Organisms
pharyngula | January 14, 2015I found this picture on a site called "Wedding Flowers", which is kind of interesting, since 30% of yellow evening primroses reproduce asexually. I think that means it's the best wedding flower for marriages in which the partners intend to clone themselves.
Wedding Flowers
pharyngula | January 2, 2015All right, I definitely want to go there.
It also looks as though MBARI has a multi-barrel squid-sucker, according to this video.
I want one!
pharyngula | December 10, 2014How romantic! I just learned that "the word mistletoe is a compound Old English word combining 'mistel' (which means “dung”) and 'tan' (which means twig) because it looks a bit like bird poop on a stick".
Alder and Ash
pharyngula | November 28, 2014Have you called her lately? Look at this mother octopus, clinging to a deep-sea cliff, hanging over the abyss, guarding her clutch of eggs.
She stayed there, never leaving, for four years. The MBARI submersible would regularly visit the spot and check on her, and there she was, getting weaker and weaker, but still defending her brood…until one day they checked, and she was gone, and there was only a heap of hatched-out husks of her eggs.
If she were human, I'd say that was so lonely, so sad. But maybe an octopus finds hovering over eggs for years and years and starving to death fulfilling.
pharyngula | November 10, 2014This is devious: Mexican free-tailed bats have jamming sonar to disrupt competitor bats' food hunting. It's like there aren't enough insects for everyone to eat!