Also I Want To Append To This, We Shouldn't Necessarily Assume That Animals Will Be Like Humans; In Scientific

their hair makes them look so round and fat

@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!

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.

I saw this one paper where they made an artificial neural network based on the actual neural architecture of the fruit fly and trained it on pictures of flies to show that 1. individual fruit flies are visually distinct 2. they are probably able to differentiate between each other visually despite their vision being terrible. And as a comparison they had a bunch of experienced fly scientists (aka “flyentists”) try to identify the same pictures of flies and they failed miserably which I thought was really funny

This ability to re-identify flies across days opens experimental possibilities, especially considering that this performance was achieved with static images (16fps yields around a thousand estimates of ID per minute, allowing high confidence in the parsimonious correct identification). This is in contrast to the human ability to re-identify flies, which at low resolutions is barely better than chance.

Clearly, all models can learn to re-identify flies to some extent, underscoring the individual-level variation in D. melanogaster. Re-identifying flies is in fact easier for DCNs than CIFAR10 (at least with centred images of flies acquired at the same distance). Even the model that rivals, in some sense, the representational performance of humans does ten times better than humans. Why humans can’t tell one fly from another is not clear. Regardless of whether it was evolutionarily beneficial to discriminate individual flies, humans do have incredible pattern detection abilities. It may simply be a lack of experience (although we attempted to address this by only using experienced Drosophila researchers as volunteers) or a more cryptic pattern-recognition ‘blind-spot’ of humans. In either case, these findings should spur new experiments to further understand the mechanisms of human vision and experience and how they fail in this case.

these CRINGE scientists FAILED to identify flies that all our models could smho 🙄😤

important anomalocaris dorsal carapace representation... the anomalocarapace...

sick and tired of inaccurate anomalocaris paleoart ,, decided to take matters into my own hands

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

sensitive white boys

One small step for leeches, one giant leap for leechkind! For the first time, we have concrete evidence that at least one species of terrestrial leech in Madagascar can jump. Mai’s work is important to conservation efforts because leeches are increasingly being collected to survey vertebrate biodiversity. By analyzing their blood meals, researchers are able to identify other animals living alongside the leeches, ranging from wildcats to frogs to ground-dwelling birds. Read more about Mai's research in our latest blog post.

Have you ever seen a leech jump? Let us know in the comments!

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)

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