Bronze Jarfly

A blog about little lives

[tiny-forests]

moss mfriday #3: Glacier Mice

[image credit]

That's right - it's glacier mice. One of my favorite things maybe on the entire planet. Let's talk about these freaky fuzzy little rats!!

Glacier mice are balls of moss that live in large herds like this in a few select glaciers. They are moss all the way through, with a center consisting of dead moss matter, implying that they begin as small growths of moss and simply accumulate over time, like snowballs. However, their outside surface is alive and well on all sides. Glacier mice have been observed, through tagging and tracking, to roll across the glacier like a majestic herd of wildebeest, exposing all of their sides to the sunlight. They trundle along at a pace of about 2.5 cm per day. That's 30 feet in a year! They're really schmovin'! Certainly further than most mosses can claim to travel.

What's really exciting, though, is that they all move in the same direction, and we're not sure why or how. Scientists experimented to try and attribute their coordinated behavior to wind, sunlight, and the direction that their grazing ground slopes, but to no avail. They speed up, slow down, and change direction in unison, based on some mysterious moss code that we haven't cracked yet.

Cross-section of a glacier mouse. Note the dead moss matter inside, and the short gametophytes on the outside, adapted to harsh winds and sunlight. [image credit]

We have figured out how they roll, though - while the moss ball sits on the ice, it insulates the ice directly underneath it, protecting it from melting. This forms a little pillar of ice that the moss eventually rolls off of. The insulating power of glacier mice also gives it the wonderful ability to host all kinds of microorganisms that otherwise wouldn't survive the glacier's harsh conditions, and their ability to move makes it possible for microorganisms to spread from one habitable spot to another. They're like a bunch of little tardigrade passenger ships, braving the dangerous glacier to go where no water bear has gone before!!

Glacier mice have been found to consist of several moss species, most of which must reproduce asexually in order to survive in the dry climate. They've been observed to live for at least six years, but are projected to live much, much longer. I love them. So much. I hope they know that I love them!! I LOVE THEM!!!!

[source][source][source]

[ospreyonthemoon]

Oh.... the glacier mice...

[bronzejarfly]

Sir David Attenborough—documentarian, naturalist, broadcaster, and the most well-traveled human being in history—has turned 100 years old today.

It's difficult to overstate the impact this man has had on humanity's collective understanding and appreciation for the natural world. Attenborough completely redefined the scope and scientific rigor of nature documentaries through his ground-breaking natural history programs—including his collection of 'Life...' series, which were produced over a span of 30 years and will likely forever remain the greatest nature documentaries ever made.

He of course boasts many other accomplishments, including a long and influential tenure as a senior manager at the BBC which helped guide the trajectory of television programming the world over. But I don't think I'm wrong in believing that it is his work with the BBC Natural History Unit that will remain his most lasting contribution to humanity. I cannot even begin to guess how many children watched his documentaries and became inspired to dedicate their lives to the study and preservation of life on Earth.

I firmly believe that Attenborough's work—and the work of documentarians that followed in his footsteps—will be treasured and celebrated long after most our era's art and culture and media has been forgotten. And while he is intensely lucky to have led such a long and eventful life, I think the rest of us are even luckier, that we are privileged enough to share a world and an epoch with a man who has spent a century teaching us all to love the Earth in all its impossible splendor.

[herpsandbirds]

Buff-fronted Owl (Aegolius harrisii), family Strigidae, order Strigiformes, found in spotty locations across most South American countries

photos: Sergio Gregorio, Alex Mesquita, Hector Bottai

[heedra]

if you learn to love bugs with all your heart the world will feel half as hostile and a thousand times as big

[kedreeva]

This is a quail gizzard!

This little thing contains grit used to grind up anything tough in the GI tract. Since my quail are pretty exclusively fed a processed feed, there nothing too cool in there

But clean it out and you can see the INCREDIBLY tough inner lining

It feels a little bit like wet sandpaper in there. Really cool to open up and look at.

Larger birds like chickens and turkeys that free range have gizzards full of small stones, called gastroliths. There's even a hobby some hunters have, of collecting "turkey pearls" and displaying them!

If the quail have any they are very very very small. I do wonder what the peafowl gizzards...

[weekendviking]

Here's my collection of Moa Gastroliths, mostly agates, collected in the area of Aotearoa New Zealand that I grew up in, by my grandfather, uncle and myself. In our area the local rocks are Cretaceous Basaltic Andesites, Dacites and Rhyolites, and so there's a lot of agate and quartz geodes, amygdaloids and veins. Just like a hen will go for a shiny rock for gizzard grit, Dinornis Maximus and the other Moa species in our area seemed to go for the agates particularly for gizzard stones, so you find the small ones that had been polished away too small to be useful scattered around in singles, wherever they passed in the droppings, while the larger ones you can find in clusters around where a moa died. Sometimes even in a distinct pile if the skeleton was not disturbed or even still present when fossilised/subfossil remains.

There's a distinct variety of polish that identifies a gizzard stone - pits and grooves from the pebble's original morphology are often left untouched, while high areas and corners are smoothed, but with a pitted or matte polish, rather than smoothly shiny, and often a striated or scratched texture to the polish that's quite diagnostic of gastrolith origin. If the stone is polymineralic, especially porphyritic, softer minerals will be both physically and chemically eroded more deeply than harder minerals, giving a careous texture to the polish.

[kedreeva]

This is maybe the coolest thing anyone's ever added to one of my posts. Ancient gizzard stones from an extinct giant bird??? I'm in love.

[herpsandbirds]

Pennant-winged Nightjar (Caprimulgus vexillarius), male, family Caprimulgidae, order Caprimulgiformes, South Africa

photographs by Manfred Suter

[gallusrostromegalus]

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

[despazito]

Dendrogaster (a crustacean that parasitizes starfish)

[loving-n0t-heyting]

this is how they look

[headspace-hotel]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CRUSTACEAN.

[headspace-hotel]

my tags need to go in the main part of the post actually

[revretch]

Fun fact: There's a crustacean that also does this to other crustaceans! It's a type of barnacle called a rhizocephalan, and it infects crabs, altering the crab to take care of the rhizocephalan's eggs like its own:

The funny thing is that, in both cases, the crustacean starts out a regular little crustaceans, with eyes and legs and everything. It only discards those when it becomes an adult!

[atelierentomologica]

Cicada brooch, Wallace Chan

[bogleech]

I'm so sorry if you've talked about this already but I just saw it and you were the first person I thought of

Anyways have you seen this absolutely INSANE rove beetle

I HAVE HOPED TO SEE ACTUAL CLEAR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THIS FOR YEARS. I have seen nothing but scientific drawings and some microscopy slides!!! Oh my god it looks even sillier and more far-fetched than I thought it would. I want everyone to know before they carelessly continue scrolling that this is how the beetle pretends to be a termite and freeloads in termite society and the entire fake termite is just the beetle's abdomen. If you look closely you can see that's what it is, that it just has a massive weird butt so big it can hide entirely under its own butt and that it (the butt) is shaped like a different, inflatable decoy bug with fake antennas and fake legs.

Just four fake legs because it did not study entomology but luckily neither have the termites.

[a-book-of-creatures]

@totallynotagentphilcoulson how dare you hide this in the tags

[crevicedwelling]

the paralyzed cicadas I picked up from a failed cicada killer nest are the perfect material to show off some cool features of insect anatomy! (although the wasp’s venom would keep them alive for her larvae to eat, I froze them to make sure they’re fully dead for dissection).

cicadas are powerful, fast fliers, and all of their thorax is taken up by a bulk of reddish, stringy flight muscles, which I’ll talk more about later. this cicada is a female, so her abdomen is full of white, elongated eggs that she will insert into tree bark with the bladed ovipositor at her rear.

the male cicada’s abdomen, however, is almost entirely empty, and that air-filled space is used as a resonator for his loud calls. the biggest structure visible there is a curved pair of muscles that deforms the tymbals, producing a click with every contraction.

here's a view of the complete muscle, and the tymbals themselves which look like overlapping plates on his belly. if you're curious what the white frosted appearance is, some Neotibicen have a coat of waxy powder or pruinescence; this male N. tibicen is particularly pruinose.

onto the flight muscles:

powered flight is a pretty complex mechanism in any organism, and is never so simple as just flapping wings up and down, but most insects power their flight in a really unintuitive way (at least for us vertebrates): they contract muscles in their thorax that aren’t even attached to the wings!

this method of flight is called indirect flight, in contrast to the direct flight of the dragonflies and mayflies where each of four wings is directly attached to a muscle and can flap on its own.

instead, most insects have a longitudinal (image 1 above, d below) pair and a vertical (2, c) pair of muscles that deform the shape of abdomen, pulling the upper segment of the thorax (notum) up and down, and this moves the wings which are attached to the notum. useful indirect flight gif from wikipedia found here

even if compressed manually, the dead cicadas "flap" their wings due to the motion of the notum:

insect flight is a lot more complicated than this simplified look at them, but I think these cicadas offer a pretty good look at how most insects get around essentially by squishing themselves internally!

[plaguedocboi]

Ok y’all brace yourselves cuz I just learned about a new animal

Yes, that is an animal. Yes, scientists refer to it as the purple sock worm. No, that’s not it’s real name, silly, it’s real name is Xenoturbella!

When these deep-sea socks were first discovered, no one knew what the fuck they were looking at (and, really, can you blame them?). They have no eyes, brains, or digestive tracts. They are literally just a bag of wet slop. DNA analysis initially seemed to indicate that they were related to mollusks, until the scientists realized that DNA sample was from the clams they had recently eaten (yes, they can eat with no organs. We don’t know how.)

Scientists then analyzed the data again and tentatively placed them in the group that includes acorn worms, saying that their ancestors probably had eyes, brains, and organs, but simplified as a response to their deep sea ecosystems.

Later DNA testing has since shown that they are their own thing! Xenoturbella, along with another simple and problematic to place creature called acoelomorphs, belong to their own phylum called Xenacelomorpha! This places them as the sister group to all bilateral animals. So, they just never evolved brains, eyes, or organs. They are a glimpse at a very primitive form of animal that never bothered to change, because apparently what they do works. Rock on, purple sock worm.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Real "Luigi Wins By Doing Nothing" animal here.

[maruposting]

This is the standard winged nightjar and it has one singular stupidly big feather on each wing... if you even care.

[legalise-greenleaf]

Love this guy

[a-book-of-creatures]

That’s standard as in “pennant” or “banner”, not standard as in “normal”.

But it’s not a pennant-winged nightjar. THIS is a pennant-winged nightjar… if you even care.

[crevicedwelling]

can’t forget the Lyre-tailed Nightjar! there’s actually a number of these ridiculous guys, and they’re partly why caprimulgiforms are some of my favorite birds

also the Sickle-winged Nightjar, which is. come on, that’s just a weird moth

[a-book-of-creatures]

Everyone does care about nightjars 🥹

[life-on-our-planet]

The desert rain frog is the size of a ping pong ball and may walk up to 50 yards in search of insects like termites to eat. BBC Earth

[bogleech]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/vabbley/4758175680 In looking for good pictures of troglobites though I only just learned about the blind goby which is of course blind and colorless because it lives in the absolute darkness of subterreanean tunnels but that they don’t mean caves; these apparently live right on California coasts, they just absolutely never leave the burrows of mud shrimp they’re symbiotic with

[bogleech]

I take for granted that people know these kinds of things so in case you don’t, it bears repeating that a whole lot of gobies have a partnership in which a burrowing nearly-blind shrimp builds and maintains the home while the goby stands guard for danger with its more advanced vision So it’s HIGHLY likely the blind goby started out this way but it’s so bad at the original job it just stopped even having eyes??? I have no idea if it benefits the mud shrimp in some other different way or just became a freeloader

[newtonpermetersquare]

So that’s basically how it went down

[tricornking]

I resent just how fucking accurate this shitpost is, congratulations OP, you effectively illustrated how Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection became accepted by the wider public using a FUCKING MUPPETS MEME, here is your A+, get the hell out of my office

[toadschooled]

The sandhill frog [Arenophryne rotunda] is a plump little burrower native to the western coast of Australia. Unlike most burrowing frogs, who use their hind legs to dig, the sandhill frog buries itself face-first in the sand. These frogs will dig all the way to the moist layer beneath the sand and stay there during the day. At night, they emerge to hunt insects. Images by David Nelson.

[bronzejarfly]

The perfect being.