Janet van Dyne Is Better Than You

you ever get surprised by your own recurring issues. like come on man. I thought we were past this.

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies' choices?

hello, thank you for asking, I was basically sitting over here vibrating hoping for the opportunity to infodump more

so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.

in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner

the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.

("watch a demonstration" is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)

you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.

the 6-way "sexagon" was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.

the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn't matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.

the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:

it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.

this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.

so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool

but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism

is the Devil’s Tramping Ground like. a widely known thing outside of North Carolina? b/c it’s funny as fuck, it’s this circle of dirt that supposedly nothing will grow in and it’s b/c the devil stomps around there or whatever. allegedly ppl have tried camping there and woke up miles away

it’s literally just a patch of dirt that ppl are scared of. that being said, i would not go there if asked b/c while i am not superstitious, i am a little stitious

*Tamp Tamp*

The Devil: ah I see you’ve noticed me tamping down the soft earth

heart eye cat meme

All this talk of musical episodes but is anything DC musical related ever gonna top this? Birds of Prey singing about, ahem, the Justice League…

Deceiving wunk

This is the single most attractive thing a love interest has ever said in the history of fiction

fuck due dates i wish nothing was ever due

except babies. sorry to all newborns for this insensitive post.

”getting thicker skin” is great in theory but I think for some people “get better at handling your thin skin” is gonna be way more helpful advice. I have strong emotional reactions to criticism and they might never go away, but i can continue to try and handle each situation maturely and that’s the important part. Sometimes irrational feelings are chronic and living with them is better than trying to beat yourself up into not having them.

#EXCCTLY THIS #if you have the fragility of an expensive vase then get yourself a table with stable legs to keep you from toppling over. ok #you shouldn't live your life in bubble wrap because you are meant to be seen and appreciated. ok #there might be accidents and you might shatter but you can be put back together again as a whole new piece of art and you will be sturdier #you will be okay. you are a fragile expensive vase and you need some extra care. but you will not live in a box full of bubble wrap.

“Think of your shoulders as a rhombus”

Source: privateanime on twitter

Raise your hand if you have also been personally victimized by the barometric pressure changes 🥲

Things that work in fiction but not real life

A slightly miscoloured giant leopard moth showing the blueish tint more than usual!