Latest Posts by phoronopsis - Page 2
Met this cool guy outside and then he broke into my house later that night
This is a robber fly known as a hanging thief so you know what he was doing in your home!! (Thieving)
This was from a 2015 study by Fossette et al. which observed wild Rhizostoma octopus jellyfish, aka barrel or dustbin lid jellfish, and found that they actively orient themselves and swim against the current, contrary to the popular image of scyphozoan jellies as passive directionless drifters! Based on these observations, they (the scientists) ran computer simulations of virtual jellyfish moving through ocean currents demonstrating that this active swimming is probably really really important for allowing them (the jellyfish) to form and maintain large blooms while avoiding getting stranded alone or ashore
thinking about that time scientists put tracking collars on jellyfish
During the storm, I've had a wasp sheltering on my window.
It's been two days now, and she's still there, so I gave her some honey
Lookit her! slurping away!
@onenicebugperday
TWO INJURED SEA COMBS CAN FUSE INTO A SINGLE ENTITY, AND THRIVE
In a surprising new discovery, scientists have found that two injured individuals of Mnemiopsis leidyi, a species of comb jellies or ctenophores, can fuse into a single entity. This phenomenon, which challenges our typical understanding of biological processes, reveals just how remarkable these planktonic creatures truly are.
Ctenophores, known for their translucent beauty and delicate movement in the ocean, appear to lack a mechanism called allorecognition—the ability to distinguish between self and non-self. This means that, when two comb jellies are injured and placed close together, they can merge, not just physically, but also functionally. Their nervous systems combine, allowing them to share nerve signals (or action potentials), and even their digestive systems become one.
The discovery was made by Dr. Jokura and his team, who were observing comb jellies in a seawater tank. After removing parts of their lobes and placing them side by side, they were astonished to see 9 out of 10 injured comb jellies fuse to form a single organism. Even more fascinating, the newly formed organism survived for at least three weeks, with its muscle contractions fully synchronized within just two hours. The digestive system also fused, enabling food taken in by one mouth to travel through their shared canal and exit through both anuses—although not at the same time!
While the exact benefits of this fusion are still unclear, the researchers believe that studying this phenomenon could provide valuable insights into how organisms integrate nervous systems and even how tissue regeneration occurs. It may also offer clues about immune system functions in species where the lines between individual organisms become blurred.
This discovery offers a glimpse into the hidden potential of the ocean’s lesser-known inhabitants, challenging what we think we know about biological boundaries and cooperation.
Video: Kei Jokura
Reference: Jakura et al., 2024. Rapid physiological integration of fused ctenophores. Current Biology
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 🙄😤
me walking up to the whalefall: hey my fellow hagfish hows it slimin' hagatha (she's a hagfish): are you sure you're a hagfish? you look kinda like some kinda lungfish me: haha dont worry check this out (i breathe in some pollen) HURHUHUHHHUUUURURGURGUGRGG hagatha: yep, that's a hagfish-y amount of slime. come hag out! (hagfish for hang out)
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!
Invertebrates are definitely capable of learning! A lot of people who don’t know anything about bugs say they’re automata who just do everything by instinct like an if-then computer program, and they absolutely have not looked into it because there’s SO much literature on invertebrate cognition including learning. One of the neatest papers I’ve seen was about Drosophila fruit flies (there’s a ton of fruit fly literature cuz they’re a common lab animal). So when a female fruit fly is exposed to parasitoid wasps, she will start laying fewer eggs. These researchers showed that fruit flies who have been exposed to wasps can communicate the presence of a threat via wing movements to other female fruit flies, and those flies will start laying fewer eggs too even if they haven’t seen the wasps at all, an example of social learning.
But what’s more: they can communicate threats like this not just with flies of their own species, but with flies of closely related species too. If the species are too distant, they stop being able to communicate as successfully HOWEVER these authors showed that if you house a bunch of flies together in mixed-species groups, afterwards their success at communicating goes up! This suggests the existence of a fruit fly “language” which differs between species, but which they’re capable of learning other species’ languages as well! Sources: 1, 2
see also this very scientific diagram from here:
One interesting thing about those studies is that they found that if you raise a fruit fly in isolation from hatching, it won’t be able to communicate as well. This suggests that there’s a critical period of socialization which flies require to learn how to do communicate properly and without it their ability to do so is impaired. (I believe there’s other studies on how other social interactions are affected by social isolation but I haven’t read them; again there’s sooo much fly literature ^^)
Another cool one I’ve seen is on antlion larvae, who hunt by digging pits and then waiting in the middle for ants and other bugs walking by to fall in. It’s generally thought that sedentary animals have fewer cognitive capabilities than mobile ones, due to their less demanding lifestyle, however these studies (which I’ve only skimmed) have been carried out which demonstrate that they are still capable of learning. Specifically, they can be taught to anticipate and identify approaching insects based on vibrations in the sand, and will subsequently adapt their behavior to hunt more efficiently! Even animals with what seems like a simple feeding behavior are still very capable of modifying it, which makes sense evolutionarily; while obviously different animals will require different levels of intelligence, you can imagine in a lot of cases that being able to modify your behavior based on experience is distinctly advantageous. Source 1, 2
Not an arthropod, but another bug that there’s been a lot of research into is Lymnaea pond snails, which are another common model organism for studying neurology and cognition. A ton of work has been done on their capabilities for associative learning, i.e. classical conditioning (“dog learns to salivate at the ring of a bell”) and operant conditioning (“rat learns that pressing a button gives food”). It’s been found that their ability to learn is actually a lot more complicated than just those simple kinds of stimulus ↔ response. They can take stuff they’ve learned in stressful situations (simulated experimentally by exposing them to the smell of crayfish, which eat snails) and generalize it to situations beyond just the original context, which you can imagine must be pretty important for surviving in the wild. Conversely, they can also place memories in context: when taught stuff in the presence of both crayfish smell and carrot smell, subsequently they will recall what they’ve learned in response to the carrot smell alone; in other words, they’re not just learning “carrot + crayfish smell”, but “carrot smell = crayfish smell”, placing their memories in the broader context of their environment (which again, must be helpful for survival). So they can not just learn but pretty flexibly as well! Sources 1, 2, 3
This isn't a bug at all but pretty recently there was a study that found that box jellyfish are capable of associative learning. This one research lab has done a lot of work into vision in the Caribbean box jellyfish (they have eyes btw) on both a behavior and a neurological level and have found a lot of cool things, like that these box jellyfish use their vision to navigate through their habitat of mangrove forests, and that though they don't have a brain as such, they do have a central nervous system in the form of a ring nerve connecting four small clusters of neurons that process and combine input from their eyes. I can't actually read the paper (paywall :P) but last year they did an experiment where they put jellies in a tank with darkened bars on the glass to simulate mangrove roots. Normally the jellies gauge the distance to a root by how dark it appears and then swim around it when they get near; however the bars in the experiment were colored so that they looked like they were farther away than the wall actually was. At first the jellyfish kept bumping into the all, but after several rounds of trial and error they began to avoid them, indicating that they were able to learn from the experience! Jellyfish! Aaaaa nature is so cool. Source 1, 2, 3
I have a question! About bugs and arachnids and all them. Sorry to lump them all into one category, but I'd rather not make the same post multiple times.
My question is: Can they learn "tricks?"
By this I mean are they capable of learning, in general, I suppose. Like mice in a maze, magpies with a rock.
Also, what sorts of things have they learned? How do they learn (like watching others or from experience)?
I ask because it's something that really interests me. I know the ability to learn doesn't add or subtract value from a being, it's a curious thought as I know very, very little about beetles, and spiders, and bees, and so on!
Do they just know how to do things because it's all their kind have done since the beginning of them? Do they have to learn or are capable of it?
Penis worms is serious business! been no-joke half-considering making an account to make a PSA about it (and other invertebrate stuff) for a while ^^; I like priapulids a lot, they’re a really underrated (and understudied) phylum
Hi, created an account just to let you know the photo you posted earlier is not a priapulid but a spawning sea cucumber, likely genus Paracaudina. It was misidentified on iNaturalist and went viral before it got corrected, and now it comes up on the search results along with a bunch of other worms like spoon and peanut worms that people misidentify as priapulids. The only priapulid that there’s good photos of is P. caudatus which is very distinctive if you know what it looks like. Love the blog!
Ah!!! Thank you very much for letting me know friend (even going as far as to make an account about it), sucks that these incorrect images have spread so far x(