phoronopsis
they/she ✩ I like space and invertebrates
45 posts
Latest Posts by phoronopsis
Conch snails actually do have some of their own tricks up their shells— their foot bears a sharpened operculum that they use to push themselves around much faster than a lot of slow predators (including cone snails) can move, or even to fight back. It's believed that their high-resolution vision, which is some of the best among all known gastropods, allows them to detect and react to predators in advance (source 1, 2)
Here's a video of a conch snail in action:
How are conchs even real
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
Submitted comment: “I wanted to submit this paper from 2021 which is like. one of the single most aggressive academic papers I have ever seen; for context there are as I understand currently two main strains of thought as to where life first evolved— in submarine alkaline hydrothermal vents, or in above-water volcanic hot springs. The author here I believe is one of the original proponents of the hydrothermal vents hypothesis, defending it against some recent publications from the hot springs camp criticizing it for lacking evidence, and it gets. heated. The whole thing is kinda nuts but this paragraph in particular actually had my jaw actually drop reading it”
Here we counterface all the arguments made in recent papers from the very well-funded and promoted groups militantly opposed to AVT. One of these papers offers the advice “Don’t try to prove an idea is right. Instead, try to falsify it”. Fully cognizant of Popper’s “Reason and Refutation”, this has long been our own mantra, though notably unshared across the community. As an example of good faith, Branscomb and colleagues wrote, “arguably the key virtue of the alkaline hydrothermal vent (AHV) model as a scientific hypothesis regarding the initial steps in the emergence of life is its essentially unique vulnerability to disproof. It places all of its chips on the claim that certain naturally arising, but experimentally reproducible, geochemical circumstances do produce castles of mineral ‘cells’ in which three key, undeniably life-like chemical disequilibria are ‘abiotically’ generated and maintained. If it proves not to be possible to experimentally substantiate these conjectures, then we may expect interest in the theory to wane.” Furthermore, falsifiable predictions of AVT were listed in Russell that would, if demonstrated, “reveal embarrassing missing links, or even leave the AVT as just one more casualty of the general theory of natural rejection.” We look forward to similar commitment and clarity from the wet-dry polymerizing pond people. However, we do admit to being impressed over the one prediction made by this group—viz., Dimitar Sassalov’s promise that Harvard University “will soon have the equivalent of a living thing in the lab at the chemical level”. We will be particularly interested to hear what bearing such an artifact might have on the putative ‘first universal ancestor’, its evolving progeny and the geochemical/geophysical disequilibria responsible for its emergence?
The “Water Problem”(sic), the Illusory Pond and Life’s Submarine Emergence—A Review (Russell, 2021)
Even if a species of bug exhibits some kind of social touch among themselves (which I believe some are known to, though for the large majority of species I doubt there's any data on it), it's not going to be welcome from a towering colossus that they literally may not even be able to fit inside their whole field of vision. I feel like a lot of people forget just how big we are compared to most bugs
you know that one popular tumblr post that goes like "humans will pet anything" "well how wonderful that we live on a planet full of things that like to be petted!", or various other posts you see around the internet saying stuff like "humans evolved hands so we could pet all the animals 😌". sometimes I wonder how much those posts might have left actual lasting damage on public perception of animal behavior, like I'm sure they didn't intend to but like... did they
Well I certainly didn’t expect to illicit so many questions when I reblogged this post and added some tags about jumping spider content online.
Firstly, let me say there’s nothing wrong with keeping jumping spiders as pets. I have one myself. She’s a captive bred regal jumping spider. She’s currently a bit over two years old. I’ve had other jumping spiders as well, but they passed of old age and in one instance, a failed molt, which is fairly common.
Before and after getting pet jumpers, I joined some jumper groups, read a lot of care guides, and watched a slew of videos about keeping them.
It became obvious pretty quickly that apparently due to their cute fuzzy appearance, large round eyes, and intelligent behavior, people (owners, admirers, and popular content creators) assign human and mammal emotions and behaviors to them, often to their detriment.
I personally believe bugs are complex creatures that can be intelligent and have emotions, but that those emotions and behaviors are NOT analogous to human or mammal behavior and ignoring their natural needs and behaviors means you’re likely not providing proper care for them.
This is mainly about handling. Bugs don’t want to be handled. They get nothing positive out of it emotionally. They don’t want to be pet or cuddle with you. They don’t want to hang out with you. You’re a big scary predator, and it likely wants to get away from you. Forcing handling can stress, injure, or kill them. That’s why I tagged the post (linked above) “your spider is not a cat.” It doesn’t seek affection from you.
I can’t tell you how many posts or videos I saw where people were super upset because they let their jumper out of its enclosure to handle it and it either escaped and got lost or they somehow crushed it and killed or injured it badly. I’ve also seen people chasing their jumper around its enclosure trying to grab it or get it to jump onto their hand when it’s clearly just trying to hide.
As an example, a very common thing I’ve seen in videos about jumpers is people saying when they lift their front legs at you and jump or climb onto you/your hands it’s because they “want uppies” and want to be pet and be close to you. This is a wild misreading of behavior. Sometimes raising the front legs is a defensive display, trying to make itself look larger to scare away a threat. Other times, they’re waving their legs around to sense and feel their environment, or preparing to jump onto something. They are arboreal, and their natural behavior is to find a high vantage point, so climbing onto the big thing (you) nearby is normal. It’s not because it seeks your affection.
Certainly if you DO handle them frequently they can get used to it, and it becomes less stressful for them. But in my opinion the dangers outweigh any positives, and I don’t handle mine. These are wild animals that have not been domesticated, even when captive bred. If you want to give them enrichment, and you should, offer them prey to chase or interesting things to explore in a larger enclosure. For those that do still handle them, I’d encourage you to watch their behavior closely and read the spidery cues they’re giving you rather than assuming they’re feeling what a cute little mammal might be feeling in the same scenario.
I could go on with specifics about certain videos, but I wasn’t planning on writing a huge post and this is already long. Also I’m sure many people would disagree with me about some things I’ve said, and I’m not going to argue about anything. This is just how I feel based on what I’ve seen of online jumping spider content, and it’s why I no longer interact with most of it.
If your girl has
bulbous eyes
piercing-sucking mouthparts (beak)
raptorial legs
cogwheel-like structure
that’s not your girl that’s wheel bug!
(photo from this article)
In the fish tank straight up "grisping it" and by "it", haha, well. Let's justr say. My rok.
Did you know blowfly larvae living in carcasses leave behind chemical cues which they actively seek out in order to aggregate in large groups, even with other species 😃 (source 1, 2)
^ my decomposing corpse lying out in the middle of the wilderness talking to the crows
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 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
scientists: oh hey we found a new species of deep sea feather star, neat :)
the news: TERRIFYING and ALIEN creature with ONE THOUSAND ARMS discovered LURKING in the DEEP ABYSS of the sea
the public: omg im never swimming in the ocean again!!!
the animal:
“Measuring sea cucumber body dimensions and weight and determining their relationship is notoriously difficult.” — Prescott, Zhou & Prasetyo 2015
“Tagging sea cucumbers is notoriously difficult because of their plastic nature and autolysis capacities.” — Gianasi, Verkaik, Hamel & Mercier 2015
“Nevertheless, marking and tracking sea cucumbers is notoriously difficult and represents a serious challenge.” — Rodríguez-Barreras, Lopéz-Morell & Sabat 2016
“Obtaining accurate but non-destructive mass and morphology measurements of holothuroids is notoriously difficult because they readily change shape and retain water in their body cavity.” — Munger, Watkins, Dunic & Côté 2023
the notoriously difficult cucumber
image by Amaury Durbano
On a more philosophical note, in general it's still very up in the air what conscious experience "is"; I know neuroscientists have proposed various theories of consciousness attributing it to various cognitive processes like multisensory integration, associative learning, working memory, etc. I haven't read all that much of the literature to know what the scientific consensus is on those theories (I don't think there isn't one) but my own personal (unsourced but I don't think very controversial) guess would be that it probably involves all of those things, and also probably that consciousness is a spectrum, not just a yes-or-no thing (cf. how it feels like to be fully awake vs. in the middle of falling asleep vs. dreaming). I don't think we'll ever really be able to prove or know for sure "what it feels like" to be a fruit fly or whatever, but strictly speaking this is technically the case even with other people, right— you can't do a brain scan to find a person's subjective experience, cuz it's well, subjective; yknow there's all the classical debates about philosophical zombies and the Chinese room thought experiment and so on that philosophers have talked about. Ultimately I think people intuitively ascribe consciousness to others because yknow they have a theory of mind, like I don't think I could be a solipsist even if I wanted to. When we anthropomorphize animals (or inanimate objects 😜) this is what we're doing; we view them and recognize aspects of ourselves, accurately or not, just cuz it comes more or less naturally. From a scientific perspective I think that's basically all we can really do, is to observe animals in a rigorous manner and see what they can do, and idk from the results we do have, at least to me it sure looks a lot like these animals have consciousness. They process complex sensory information in real-time, they form novel behaviors based on experiences in context, they display signs of emotion in a statistically quantifiable way, idk what do we call that if not subjective experience?
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
oh oh speaking of fruit fly behavior, I hadn't seen it when I reblogged this post before but someone mentioned it in the tags— just last month there was a super super neat paper published describing play behavior in fruit flies! Basically they put a bunch of fruit flies in containers with food and a rotating carousel embedded in the floor (which they could walk on and off at will) and then used motion-tracking software to quantify how much time the flies spent time in different parts of the container and how they moved between them. The researchers found that while most of the flies avoided the carousel, quickly leaving after going on it, about a quarter of them would repeatedly walk onto the spinning carousel and stay there for extended durations, while spending less time visiting the food patch; in further trials, where the containers had two carousels which alternately spun and stopped every few minutes, carousel-seeking flies would often stay on one carousel until it stopped and then move to the other. (I don't think it'll embed here but see the link for a video of a fly going back and forth between the two carousels!)
The researchers interpret this as the flies having individual preferences for going on the carousel, and those who did go on it were doing so voluntarily and deliberately (as opposed to e.g. accidentally walking into it and getting trapped), seemingly just because they liked it. The really suggestive thing here is that the carousel-seeking flies would do this over food: as depicted in figure 2 of that paper, the researchers found that both the control-group flies (for whom the carousel was stationary) and the carousel-avoiding flies spent around 40% of their time visiting the food patch; in contrast, the flies who rode the carousels spent only half that time at the food patch, and instead spent 24% of the observed time riding the carousel. Obviously we don't know what emotions the flies might be feeling (the authors mention that a good line of follow-up research would be to look at how dopamine/reward pathways are involved in this behavior) but it appears that there is some kind of generally positive feeling that motivates them to do this, cuz yknow food is obviously something they need and want and yet they're choosing to do this instead. They hypothesize that this kind of “passive movement” play-like behavior observed in flies and other animals could functionally serve to ‘train’ their perceptive abilities (specifically, their sense of proprioception) by providing external sensory stimulation
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
important anomalocaris dorsal carapace representation... the anomalocarapace...
sick and tired of inaccurate anomalocaris paleoart ,, decided to take matters into my own hands
The first image linked is not actually a priapulid but a sea cucumber in its spawning posture! It was misidentified on iNaturalist and went viral before it was corrected— see the original observation here. (It gets kinda heated which I think is kinda funny. Penis worms are serious business!) I have always said before that I want internet fame specifically for two reasons: to make PSAs about Anomalocaris’s head carapace which everybody always leaves out of drawings because of that one inaccurate museum model, and about the incorrectly identified sea cucumber photo about which is now like the first image result you get when searching for penis worms and is my NEMESIS 😠 (the misinformation, not the photo or the sea cucumber, those are great)
For all the worm fans— priapulids are super easy to identify; there are as of the time of writing only 22 recognized species, and for many of them the only photos of them are from articles in scientific journals. Over half the species are microscopic, and the macroscopic ones are mainly found in polar regions, often in the deep sea, where they are usually burrowed in sediment and thus are little-encountered by people. The only one of them that is commonly photographed (and studied) is Priapulus caudatus, which is broadly found across the northern northern hemisphere even in shallow waters and I think probably has to be the most accessible species in general. They look like this:
image by Thomas Trott
This species accounts for probably 99% of the images of priapulids out there, and its relatives look rather similar, such as its southern hemisphere counterpart Priapulus tuberculatospinosus or the two-tailed species Priapulopsis bicaudatus. The intricate, feathery tails (referred to in the literature as “caudal appendages”) are probably the most distinctive feature of this group; they are believed to be involved in respiration, though as with many things about the phylum it is not known for certain. (See this recent paper for a review of macroscopic priapulid morphology.) In the zoomed-out photos of that sea cucumber you can see on the iNat page, it lacks a tail which is a dead giveaway that it is not any of these; also note that while it has some longitudinal striations along what sorta looks like a proboscis, they don’t actually bear any teeth! The spined, toothed proboscides of priapulids are indeed super cool and are their most distinctive feature setting them apart from other proboscis-bearing worms like peanut worms or spoon worms, which are often also misidentified online as priapulids. A fun fact is that the shape of their teeth varies across species in a way that appears to be closely correlated with their diet, see this paper for a neat study that uses tooth shapes to examine the different ecological niches occupied by extant priapulids and their Cambrian relatives!
The only other macroscopic priapulids that don’t look much like Priapulus are the two species Halicryptus spinulosus and Halicryptus higginsi, the latter of which I believe there are literally like two full-body photos in existence of it, one of which is from a login-walled journal article from 1999 and the other of which is one of the specimens from that 1999 article photographed after 25 years preserved in a museum. There’s a decent number of photos floating around of H. spinulosus (though still not as many as P. caudatus); they look like this:
image by Claude Nozères
As you can see, Halicryptus lack tails and have a much less prominent proboscis than Priapulus and its relatives, which you can only see the spines of on the very tip; H. spinulosus in particular has a rather short and small body that distinguishes it a lot, while H. higginsi is the largest known species of priapulid in the world (see this paper for a review of both of them). They’re maybe less distinctive-looking but idk, I don’t know off the top of my head if there’s super anything else you would mistake them for, and images of them are pretty uncommon anyway. In any case as far as macroscopic priapulids go, these are the only ones you have to look out for; if you’ve got those down you’re all set! As stated before, most priapulid species are actually microscopic; just for fun here’s the tropical meiobenthic species Tubiluchus corallicola:
image by Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
look at that squiggly tail!
And yeah in conclusion priapulids are super cool and underrated and I wish there were more people paying attention to them; there’s soooo many neglected taxa that we’re still only just discovering basic aspects of their biology and priapulids are one of them! If you want to see their amazing extensible proboscis in action, linked below is by far the best priapulid video out there, I highly recommend it. And most of all remember everybody THAT PHOTO IS A FRICKING SEA CUCUMBER, NOT EVERY WORM THAT LOOKS LIKE A PENIS IS A PENIS WORM AAAAAAA 😭😭😭
Can't believe any real animal has teeth as awesome as penis worms have.
They are meat eaters :)
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
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
Oftentimes I see people just make shit up about bugs and other invertebrates. People will say stuff like "actually it's been scientifically proven that insects are physically incapable of cognition" with no source, and then you look it up and in fact there is tons and tons of literature reporting results on this exact thing. A while back after getting into an argument with people online about wasps, I decided to try compiling sources on invertebrate cognition out of spite and I had to take a break at some point because there is so much literature out there, it is actually overwhelming. Just with fruit flies alone, there's studies on how they form stable social networks and fight to establish hierarchies; how they make group decisions and act differently in crowds; how they pay attention to what other flies are doing and teach and learn from each other, even with other species. When subjected to pain out of their control, they can develop depression and respond to SSRIs to the point that they are literally used as animal models to study how to treat depression in humans. And that's just like, one animal!
Even with all the research there is though the truth is that we just haven't studied things like cognition, perception, behavior, sociality, etc. for the vast majority of invertebrates (i.e. the vast majority of animals). Most behavioral research (honestly, just bio research in general) is focused on vertebrates -- particularly mammals -- and the research that has been performed for invertebrates has still only been done for a small handful of species and lineages. Fruit flies are one of the single most studied organisms in the world (and there's still a lot we don't know about them). If idk, clams felt emotions, do you think you would be able to tell by just looking at them? (I have no idea if they do or not, I don't think anyone has studied this. we do know scallops can see.) But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and given the small glimpses of insight we have gotten into the vast world of unknowns, I think yeah it's pretty obvious that there is way more going on with a lot of animals than people think. Scala naturae my behated
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
these are the miserable remains of a chestnut weevil (Curculio elephas) who will never again feel the joy of a freshly drilled acorn after unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated upon her by me
this is her thirty seconds later. the atrocities that she miraculously recovered from included "being gently scooped up from a branch"
(September 1st, 2024)
this isn't related to cephalopods at all, but re: bilateral symmetry, there's actually some fairly recent (like, last 15 years) evidence that cnidarians actually evolved from bilaterally symmetric ancestors! Contrary to popular belief, a lot of sea anemones and coral polyps, though externally radial, actually have a bilateral digestive system. This could be a case of convergent evolution, but what's really remarkable is that embryonically, cnidarians develop this bilateral symmetry the same way as bilaterians, *using the same regulatory genetic pathways*! The polyp body plan is considered to be the ancestral state for cnidarians, while the "simplified" swimming jellyfish body plan probably is a secondary development, as suggested by the cnidarian fossil record and evidence of loss of body patterning genes in jellyfish. Together, this suggests the really exciting hypothesis that bilateral symmetry is actually the original ancestral state for the common ancestor of cnidarians and bilaterians, and rather than bilaterians being the ones who made the innovation of bilateral symmetry from radial, cnidarians would be the group that altered their symmetry instead! Sources: 1, 2, 3
(Echinoderms like starfish also are secondarily radial; they have bilateral larvae who undergo a very weird metamorphosis into their pentaradial adult form. Search "brachiolaria", "pluteus larva", or "auricularia larva" for pics!)
It's also a common misconception that cnidarians don't have central nervous systems. They're often said to have merely diffuse "nerve nets," and they do, but they also have a condensed ring-shaped nerve that integrates signals from across the body, basically constituting a central nervous system in all respects besides not actually having a singular "brain". In particular, there's been a lot of research into the nervous systems of box jellyfish, which are probably the most specialized among cnidarians due to their unique possession of true image-forming eyes, which they use for navigating both long and short distances as well detecting prey. One study from just last year even found evidence that box jellies display associative learning! Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4
(I believe there's also been research into the learning capabilities of echinoderms but I'm not as familiar with the literature. I know starfish do actually have image-forming eyes on their arms, which at least one species uses to navigate, though they also definitely do a lot of smelling and stuff as well. Source: 1)
Imagine yourself submerged in the prehistoric ocean. There are no fish, instead the only life forms consist of feather-like sessile organisms that sit on the seabed, filtering the current. The early organisms that evolved out of this, such as Jellyfish and Starfish, had radial anatomy. Their body structure entails a central axis from which you can split everything else. These bodies are simple, not designed for active mobility, lacking a ‘forwards’ or ‘backwards’. They didn’t even have eyes, instead interacting with and responding to the world via photoreceptive cells. What emerged from this were two developments: the evolution of complex eyes and the emergence of bilateral anatomy in early vertebrates and arthropods. In contrast to radial anatomy, bilateral anatomy entails an organism that can be split down the middle with rough symmetry. This is to say that they are built for direction. A body that is built for mobility entails significantly more complex behaviour behind its operation. Behaviour, in this sense, also becomes significantly more directed. These creatures now living in the ocean or on the sea-floor now begin to directly interact with one another. The mechanisms facilitating this interaction become pretty apparent in the fossil record; eyes, claws and antennae. The evolutionary consequences of this are the emergence of a complex nervous system alongside the presence of predation and, as Godfrey-Smith puts it “[From this point on] The mind evolved in response to other minds”.
This crab is under construction! Read more on the Aquarium's website. 🦀🦺
Garden snails (Cornu aspersum) with scalariform shells, a rare genetic mutation.
Typical shell formation:
Photo 1 via The Malacological Society of London, 2-4 by saber_animal, 5 by joknight_nz, and 6 (typical shell) by benanna
Jumping spider mimic planthoppers in the genus Rhotana
Photo 1 by tenebrionidfan, 2 by gancw1, 3 by budak, and 4 by deeqld
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.]
@onenicebugperday found this cool lookin' bug at my local library the other day. I have no clue what it is, looks kinda like a bee or a wasp but a bit lankier, it looked like it was a bit less than 2 inches long, pretty big for bug standards. I love the white fluff around its neck!
