Organisms
pharyngula | September 2, 2013Look closely at that leafy wing.
Then watch the video.
(via Real Monstrosities)
pharyngula | August 30, 2013
The bulk of an octopus's nervous system is not in its brain, but its arms. So scientists have studied isolated octopus arms and found that they retain substantial responsiveness to the environment.
It's depressing. I love eating big molluscs, but I've had to cut them out of my diet because there is just too much intelligence there. I'm going to have to cut out pork, too. Chickens are OK? Well, I'm cutting back there, too.
pharyngula | August 23, 2013
There's more! A whole series of photos of nautilus hatching from the Birch Aquarium at Scripps!
pharyngula | August 19, 2013OK, that's enough. The proprietor of the Monday Metazoan keeps lurching over to big furries -- where are my clackety arachnids? My slimy molluscs? My exotic weird phyla? It's always these mammals, like just now this poor, tiny newsphoto of …AWWW, IT'S A BABY RHINO…
pharyngula | August 16, 2013The name "Flamboyant Cuttlefish" is perfect, and if you watch the video you'll see even better why they deserve to strut.
Hmm, maybe I should retroactively get my kids' names changed to "Flamboyant Myers". Or at least their middle names. It's got to have an effect.
pharyngula | July 22, 2013This was something of a lost weekend for me, with a lot of behind-the-scenes distractions, so I forgot to put up a Friday Cephalopod. So here's a belated Monday Cephalopod to make up for it all.
Amin's Photos
pharyngula | July 17, 2013Looking for information on sugar substitutes? This green stuff is one of them.
via EZGro Garden
pharyngula | July 17, 2013Thirty, almost forty, years ago when zebrafish were an up and coming model system and very few labs were working on them, we were used to going to conferences and reciting the zebrafish litany, a list of attributes that justified us working on such an oddball animal: we'd explain, for instance, that it was prolific, fast developing, and optically transparent, so we could see right into the nervous system in the living embryo. And you know, not once have I ever been asked the really simple and obvious question: if it's transparent, then how do see anything inside it?
I know. It takes a moment…
pharyngula | July 15, 2013Oh, look: The first embryos from our new and improved fish system!
We only got a handful today, but you can see why. Those are about 3½ hours old, so we collected too late and the little babies' mommies and daddies had spent the previous few hours assiduously poking around in the marbles sheltering the eggs, and had sucked up their little brothers and sisters in a cannibal feast, as they like to do. We'll be adjusting our schedules, as developmental biologists often have to do, to do much earlier collections starting tomorrow.
The parents look happy and comfortable, perhaps a little plump…