Ornate harvestmen in the genus Sadocus, Gonyleptidae, found in South America. All photos are males except photos 6 and 7.
Photo 1 by damontighe, 2-6 by Art Anker (shared with permission - do not remove credit or re-post!), 7 by vukasinmarinovic, 8 by pedrova, and 9-10 by micaelae
it's like they say in dune: "i must not jeff. jeff is the killer"
me when the door says "pull" on it
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
Texting an elf and ten years later getting a response "sorry lol I got distracted"
This feels inappropriate to look at
This feels like a meme a misogynist incel rooster would make.
m,y tuube:)
A hybrid creature
Add MS 42130 f.38v
British Library
Turning off a gene early in mouse development led researchers to end up with an accidental six-legged embryonic mammal. This strange result took the spinal cord research of developmental biologists Anastasiia Lozovska and Moisés Mallo and their colleagues at Portugal's Gulbenkian Science Institute in a new direction. "I didn't choose the project, the project chose me," Mallo told Sara Reardon at Nature News.
When do you think cavemen figured out that you need a flared base for safe anal insertion? Can you imagine being the very first person to have that problem???
"What happen?"
"Thag fall on it 😶"
finally unlocking the real untold story of thagomizer
On most other social media people say weird things like "what does this mean" or "am I missing some sort of context" but on Tumblr people immediately understand and enthusiastically support something left unspoken and unquestioned if a post just says something like "FEED. MY DAD. THE SLOP." or "it's a rat cunt kind of Christmas" (which is posted July 4th)
i hauve 100000000 sons and 100000000 daughters and this is just some of them
These are AI
i birthed these they came out of me
I saw
yea he saw
everyone was there except for you i don't know why you didn't show up. we all got to hold one.
