bad biology memes babey!

the memes of a conservation biology student

[hellisratherpleasant]

found this on the Savary Island Encyclopedia

[bunjywunjy]

Spare some albatross facts?

albatrosses of all species mate for life, which is a big honkin' deal for a bird that lives for well north of 60 years!

when an albatross reaches sexual maturity, it will attend a yearly gathering of other single albatrosses of its own kind, whereupon it will perform a long, complicated, and EXTREMELY bizarre courtship with its chosen paramour until they seal the deal! TILL DEATH DO US PART.

(not all mated pairs are male-female, either! there's also a fair number of male-male and female-female pairs out there who just decided they liked each other better than the opposite sex, and baby, that's just natural.)

the albatross pair will spend most of their time apart, drifting gently around the world on the ocean air currents thousands of miles apart. but when the time comes around to make another, smaller albatross, they'll return to the same place they first said their vows to find each other and get crackin'!

they then proceed to create and raise a beautiful baby muppet together, and the circle of life goes on.

[abandoned-as-mustard]

Is there a divorce rate? Cuz even with penguins supposedly mating for life, about 20% of them split up 😂

[bunjywunjy]

actually, even accounting for species variation, the albatross divorce rate is pretty close to 0%.

give thanks! give thanks!!

[montereybayaquarium]

Two tubular tunicates took turns tuning two tuna for a toot, but too untoward was the tooling tour to the tunids that they entombed the two tunicates in a toothy toupee—anyway happy Twos Day!

[etakeh]

NIGHTJARS

You heard me.  

Nightjars.

They are the BEST birds.  Don’t come at me with BUT CORVIDS y’all know Corvids aren’t birds, they’re magic.

Anyway.  Nightjars.  Why nightjars, you might ask.  Well let me tell  you why.

I’ve already told you about the Tawny Frogmouth

But there is also the Great Eared Nightjar

Pennant-winged Nightjar

Standard-winged Nightjar. Yes, those are part of its wings. No, I don’t know WTF.

This oddly shaped stump.  haha tricked you!  It’s a Tawny frogmouth and baby.

Lyretail Nightjar.  again, why.  again, no idea.

Australian owlet-nightjar

Swallowtail Nightjar.  Not so fancy?  look again. that mustache.

Not into cute mustaches on birds?

Tell that to this Sickle-winged Nightjar.  

Before it cuts you down with its badass wings.

Hey another stump - wait no it’s a FROGMOUTH

I’m not the first to have come to this conclusion.  

says right there.  BEST BIRD.

Ok whatever Indian Nightjar doesn’t care what you think about it.

If you don’t agree, you can sit over there and be wrong.

[toastbutteregg]

[amphibianaday]

some amphibian valentines! feel free ot use them :D

(day 464)

[jewishpangolin]

[montereybayaquarium]

It’s time to discover your inner shrimp—are you more like a mantis shrimp, a brine shrimp, or…??? Take our Shrimp Week personality quiz and shellebrate the real you!

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

sometimes I forget orchids grow on trees and I’m like. oh.

[twosidedcherrytrees]

They do what now?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

in the wild, most orchids grow on tree bark, a fact which will never not bring me a profound sense of delight

interestingly, orchids aren’t parasites–they are just harmless squatters hanging out with their arboreal buddies. it’s a form of commensalism–one organism benefits, the other neither benefits nor is harmed.

[paleiobotanicalbackwardslicorice]

OK but orchids ARE parasites. They just aren’t parasites on trees. All orchids have this very bizzare lifecycle where they begin life as parasites on fungi. Here’s the rough strategy:

1. There’s a tradeoff between how much nutrients can be in a single seed and how many seeds you can make. On one end is the double coconut, the largest seed in the world weighing as much as a small child but each double coconut palm tree makes relatively few seeds per individual per season. OR. Make a fuckton of seed that individually cost very little to make. A lot of your small nonwoody plants chose this option, grasses, dandelions, any little weeds usually.

2. But there’s a limit to how far you can push this.

3. And by god orchids crossed it.

4. Orchid seeds are so fucking small they don’t have the energy stores to fucking germinate.

5. Orchid seeds are so small that they only consist of a few cells that haven’t decided who’s going to be roots or leaves yet.

6. And this is great! If you preferred habitat is in trees where the ability to disperse from one treetop to the next and find the right little spot on that tree to survive as a seedling for a few years is really hard. Lots of seed that can float on the wind and find just that spot is great for that.

7. But shit for actually, you know, being alive.

8. But orchids are crafty bastards.

9. Most plants try very hard not to be colonized by fungi, thats usually not good.

10. But orchid seeds just let fungi in.

11. And how the turn tables.

12. Because they just start eating the fungi back.

13. And this is where it gets weird.

14. Orchids are easily in the running for most diverse plant family at nearly 30,000 different species

15. And every single fucking one of them is like this.

16. And worse than that most of them are dependent on a single species of fungus to do this for them, so they produce millions of seeds just so that one might find the one right fungus.

17. And then after that anything can happen.

18. Some orchids are nice and start paying back their hosts onve they get big enough to phtotosynthesize with nice sugars.

19. Some orchids move on to as many as 30 other fungal species throughout their lives.

20. Some complete bastards keep being parasites after they are big enough to photosynthesize on their own. That’s right, a plant that can make its own food is stealing from something that lives on dead leaves.

21. Some orchids just never grow out of it, orchids have turned into permanent parasites more often than any other group of plants because they’re all parasites so becoming a full parasite is nbd.

22. And worse, most of these actually parasitize fungi that are symbiotic with forest trees that supply sugar to the fungi in return for better access to mineral nutrients, effectively making the orchids both parasites on the fungi and the trees, in a sense the whole ecosystem.

23. This leads to one more weird phenomenon. Mutant albino orchids unable to photosynthesize, of species that normally can photosynthesize, are often recorded as being able to reach maturity and flower without issue. because they just keep being parasites instead. Orchids can just. become parasites at will.

In conclusion orchids are just the weirdest fucking plants in the world. Technically all the above applies to this obscure group of ferns called the Ophioglossum family too. Same fucked up start out life as parasites and become independent (or not) later thing.

[jennenen]

@elodieunderglass I thought you’d enjoy this.

[elodieunderglass]

That’s so kind of you, thank you!

[kristina100000]

me and my girl

[sleepy-bebby]

Chinese giant salamander (娃娃鱼) a.k.a ‘baby fish’ due to the sound they make that sounds like a baby crying.

The Chinese giant salamander is one of the largest salamanders and one of the largest amphibians in the world. It is fully aquatic and is endemic to rocky mountain streams and lakes in the Yangtze river basin of central China.

The Chinese giant salamander is considered to be a "living fossil". Although protected under Chinese laws, its population has faced severe declined over the last 70 years and is currently (2022) listed as threatened. There are evidence indicating that the Chinese giant salamander may be composed of at least five cryptic species, further compounding each individual species' endangerment. It can reach up to 50 kg (110 lb) in weight and 1.8 m (5.9 ft) in length.

Here is a video of a 200-year-old Chinese giant salamander that was found in a cave.

Here is a video of it making the crying sound.

Here is another video

[academicssay]

academic publishing explained | source: https://twitter.com/dglaucomflecken/status/1484679759829209090?s=21 

[koryos]

you, a generalist unspecialized mouse or mouselike mammal:

- food goes from esophagus to stomach to intestine

- can eat and digest almost anything

- adaptable and can survive in many different environments

me, a specialized sanguivorous vampire bat:

- food goes from esophagus to intestine to stomach to intestine

- can only eat blood

- will die if I don’t eat for one night (unless someone vomits in my mouth)

- will die if there’s not enough humidity in the air

- will die if I exercise too much

- will become dehydrated if I drink too much

- constantly pissing so I’m not too heavy to fly

[koryos]

I’ve gotten a couple of requests for more info on this and also I fuckin’ love these horrible creatures so let me explain the digestive system of the vampire bat. I guarantee by the end you will be wondering how these creatures even exist.

Vampire bats are the only known obligate blood feeding vertebrates. Other animals like vampire finches supplement their blood diets with other stuff, depending on what’s available. This is because blood is a terrible food to live solely on.

Blood is, first and foremost, 92% just plain water. This means to gain appreciable nutritional value from it, you have to drink A LOT. Common vampire bats drink around 20 grams of blood each night, which doesn’t sound like much unless you realize that common vampire bats weigh, on average, around 30 grams. (Several of them could fit snugly in a teacup.) That’s like if a person who weighed 150 pounds/68 kg drank 100 lbs/45 kg of fluid every night in half an hour.

This presents an issue, because vampire bats can’t just swell up into an orb and roll off when they’re done feeding- they need to be light enough to fly. So blood needs to be processed very fast by their digestive system so they can shed the water weight. This is why vampire bats start peeing within about two minutes of feeding, and continue peeing through their approximately 30 min feeding session. It shoots through their body that fast.

Peeing this much at once has consequences on the body, though. To put it briefly, while vampire bat pee is mostly clear water at the beginning of the feeding, it is dark with urea by the end. (Urea is a waste product from food that builds up in the body and is released by urine.) Because they need to keep peeing to process the blood fast and dump toxic urea from the body, their urine becomes more and more concentrated as their bodies run out of water to dilute their urine with. So even though bats may consume 2/3 or more of their body weight of fluid each night, the vast majority of which is water, they may become dehydrated.

Their high risk of dehydration is why they can’t handle dry environments, and why you don’t find them outside of tropical environments. (Really it’s a miracle these creatures can survive at all.)

Blood isn’t just a troublesome food because you need to drink a lot of it to live. It’s troublesome because even with the water taken out, the nutritional value of what remains SUCKS, no pun intended. It’s literally basically just some proteins and iron. And while that may be why vampire bats are so jacked (seriously, they’re very muscular in places most bats aren’t), it is extremely difficult to thrive on. One big reason is that blood contains almost no fat, which is crucial to most animals because it provides spare batteries- essentially, stored energy we can use if food is scarce.

A vampire bat does not have this backup. They will literally die within about 36 hours of not feeding. Even mice can live 3-4 days without food, and they normally live for two years as opposed to a vampire bat’s 12-20 years. (Depending on their environment.) Each and every night in a vampire bat’s life is on a knife’s edge, teetering towards starvation.

These bats do help each other, however, by regurgitating small amounts of blood for their hungry colony mates who haven’t found food for the night. Without this behavior I’m not sure the species would be anywhere near the populations it has now; they might not be able to thrive at all considering how desperately mothers with pups need the food. It takes most small bats about two weeks to wean their pups. It can take vampire bats up to nine months to wean their pups (though more generally it’s around four months) because their milk suffers from the same lack of nutrition as their food. They also have unusually long pregnancies (5-7 months; other similar-sized bats average around 6 weeks) for the same reason.

The energy budgeting for the vampire bats is so severe that they actually have a sharp limit for how far they can fly before they become exhausted. Vampire bats are not known to migrate or even relocate because frankly, they might end up dropping dead out of the sky.

So, to recap, each day is a struggle between life and death, the bats teeter between drinking too much and becoming too heavy to fly and/or dehydrated, or drinking too little and dying on the way back. This is a highly successful species we’re talking about here. How they’re so successful with these constraints is a mystery to me, although it might have something to do with their high intelligence.

I haven’t covered one thing, which is the structure of the vampire bat’s digestive system. So. For the vast majority of vertebrates, food goes in the mouth, down the esophagus, into the stomach and through the intestines. Let’s call the esophagus/stomach/intestine routine ABC. Vampire bats… take a slightly different route. Using these letters, their digestive order would be ACBC.

Take a look at the following diagram. An average insect-eating bat’s organs are shown on the left, while those of a vampire bat are on the right.

You may notice that things are a bit… off. Unlike practically any other vertebrate on the planet, a vampire bat’s esophagus splits into two branches. One branch leads directly to the intestines, the other to the stomach. The stomach and intestines are not connected in any other way.

The question is: why? Why this? Why do you have to be like this, vampire bats?

Naturally, the answer is in the diet again. The bat uses its intestines to pull out the negligible nutrition from the blood quickly, then sends the resulting wastewater to the stomach, which balloons tremendously even as it rapidly sends the water to the kidneys to be processed into urine. (Then later they have sludgy black poops.) Even with their fast urination system, bats only manage to shed about a quarter of their water weight by the time they lift off into a sloshy flight, weighing easily twice as much as when they left. See the “before and after” shots below.

(Both photos taken by Jon Flanders. Hey kids, contrary to these images, never touch a bat with bare hands, much less a bat that can deliver extremely deep wounds as well as the bacteria and viruses of whatever animal they just fed on. Don’t Do That™)

Anyway. I need to stop talking about vampire bat digestion because this got uhhhhhh long. It’s a fascinating yet mystifying subject. If you want to learn more I recommend Dark Banquet: Blood and the Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt. I learned a lot of stuff that I wrote here from that particular book, and it makes for a pretty good read (even though I disagree with his hypothesis about how vampirism evolved in bats). If you’re interested in vampire bat behavior, which is equally interesting, I recommend looking into the research of Gerry Carter.

[zebug]

So, I learned about this years ago. As a kid I was big into vampire novels. This one book on Amazon books was supposed to be some vampire comedy. I don’t remember it being that funny but I do remember one of the pain points were that the police were chasing down a serial killer. They called him The Pisser because he would pee on the bodies/ all over the crime scene after killing the victim. It turns out the perp was a vampire and, like vampire bats of the namesake, would have to quickly remove much of what he took in. I did not look at vampires the same for years…

[morrak]

Untitled Wednesday Library Series, Part 64

Known also as Hey look, Morrak finally read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2003 Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, or: Shit, dude, another university press ecology book? To both charges I say yes, yes, I know.

The How

Gathering Moss feels like it’s everywhere, at least if you’re me, or at least it did between five years and two years ago, at least when I was in used bookstores. Maybe I got it at one of those, or maybe I got it new. Maybe it was online. I’m not really sure. Point is I’ve had it sitting on my shelf alongside 2013’s Braiding Sweetgrass for a while now.

Neither one is really escapable in my reading or social circle. A perk of being surrounded by people smarter, more thoughtful, and better informed and experienced than me is that I can pretty much trust them when they say a thing is good and worthwhile. Several years of good words about this book plus its appearance in some other books’ bibliographies finally made me pick it up last week.

The Text

Good and worthwhile. I try not to make these posts book reviews in the traditional sense. That’s not to say that I think those things aren’t worth doing — they are, for at least a few reasons — but I’m not usually the right person for it. That’s no different here, but my impressions are vaguely book review-shaped.

Gathering Moss is, I think, as much a classic as it can be given its age. Kimmerer’s work and reputation have reach for a reason; this books feels and functions like a lot of other successful ecology writing, which is to say it’s sound and effective.

I don’t find the prose works very well for me, but people whose taste I respect and broadly share have said the opposite. My botanical experience comes on the one hand from a very formal academic background and on the other from time spent with gardeners and ranchers and white outdoorsy types. The storytelling pace and overall tone of the book don’t fit either of those molds, and I don’t think I was in the right headspace to meet it where it stood. That’s a strength of the book and a weakness on my part, mind you; I appreciated it deeply but couldn’t get myself to switch gears before the pages ran out.

Counter to that feeling was the knowledge that reading so much that’s been written downstream of this left me anticipating its strongest messages — on evolution, on ways of knowing, on scale, on relationship to environment — in a way that watered them down. I dearly wish I’d picked this up a few years ago, because I’d rather have learned those lessons from this book first rather than encounter them the way I did. Bittersweet to find it now.

It took until the chapter on Sphagnum bogs for me to feel really affected, and then only because I have experience with those habitats and seeing them destroyed. My strongest takeaway was disappointment that I needed such a personal connection for the book to get a rise out of me.

The Object

Definitely a university press paperback. I counted two bizarre editing/copy errors, and the text wrapping on the illustrations was sometimes genuinely hard to read around. The illustrations themselves are extremely good and add a lot. Exactly the right kind of addition; they contribute a lot to the tone and descriptions alike.

Sometimes a book feels cheap and slightly impermanent, and sometimes that’s a better effect than being too nice to drag around with you. I feel like I’ve read a million books built like this camping or in airports, and I like that about it. It’s approachable.

The Why, Though?

Given what else I have on my shelves, I wouldn’t want to be without this. I strongly suspect I’ll have a better experience with Braiding Sweetgrass, then eventually come back to this and feel like it’s clicked. I’ll definitely be lending it out, because again, I think it’s good and worthwhile.

[thunderoad]

“People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty” - a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines - and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple of days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran. Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants - with which they shared the confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below. On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, they’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t eve see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me. “All you’ll see is black.””

— Mary Roach. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.  (via hummeline)

[astronomy-to-zoology]

Spectacled Eider (Somateria fischeri)

…is a large species of sea duck native to the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. Like other sea ducks the spectacled eider dives for its meals which usually consist of molluscs and crustaceans. The spectacled eider like other eider species is sexually dimorphic as males sport a striking white, black and green coloration while females have a more modest chocolate brown coloration. During the breeding season eider pairs will move inland to tundras close to the sea to lay their young.

Phylogeny

Animalia-Chordata-Aves-Anseriformes-Anatidae-Merginae-Somateria-fischeri

Image Source(s)

[worm-suggestion]

Bro i am sorry but you look like shit right now.

[daffy-dork-deactivated20220129]

Don’t you dare badmouth her 

[elodieunderglass]

Not everyone is READY for a duck in a balaclava

[astraldemise]

you ever see an animal that you know is like an apex predator that could tear you apart if it so inclined to but you also just think theres a sense of comfort about its existence ? thats how i feel about tigers

[astraldemise]

she would never hurt me (she would)

[maelwife]

Salad for wolves would have awoogula in it