Bat Falcon

What an incredibly handsome lad! I'm especially fond of that fluffy face. Also, I love both bats and falcons, so no surprise that I would also love a bat falcon.

Moth Of The Day #212

Lily Moth / Indian Lily Moth

Polytela gloriosae

From the noctuidae family. They have a wingspan of about 29 mm. They are found in Sri Lanka and possibly Indonesia.

Image sources: [1] [2]

WOWOWOWOW

Not biology related, except that part of doing science is writing about it!!!

Plus, we're approaching finals, so you might be thinking more about writing assignments.

Rhodothermota vs. Campylobacterota

Rhodothermota propaganda here

Campylobacterota propaganda here

Oh man, this was a tough one!! On the one hand you have the rhodopsins — related to the molecules that make your eyes able to detect light, and also helpful for proving that proton gradients can power ATP production:

Illustration from Garret & Grisham Biochemistry, showing the experiment done by Racker & Stoeckenius (1974) -- they created artificial vesicles that contained both bacteriorhodopsin and mitochondrial ATP synthase. When they shone light on them, they generated ATP.

But then you have H. pylori, and the story of Barry Marshall's frustration with his inability to definitively prove that the bacteria caused ulcers in his patients. Because even though all his ulcer patients had H. pylori in their stomachs, correlation doesn’t mean causation. So he gave up and drank one of his cultures. (Without, we should mention, running this idea by an IRB first.) He got super sick, but cured himself with antibiotics…and won a Nobel Prize for linking bacteria with gastric ulcers.

Still, as I tell my students, this was a terrible idea, and they should never ever drink anything in the lab, not even to get a Nobel Prize. (Also, similarly, stay away from TikTok dares.)

(I have had an ulcer, which was not fun, but once they figured it out and gave me antibiotics for it, poof!)

Whoops, you dropped something:

Hello, and welcome to bacteriashowdown!

Click here for the current round (phylum round 1)

The bracket for phyla can be found here. Polls are tagged #poll

Fungi Showdown (Kingdom winner, original blog, my inspiration): @battle-of-the-taxons

Animal Showdown (Kingdom runner-up): @animalshowdown

Plant Showdown: @plant-taxonomy-showdown

Y'all. Y'all. Y'all!!!

(hoping for a Cyanobacteria sweep)

If you like frogs. Or possums. Or cool builds. Or happiness. This is the video for you.

Tags via @brawltogethernow

Sometimes I wish we weren't in a desert and had more resident frogs frods.

african peach moth (egybolis vaillantina) | source

Oooooooh!! So shiny, and bonus points for the bright orange antennae.

Aristapedia ftw

Y’all. Bazooka is right there.

But you guys you guys you guyssssss

Demir and Dickson did this study with constitutively expressed alternate splicing patterns of fruitless and showed that it affects courtship behavior. The gene is the same in males and females, but the mRNA is spliced differently. SO COOL.

Yes, I find this exciting because I legit got to play videos of gay fruit fly orgies in journal club. Probably the pinnacle of my scientific career, ngl.

(aaaargh Tumblr won't let me upload the video and the player on the paper isn't working. If you download the zip of all the supplementary files, those are functional. Tempted to put it on YouTube...)

I was watching a stream of a small waterhole in the namib desert. a warthog showed up started bathing in the waterhole and turning the drinkable water into mud. this INFURIATED chat. everyone was pissed on behalf of the oryxes. the power of technology is incredible

you just missed the zebras. they told me to tell you they say hi

hyenas are whooping on stream and chat is LIVING

oh my gosH ARE YOU KIDDING ME

Internet redeemed. for now.

Fruit bat noises, apparently. If you care

Oh my god. I care. I care SO much.

reblog for noises

If you don't think you care, trust me on this: YOU DO CARE.

Also, for those who wonder why I call bats "sky puppies", these guys are why. <3

@superzobat interesting article re: biocrusts

the little guy industrial complex sweeps the competition once again

Yay! Little guys finding places to live and making those places more stable / habitable for themselves!

Biological soil crusts are darned important (and very underappreciated and under-understood) here in our local shrub-steppe.

Great job little dude, you're getting it all figured out

Aw, this little guy (keep watching to see just *how* little!) probably got it into their head that barrel rolling is just the correct way to enter the water always. <3

hbomberguy’s latest video on plagiarism has made me completely rethink literature and writing. I have never once so much as considered intentionally plagiarizing anyone or anything, but I there’s something more that has come out of this and it’s the names of the people who created the works Somerton (and others) ripped off.

Plagiarism isn’t just bad because it is lazy and disrespectful, it’s bad because it buries the truth. If you can’t find a source, the conversation is over. Somerton’s sources are fairly easy to find by simply searching his plagiarized lines, but that isn’t true in most cases. Most of the time, the line is a lot less clear.

Today, I was writing a report on English Ivy, which is an invasive species here in the US. I wanted to know when it was introduced and I at last found a source claiming it was introduced to the US “as early as 1727” on a .net website that seems quite reputable (it has multiple major universities credited in its home page), but there is no citation for where this date came from. I dug deeper and found a pamphlet created by a city government in Virginia that made the same claim, only to discover the first source linked in their bibliography. Another website (a botanical garden’s page) gave the same date with the same source hyperlinked. Of course, I have classes to attend and things to do and probably not enough time to follow the lines back to where this 1727 date came from, but if I had not just watched this video, I wouldn’t have given that date a second thought.

Of course, it doesn’t matter in the long run exactly what year hedera helix was introduced to the US, but it makes you wonder how many facts have been so vaguely attributed that it becomes completely impossible to figure out where they originated (and further, whether or not they’re true at all).

SO MANY OF THEM. And some of them do matter! The entire behavioral repertoire of one literal textbook example of alternative tactics traced back to a single paper about an ancillary topic in the 1990s, which cited "personal observation."

Personal observation!

I had a colleague whose very promising career was essentially jump started by tracing a dogmatic axiom in the field back to the original observation, and then demonstrating that with hard data. This kind of thing happens all the time in research. Many of the best papers are written by people who chase these hearsay citation trails all the way to the ends to read what's there.

See also: the commonly cited “there are 10 times as many microbial cells in/on a human than there are human cells.” Which was a rough back of the envelope calculation that was never intended to be definitive.

(tldr: it’s probably more like a 1:1 microbes:human ratio, but hard to really know because we can’t exactly count them. So it depends on how you estimate.)

(Your cells are way bigger, so you’re still mostly human by volume / mass.)

Back to OP’s original point: the internet has made this SO MUCH WORSE. Everyone is copying everyone else, so it’s sometimes well nigh impossible to verify something. (My damned open source, certified-to-ASM-curriculum textbook has some outright plagiarism in it, ugh.)

GIRLY JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT CYERCE ELEGANS

If Cyerce nigricans is a butterfly, then this is a fairy... Cyerce nigricans for comparison:

I mean, I already knew that seas slugs are freakin' gorgeous to the point of how-does-this-even-exist, but.

I???

How are these real?!

This is honestly better advice than “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”

By all means try again. But do that after you figure out WHY you failed!

SLAMS REBLOG SO HARD

Ahem. Thank you to our hero Ms. Frizzle for summarizing the process of science so succinctly!!