NAI Director’s Seminar tomorrow
By the way, you can purchase ‘singing’ stuffed coqui frogs here, to delight and/or terrify
Diatoms!
“A few pennate diatoms are responsible for poisoning of humans. Pseudo-nitzschia and a few other species produce the toxin domoic acid. If a bloom of these species occurs, the diatom toxin accumulates in mussels, making them unsafe to eat. It has been suggested that an encounter with a domoic-acid crazed seagull was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.”
— John Becker, Monterey Bay Aquarium
Above: picture of a pennate diatom (fossilized, Oregonian, otherwise unidentified). Almost certainly nontoxic. The last of a set of images I took as part of a small study in lab.
The giant water bug Lethocerus americanus, spotted two months ago in Massachusetts. This guy was kind enough not to bite my toes.
dailyfossil: Hallucigenia
When: Early to Middle Cambrian (~540 to 500 million years ago)
Where: Found in what is now British Columbia and China
What: Hallucigenia is another odd fossil first known from the Burgess Shale formation of Canada. This largest individuals only reach 1.2 inches (~3cm) long, but there has been a lot of scientific debate centered around this tiny species. Before we get into the debate over its phyogenetic position, first we need to talk about which way is up! Or anterior for that matter. The first reconstructions of Hallucigenia had it walking on the stiff looking spiny projections, with the more flexible tentacles used to bring food to its mouth, which was reconstructed as being on a large bulbous projection. The modern interpretation is reversed in almost every way; it walks on the tentacle feet, the spines are on the dorsal surface for protection, and its head is on the opposite end. The modern reconstruction does not even have a large bulbous projection, as it is now thought the appearance of this blob in fossils is the inner organs of Hallucigenia being squeezed out though its posterior as it was flattened either at or after death. This strange form walked along the ocean floor, eating tiny food particles.
So now we /might/ know how this animal really looked… but what is it related to? Common suggestions have been: velvet worms (Onychophore), an extremely basal Arthoropoda, or as a member of a phylum now extinct. There is no firm consensus even today.
The Royal Ontario Museum recently put up a spectacular website on the Burgess Shale that you should check out if you would like to learn more about Hallucigenia and its contemporaries.
Ivanhoe Reservoir, Los Angeles
Photo: Gerd Ludwigin 2007, high levels of bromate - a carcinogen formed when bromide and chlorine react with sunlight - were found in Los Angeles’s Ivanhoe Reservoir. Today three million black plastic balls help deflect UV rays.
“The relative sizes of different sensory representations in naked mole-rats S1. The chart on the right shows the percentage of cortex devoted to different body parts. On the left the different body parts are illustrated according to their cortical proportions. This “mole-ratunculus” provides a graphic illustration of the cortical magnification of the incisors and head (illustration by Lana Finch).”
‘Somatosensory cortex dominated by the representation of teeth in the naked mole-rat brain’
Asplanchna Rotifera
From: ‘The Rotifera or wheel-animalcules Vol 1’ by C. T. Hudson assisted by P. H. Gosse. Published 1886
