t have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.
Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.
Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study
Sometimes ants can’t smell ants either and you get supercolonies
Nobody goes nutting any more huh
Aussie magpies are ridiculously smart, love them as an example of convergent evolution since they are not corvids but rather songbirds that have evolved to be more crow-like to fill a similar niche to corvids
Studio Ghibli vibes
love me some land crustaceans
One common test is the famous “mirror test” where an animal is given some problem that can only be solved by using its own reflection in a mirror for reference, such as a study involving an Australian ant. They put a blue dot made of felt (I think) on the ant’s head behind the antennae, and watched the ant clean itself once it saw that it’s reflection had a weird blue thing on its head. But I don’t know if there are other tests for “self awareness”
Thankfully I crawled through with a passing grade, it’s all behind me
But the benzene rings, they still haunt my nightmares
Look this is true but AT LEAST it’s how politics is supposed to work, it’s not about choosing the most ethically and morally consistent person, it’s about having a person in the seat who will vote the way their constituents want, no more
So ashamed of how shit I was at organic chemistry
My brain just could not complete those fucking benzene rings why am I so INCOMPETENT WHY
That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first
Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time
Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.