Ramblings of an Obsessive Biologist

[bogleech]

Someone made a post saying among other things that some Mortasheen monsters are "caricatures of asian people" but I can't think of which ones that could possibly POSSIBLY be referring to?! I'm looking them over obsessively trying to figure out which ones could be taken that way or how. I can't think of what design choices or lore concepts could ever fit into that?!

[synbiosys]

That's absurd. It sounds more like this person has spent too much time inhabiting internet echo chambers and not enough time talking to people in real life. Hisscreant lacks a sufficient number of similarities to Asian caricatures/stereotypes for this critique to be valid. Same goes for every other monster released in the book. I suppose the snaggleteeth and the pompadour "haircut" put it closer than intended, but not close enough for this critique to make sense.

Criticizing the grasshopper arthropoid (can't remember its name...) as a racist caricature is even more of a stretch; if I'm not mistaken, you based it partially off of the various katydids/grasshoppers that use enlarged tibial spines to defend themselves from predators by kicking. Some of these species are actually notorious for being able to draw blood from unwary entomologists who try to capture them. Making a grasshopper/orthopteran arthropoid that fights this way was brilliant, because it combines real-world martial arts with a real-world defense mechanism in insects. If this is a racist caricature of Asian people, I guess a bunch of bug-type pokemon are also racist caricatures (obviously they are not). Pacific Rim was a sci-fi/comedy film about Kaiju and giant robots; people were split over whether or not they liked it, but nobody criticized it for racist caricatures of Asian people.

I've seen the same thought pattern recently with people who enjoy physical fitness activities; progressive/liberal-aligned people on tumblr are associating people with an interest in physical fitness and nutrition with MAGA/MAHA types, because they (especially gen-z conservative men) talk about it a lot. However, this is is thoroughly illogical; I lift weights, I am currently being prescribed testosterone, and care about my nutrition, but I am also very much progressive/liberal in my political alignment. I know lots of other people like this as well.

Another comparison; Pokemon Sun and Moon caught some flak for the "Tapu" Pokemon, which are loosely based on Hawaiian culture. Also, the entire region in the game is based on Hawaii, which is a real place. Some Hawaiian people were uncomfortable with the way that the word "Tapu" was used, and spoke up about it. So, despite how popular Pokemon is, enough people were bothered by it to at least talk about it.

But there's very little in Mortasheen that could be considered references to people, languages, or places that exist in our world. If Hisscreant was a monster that explicitly inhabited a region that was an obvious/overt analog for an actual Asian country, and especially if this region was accompanied by other overt "Asian" tropes/stereotypes, I'd agree with the criticism. But that is obviously not the case.

Racist caricatures are harmful, and it's good to point them out and confront them when/where they occur, but there's a logical limit to what could be called a caricature. The cited examples in Mortasheen are well within this limit, and if your friend persists, it might be necessary to confront them about it.

[bynine]

MAGMARINE - MAGCARGO evolution - FIRE/ROCK - STORM DRAIN

It lives on the ocean floor, releasing fumes that microscopic Pokemon feed on. Once a year, they migrate below the earth's surface to lay their eggs in underground lava pools.

[synbiosys]

Hidden Ability: FLASH BOIL

In-game text: Water moves boil instantly, reducing damage and potentially burning the user

Verbatim effect: Water moves do 50% less damage, and have a 50% chance of burning the user. In doubles battles, Magmarine's partner can also be burned.

I thought something like Heat Proof or Levitate would be cool, but I added the burn effect because this would be an ability that only Fire-types would possess, and Fire is a type that is offensively pretty good, but challenged by some difficult type weaknesses defensively. Who needs type resistances when you can dish out a debilitating status effect instead?!

It could also make for a good combo in doubles battles if Magmarine's battle partner has Guts. Magmarine's ability would cause their partner to get burned, but then they'd get the attack boost from Guts.

I think Water Absorb would be a better main ability for Magmarine, but I thought this would be another cool defensive ability that would punish anyone who tried using a water move. Flash Boil would be easier to use in singles, and water absorb would be easier in doubles, but Flash Boil would still combo with Guts.

[cosmonautroger]

Love Letter, Masa-San, Fujino, Kanagawa, Japan

[synbiosys]

"Godzilla? GODZILLA?! Sorry sir, but you dropped something...."

[craftingcreatures]

Attended a rattlesnake conference yesterday and one of the presenters was talking about public attitudes towards snakes, specifically how showing them in a non-aggressive context helps to create more positive attitudes, and. Y'all. I NEED to show you the image he used as an example

Look at him. Look at this smiley newborn sidewinder sitting in a bottle cap. He is so small and so happy he is EXACTLY the right size to sit comfortably in a bottle cap

[synbiosys]

I went herping with some friends in SW Idaho in 2016, where we ended up finding a large rattlesnake den. For anyone who doesn't know, at least some rattlesnake species utilize hibernacula, or "dens" that become the "home" of many generations of snakes, and in many cases are also utilized by other snake species; these are usually located in large rock formations with unobstructed (i.e., no trees) south-facing exposures. I'm not sure if it's known when or why rattlesnakes started using dens communally, but rock formations like this are critical in places with cold winters; deep basalt talus piles, collapsed lava tubes, and limestone outcrops with small caves and piles of rubble absorb heat from the sun on cold winter days, and also shelter the snakes both from moisture (they'll get fungal infections if they don't stay dry) and from the colder air outside.

So we found one of these. I'd never been this close to this many wild rattlesnakes before; there were probably 12 snakes just outside of the opening of the den, and many more with visible coils right next to the entrance. We caught a snake and moved it a bit further from the den to take photos; after that, the rest of the group went downhill, but I decided to sit in front of the den, because I was fascinated by it.

Most of the snakes had retreated further inside while we were taking photos of the one we captured, but after I sat down and waited for about 10 minutes, the snakes actually ignored me, and started to come back out. After 20 minutes, most of the snakes that went back inside were back out again. They knew I was still there, but they didn't seem to mind, and several were within 6 feet of where I was sitting. I sat there with them for another 10 minutes or so before the rest of the herping group I was with came back to find me.

I'm trained not to anthropomorphize the behavior of non-human animals, but it was hard to avoid thinking of those rattlesnakes like sagacious sentinels of the sagebrush. Their ancestors probably basked there atop that basalt outcrop only a few centuries after the lava cooled and the last glacial maximum ended.

To be clear, it's often the behavior of a venomous snake species (or individual) that dictates how dangerous it is, as opposed to the physiological properties of the venom itself. I don't think my brief observational experiment with these snakes would have worked out so well with species more likely to perceive humans as threats and/or bite in self-defense. The point is that they're just another creature trying to make their way in this world, and when given a chance to demonstrate it, it becomes obvious that they are peaceable beings.

[bogleech]

an 80's cartoon ad implying these characters are all easily defeated by...

[synbiosys]

If there were just two more boxes with comparisons to other cartoons, it would be enough for a Mega Man fangame.

[bogleech]

It's always wacky how many conservatoid creatures think "you have the word leech in your username" is a gotcha. They don't think "cool and interesting invertebrate" at all??? No scientific wonder or ecological literacy. No, they immediately associate the word with their strawman idea of a socialist "leeching off society" to the point they actively think that's what I'm referencing?!

[synbiosys]

One of my former housemates has a conservative family and is probably a moderate conservative/just right of center (or possibly libertarian). For the record, he's actually a pretty nice guy and I never detected any kind of bigotry or other harmful behavior from him.

Sometimes I would talk to him about coursework for my undergrad (I'm a conservation biology major) and eventually he admitted to me that he "doesn't know anything about 'environmental stuff'".

His tone wasn't defiant or belligerent; he was being brutally honest about himself. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I made a neutral comment about it and kept going with the previous thought.

This person is also mid-gen Z, and I don't know how much that has to do with it, but I have noticed that many conservative people in the United States have outlooks (especially when religion is involved) that inherently exclude the splendor and necessity of non-human, non-domesticated biota from their worldview.

[bogleech]

I've done so little traveling or socializing or "real jobs" that I'm the only middle aged guy I've ever met with no entertaining personal stories. Never been to a concert, broken a bone, gotten arrested, had an explosive or complex interpersonal drama, gotten drunk, I'm not entirely sure what I've been doing non-digitally other than scraping a lot of kinds of goo off of logs.

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

I would like to hear about the goo logs

[starathsbunker]

#Why is there goo on the logs?#Is the goo supposed to be there?#Why are you taking the goo off?#Is it valuable goo?#Is it valuable logs?#Did someone put the goo on the logs?#Did the logs produce the goo?#Is it famous goo?#I think maple syrup is probably goo#Is your goo maple syrup?

tags by @unashamedly-enthusiastic

@bogleech I wish to know about the log goo as well

[bogleech]

There are a few kinds of goo you can find on logs!

Jelly Fungi are a number of different wood eating fungi whose fruiting bodies have a rubbery, jellylike consistency. Like most mushrooms the external growths are just temporary, existing to spread spores, but if they dry out before theyre finished they can remain dormant a very long time! They plump up again and pick up where they left off when the weather gets moist.

They're paraphyletic, meaning that even though they're all similar, jelly fungi are not necessarily related to each other!

Also it should be noted, wood eating fungi didn't appear on earth for a few million years after the first wood, so at one time, trees actually didn't rot. Once they fell over they just stayed there like a rock forever. There were just mountains of eternal dead trees piled up, forming a kind of habitat we can't even imagine.

Then there are slime molds, which I find during the cooler rainier season or even the dead of winter. Not everyone knows what these are, so they are actually amoebas that gather together until they're visible without a microscope. They crawl around, the entire mass able to move a few inches a day, eating other microorganisms, and once they've gained enough mass they fuse together into tiny mushroom-like growths that carry spores.

The remarkable thing about this is that slime "molds" have no relation at all to fungus, and are ALSO paraphyletic, at a higher level than the jelly fungi were. Meaning, the different jelly fungi are still all fungi, but some slime molds might not even be any more related to other slime molds than you are. They don't all share one slime mold ancestor or anything.

A colonial amoeba with a spore stage is evidently just an easy form for life to stumble upon, multiple times independently. Slime molds could, therefore, hypothetically exist exactly like our own slime molds all throughout our universe, so long as other worlds developed anything like cellular life.

Another goo I like to find is nostoc, which resembles lumps of green jelly and grows continuously, ie it doesn't come and go like either fungi or slime molds but forms permanent masses! Unlike either fungi or slime molds, it doesn't eat anything, and instead photosynthesizes just like a plant!

It is however not a plant at all, and in fact maybe a billion years older than the first plants. It's a cyanobacterium, which is often considered a type of "algae," except most kinds of "algae" are protozoa with cells like those of plants and animals, and again, not all related to eachother - a simple photosynthetic cell is just another thing nature has made many, many times.

Bacteria aren't even anything like our cells though. They're simpler and more ancient than that, not merely a different "kingdom" of life like you vs. a plant, but an entire different "domain" of life, so you and a plant have a LOT in common structurally, but neither you nor a plant have really anything at all in common with how bacteria are built.

Cyanobacteria, like these nostoc colonies, would have been the very first life on earth to begin harnessing energy from the sun, and are also thought to be the first life on earth to produce oxygen as waste.

For millioms of years nothing lived on earth but bacterial slime, and then some of it learned to eat sunlight and began pooping oxygen, and this actually caused what we call the "oxygen catastrophe" because it killed off most other life on the planet, the cyanobacteria completely re-engineering earth's atmosphere into the one that allowed all modern life as we know it to exist! Would a different world have evolved otherwise, or would it have stayed a silent world of only brown and grey slime, forever and ever? Oxygen is energizing but it's also "toxic," it's part of why we age and die, so the struggle to keep existing in this usable yet sickening atmosphere seems to be what triggered the still ongoing explosion of more and more diverse life.

I've been using photos off google so far but here's some of the nostoc I've been growing in jars at home:

This is a species I find on wet tree bark or in moss around the columbia gorge, and it forms these sheets of clear gel on smooth surfaces, but on wood it likes to bunch up into globbies:

This piece has been in a very wet glass container on a warm windowsill for around a year; this is the side facing the sun!

These are my babies!

they invented air

[r3mm]

you might not have any interesting personal stories (i mean, you definitely do because there's LOTS of people who would want to hear about the different times you've found cool slime) but please don't ever think that means you're not interesting, because i'm interested as FUCK right now!!!! this absolutely blew me away, thank you for sharing

do you know if the absence of wood eating fungi contributed to the huge amount of fossil fuels that were able to form, or is that oversimplifying?

[bogleech]

As a matter of fact it is theorized the majority of coal formed before trees decomposed as quickly, so if we used up all the coal it might not ever replenish!

Today I opened a tank I hadn't looked at in a long time and the cyanobacteria in there has made a stalactite :)

[derived-centrosaur]

I'm enraptured by the slime talk, but wanted to chime in on the coal deposition point. That specific time period that was mentioned is the Carboniferous Period (360-300mya) (In North America it's split into the Mississippian (360-323mya) and Pennsylvanian (323-300mya) sub-periods, the Pennsylvanian being the coaly one, the Mississippian sub-period is more defined by marine carbonates). But coal is found in less fantastic amounts for the rest of time afterwards because coal can form any time there is significant dead plant buildup with little to no decay. This only practically happens in swampy environments and so as a rock, coal is great at indicating depositional environment. I'm not certain of the situation in Europe, but in North America much of the easily accessible Carboniferous aged coal (think Appalachian area) has been mined and what's left is either more difficult to extract or is of lower quality. A lot of what is used now is younger Cretaceous/Paleogene coal from out west. One of Canada's largest coal fields is the Lethbridge Coal Zone which caps the Dinosaur Park Formation, at only 74 million years old it is well after wood decomposition had been solved, And in the U.S. the Powder River Basin is the most productive coal field, which is even younger at 60-40ish million years old.

[bogleech]

Oh! Actually where do "petrified" forests fit in, was that more often when they were sticking around longer or is it like when a cataclysm buries a lot of trees in anoxic muck?!

[synbiosys]

I'm pretty sure coal starts out as peat. If I'm not mistaken, there are peat deposits that go deep enough that there's lignite at the bottom. Lignite is also known as "brown coal" and is really just peat that hasn't quite become coal yet.

I think petrified trees mostly happen when trees are suddenly engulfed by large amounts of sediment, or at least mud composed mostly of minerals. I've been to the John Day fossil beds in central OR, and most of the fossils there occurred as a result of being buried in volcanic ash. Volcano ash is mostly silicates, so it would probably have a similar result. There are also some parts of the Willamette Valley, between Albany and Eugene, with a lot of petrified wood. The town of Sweet Home was built on what's more or less a petrified forest. At least some of it was deposited during the formation of the coast range, and the mineral composition is mostly microcrystalline quartzes, like agate. I don't know what the composition of the petrified wood in the John Day fossil beds is, but if it was from ash, that's gotta be mostly silicates too.

[bogleech]

It's a little cheesy but you kind of need cheesy for your blurb description on a book. The original clickbait. Is this a good back cover?? Would this make you curious to look inside? It's the back cover the kickstart backers will be getting but could go through adjustments by the time we "go full retail" with it. I spent FOREVER picking out the monsters, trying different ones that fit together nicely. Two or three of them here have possibly never been shown to the public, but I have shown most of these on my Patreon :)

[synbiosys]

It looks great and I don't think it's cheesy.

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Meat-Eating Caterpillars: less than 1% of all known lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) are carnivorous, and even fewer are known to hunt and kill their prey; these are just a few of the exceptions

Above: a carnivorous pug moth caterpillar, Eupithecia orichloris, ambushing a fly

Lepidopteran predators are extremely rare, but they do exist. Some of the most interesting examples include the carnivorous pug moth caterpillars of the genus Eupithecia, the ant-eating casebearer, the Hawaiian snail-eating moth, and the bone-collector caterpillars of the genus Hyposmocoma. Curiously, almost all of the species on this list are endemic to Hawaii.

Above: Eupithecia orichloris

The carnivorous pug moth, Eupithecia orichloris, is probably the most famous predatory caterpillar in the world, thanks to the striking and unusual method by which it captures its prey -- this species is an ambush predator that often disguises itself as a twig and then pops up out of nowhere, violently plucking its prey from the foliage. Eupithecia is the only lepidopteran genus that is known to contain ambush predators, which makes this behavior seem even more striking.

The ant-eating casebearer, Ippa conspersa, is another carnivorous caterpillar that feeds on ants and other insects (both as a predator and as a scavenger). This species uses silk, sand, and other fine debris to build a flat, peanut-shaped "shell" around its body, and the "shell" acts as a kind of camouflage, allowing the caterpillar to sneak into ant nests and hunt.

Above: the ant-eating casebearer and its unique "shell"

As its name implies, the ant-eating casebearer often feeds on ants, but it has also been known to eat cockroaches and other insects.

Above: an ant-eating casebearer feeding on a cockroach

Hyposmocoma molluscivora, commonly known as the Hawaiian snail-eating moth, is a casebearing caterpillar that feeds on live snails. It uses strands of silk to immobilize its prey, tethering the snail in place so that it can climb into the victim's shell and feed on the soft flesh within. The caterpillars of this genus are the only lepidopterans that are known to feed on molluscs; all of the other predatory caterpillars feed on arthropods (insects and arachnids).

Above: this photo shows a Hawaiian snail-eating moth using strands of silk to hold its prey in place

The genus Hyposmocoma also contains the predatory "bone-collector" caterpillars, which cover themselves with the body parts of other insects and arachnids, often scavenging the leftover pieces from spiderwebs. They carefully trim each piece of exoskeleton and then arrange them all together onto a portable silk mesh.

The caterpillars often live side-by-side with spiders, as they opportunistically feed on the insects that they find trapped in spiderwebs, and their macabre body ornaments likely serve as camouflage; they allow the caterpillar to avoid being detected or attacked by spiders.

Above: a bone-collector caterpillar covered in the body parts of other insects, including a large weevil head that is clearly visible near the center, several ant heads, a fly's leg, the abdomen of a bark beetle, a wing, and several pieces of antennae, among other things

Sources & More Info:

Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society: Predatory and Parasitic Lepidoptera

GeoJournal: Behavior, Biogeography, and Conservation of Eupithecia in the Hawaiian Islands

Korean Journal of Applied Entomology: The First Record of the Myrmecophilous Tineid Moths of Genus Ippa in Korea

Nature: Caterpillars Eat Snails Out of House and Home

Science: Web-Spinning Caterpillar Stalks Snails

NBC: Hawaiian Caterpillars Hunt like Spiders

National Geographic: This Camouflaged Critter Wears Severed Insect Body Parts like a Coat

Scientific American: Carnivorous "Bone Collector" Caterpillars Wear Corpses as Camouflage

Science: Hawaiian Caterpillar Patrols Spiderwebs Camouflaged in Insect Prey's Body Parts

[ospreyonthemoon]

@revretch @bogleech you two seem like you'd appreciate these caterpillars

[revretch]

I knew about the first one, but not the rest!!!

[synbiosys]

The last photo (the bone-collector case) is so awesome.

[halfwaypo1nt]

There was also a monastery and lots of cats up here

[synbiosys]

Looks like a Dark Souls game with a modern-esque setting.

[babyfoxcollectionthings]

[bedupolker]

imagine having to defend yourself against a sea monster and your only weapon is a pair of chopsticks attached to your face

[bogleech]

This still seems so effective that maybe it's exactly thr kind of reason spiny lobsters put so many points into antennae and they're covered in those forward facing barbs. It's obviously not that the antennae are strong on their own but the moray clearly hates the prickliness and keeps backing out of it!

[synbiosys]

Wow.

Every time I'd look at photos of spiny lobsters, I'd wonder why they lost their claws, and also why they had super long spiny antennae.

I had no idea they used them this way. It's probably like scraping the underside of your arm against a large blackberry stem.

[onenicebugperday]

Rolled-leaf orbweaver, Poltys cf. idae, Araneidae

Photographed in Malaysia by Nicky Bay // Website // Facebook

Shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

[bogleech]

This is the kind of spider I’m thinking of when I say every piece of media with giant spiders should be required to look at some actual spiders and make theirs look even remotely interesting

[synbiosys]

Okay, so that spider's abdominal extension looks very much like a Nepenthes pitcher that hasn't fully formed yet. Or, another interpretation would be that the spider's abdomen is a Nepenthes pitcher that has started to expand and the rest is the tendril.

And it's from Malaysia, well within the range of many Nepenthes species.

Not sure if it's a coincidence, but things like this rarely are...

[mossworm]

was no one going to tell me the USGS Bee Lab just takes photos of bees, uploads them to a database, and then destroys the specimens? and this has been standard practice for years, completely independent of Trumpy fucking up USA science?? they just take a photo of the dead bee and then smash it??? what the hell

Big data, changing taxonomy, and ghost records: permanent preservation of collected specimens is essential for insect monitoring

Abstract. Successful long-term biodiversity monitoring requires consistent identification of all specimens, both those newly collected and t

Say Bees!

Sam Droege’s stunning photos of national park insects are the bee’s knees. (And all the other parts, too.) 

"Once he has photographed a bee, [Sam] Droege crushes it through his fingers and scrapes the guts off the pin, which he washes for future use. 'We’re not a museum,' he said. 'We’re a database.'"

wtf. this is nuts and so wasteful. are the bee people okay

[synbiosys]

That's horrible.

One of the best justifications for preserving specimens is establishing a record of the genome of the species.

You can't do that if there are no physical specimens.

[bogleech]

Thought you might appreciate these little suffering eyeball guys I saw on a poster at my local pharmacy

its okay they like it!

[synbiosys]

Yeah I totally interpreted these as eyeball monsters that were elementally aligned with earth, fire, poison, or water.

[bogleech]

Aphids are such peaceful little animals. They're all over the wild plants, and the wild plants still exist just fine, with parasites like wasps and predators like lacewings maintaining the balance when aphids do overpopulate.

But as soon as people see some on their garden plants they think of it as if their plants caught a terminal disease

[synbiosys]

This just happened to me!

I've been collecting native plants for a while, and a couple years ago I moved to a new place on the edge of town where it was obvious that nobody had used pesticides/herbicides in a long time.

This spring, I suddenly found aphid infestations on some of my plants. I was concerned because they're in containers, which sometimes makes them more susceptible, and there were a lot of aphids. I also have some rare non-native plants (terrestrial orchids, gesneriads, and begonias) that stay outside, but may not have the right type of chemical signals to attract the native parasitoid wasps.

So I used water to remove the aphids that were threatening my orchids, etc., but then I found another even bigger infestation on the plants in the front yard a week later. And I had final exams the following week. I also have OCD, so I get really nervous about stuff like this sometimes.

I forced myself to calm down about the situation by reminding myself that there are lots of native insects around, and they'd probably get the job done for me if I just stayed calm.

I went back outside to check on my plants again this morning and all that remain of the aphids are some ghostly shed skins.

Sadly, in larger suburban areas that have been really hammered by overuse of pesticides, this doesn't work as well because so many of the native insects are missing. This was the case at the house I grew up in. I don't know how to change that mindset, but if people are willing to trust the wasps and the lacewings, ecological restoration to bring back small areas of native prairie/forest in suburban areas would probably go a long way.

[onenicebugperday]

Herrick’s water penny beetle (larvae and adult), Psephenus herricki, Psephenidae

Water penny beetles are found on every continent except Antarctica. The larvae, which live in water, feed on algae on rock surfaces. The presence of water penny larvae in a stream can be used as a test for the quality of the water, as they are pollution-sensitive. Adults are terrestrial.

Photos 1-2 by davidenrique, 3 by Judy Gallagher, 4-5 by kim_fleming, and 6 by klips

[bogleech]

I saw these on a nature poster when I was little and was so fascinated that when I got home I drew fish or frog people using them as money but to this day I’ve never seen one.

[synbiosys]

You can find them in Oregon, but only in rocky, fast-flowing streams. Pretty sure I've heard of people finding them in the cascades.

[humansbgone]

YouTube's autoreply at it again with sage tips.

[synbiosys]

Wow the one on the right is hilarious