This is a place for a variety of stuff and things I find and wanna show others! Hope you are having a good day, and if you arent, I hope things are going okay, just know every shadow passes eventually so dont stop. Keep going!
13 posts
Naturenerdatwork - Nature Nerd's Stuff N' Things - Tumblr Blog
I love nautilis ev so much
Nautilus expedition live streams (+ their commentary) 2020 / 2021 / 2022
LEARNING NEW THINGS IS SO COOL
We’re all aflutter over the sea angel!
This swimming snail's rhythmic flapping and graceful movements resemble whimsical wings. The flappy bits you see sculling through the water aren’t wings at all—they’re basically a modified, slimy snail foot.
And despite its celestial appearance—the sea angel is a carnivorous hunter. With hidden tentacles tucked away inside its head, it tracks down prey and strikes!
love learning new things
the paralyzed cicadas I picked up from a failed cicada killer nest are the perfect material to show off some cool features of insect anatomy! (although the wasp’s venom would keep them alive for her larvae to eat, I froze them to make sure they’re fully dead for dissection).
cicadas are powerful, fast fliers, and all of their thorax is taken up by a bulk of reddish, stringy flight muscles, which I’ll talk more about later. this cicada is a female, so her abdomen is full of white, elongated eggs that she will insert into tree bark with the bladed ovipositor at her rear.
the male cicada’s abdomen, however, is almost entirely empty, and that air-filled space is used as a resonator for his loud calls. the biggest structure visible there is a curved pair of muscles that deforms the tymbals, producing a click with every contraction.
here's a view of the complete muscle, and the tymbals themselves which look like overlapping plates on his belly. if you're curious what the white frosted appearance is, some Neotibicen have a coat of waxy powder or pruinescence; this male N. tibicen is particularly pruinose.
onto the flight muscles:
powered flight is a pretty complex mechanism in any organism, and is never so simple as just flapping wings up and down, but most insects power their flight in a really unintuitive way (at least for us vertebrates): they contract muscles in their thorax that aren’t even attached to the wings!
this method of flight is called indirect flight, in contrast to the direct flight of the dragonflies and mayflies where each of four wings is directly attached to a muscle and can flap on its own.
instead, most insects have a longitudinal (image 1 above, d below) pair and a vertical (2, c) pair of muscles that deform the shape of abdomen, pulling the upper segment of the thorax (notum) up and down, and this moves the wings which are attached to the notum. useful indirect flight gif from wikipedia found here
even if compressed manually, the dead cicadas "flap" their wings due to the motion of the notum:
insect flight is a lot more complicated than this simplified look at them, but I think these cicadas offer a pretty good look at how most insects get around essentially by squishing themselves internally!
Sperm whales are amazing, and if you live in the US please nite the 300 yard law if you plan to be out at sea.
Sperm whale mimics a spinning diver.
Please check out Nautilus live they are an incredble team with an expansive knowledge and thoughts
Googly-eyed Stubby Squid | Nautilus Live + their commentary
I love the idea that cryptozoology should be an actual field researching unknown organsims and not a "pseudoscience field" with little credibility in the scientific world. Crytids like nessie and the kracken are tied to animals that have/do exist today, so this makes perfect sense to me that cryptozoology should be a legitimate field.
Cryptid fish that has only been seen once and never again that may or may not exist but well never know my beloved
How incredible is it that animals are seemingly more and more similar in behaviors the more we learn about them, i mean fish call like birds do. This is why our natural world amazes me.
I’m too high to be thinking about fish in coral reefs making noises that are akin to birds singing. A chorus of fish….
Nat 20 Deception, moth are such amazing insects
Master Masquerader
Geometrid Caterpillar and Moth (Tanaorhinus viridiluteatus, Ennominae, Geometridae)
Pu'er, Yunnan, China
See more Chinese moths on my Flickr site HERE and caterpillars HERE.
The Nautilus Expeditions are livestreamed in real time, if you are ever curious check them out while on a dive, a great way to nboth learn about deep sea exporation and keep your self entertained!
Best of the E/V Nautilus 2016 Expedition | Nautilus Live
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Endless Deep Sea Gifs
I love animals that evolved in such a way that they are fundamentally the same today as hundreds of thousands of years ago. Bonus if they can survive in space, and have jet boosters
Nautiluses. THIS goddamn animal.
The fundamentals of this design are HALF A BILLION YEARS OLD. Look at its weird eyes. It evolved back when eyes were still new. Those are literal pinhole cameras. Because nature invented photography the same way we did, apparently.
It doesn't have tentacles. Those are cirri, which lots of sea animals use to do all sorts of things. Fetal nautiluses have one giant slug foot that splits into these. They have noodle antennae made out of foot.
You can bring them up out of the ocean and they can survive the equivalent change of like 80 standard atmospheres. That shouldn't be possible. These things evolved a goddamn spacesuit...500 million years ago.
They also swim via jet propulsion. Their shells make them buoyant, which they can regulate, and they shoot water from a pump. So their 500 million year old spacesuit also has a goddamn rocket pack.
There have been 5 mass extinction events (we are causing a six one now). This thing has survived all of them. And it never got better eyes.
Or A BRAIN. That's right. This thing predates BRAINS. It has two separated lobes behind its top and bottom halves of beak that apparently work well enough that it can track smells with okay accuracy in total darkness, in 3 dimensions.
Here is one eating a dead fish.
Goddamn.
So often we see people completely miss all the info on how to have domestic pets in a way that limits damage to the environment. Always leash your dog, for all of these reasons and for other people who could be frightened of your dog or dogs in general. Pets are a wonderful thing for humans to have but we have to have them responsibly much like anything else.
As summer is approaching, I’d like to share this bird-friendly beach etiquette reminder. A lot of people let their dogs roam freely on the beach, but dogs that chase wildlife can have a detrimental effect on the animals that have no choice but to share the shoreline with us. Please enjoy the summer with your pets and make sure to give wild animals plenty of space!
A ton of incredible species are outright ignored and left to die in the mess we create, very common with invertebrates sadly. Just because an animal may not be the cutest or the cuddliest doesnt mean they shouldnt be protected, as often times these invertebrates are sources of food for other species that people tend to notice more. All animals need conservation because usually we dont realize just how amazing they are until they are gone.
Okay, I know people as a general rule tend to not care about invertebrates as much as cute, fuzzy mammals, but this is a must-read if you care about animal welfare. The short version is that horseshoe crab blood has been used for decades in medicine as a way to test whether something is truly sterile; the blood clots in the presence of bacteria. Since then millions of horseshoe crabs have been captured and drained of blood, even though a synthetic alternative was developed a few years ago.
They go through a pretty brutal experience in the process. They're caught by fishermen who often throw them by their tails into a pile in the open air, and they're then trucked to a bleeding facility where they're strapped down and their blood is removed with needles jabbed directly into their hearts. Over half their blood may be taken, after which they're supposed to be returned to the ocean. However, it's likely many of them never make it back, instead turned into fish bait and sold by the same fishermen who caught them in the first place.
Apart from the fact that this is a horrific thing to put any animal through, the attrition due to fatalities has put a serious dent in horseshoe crab numbers. This is compounded by massive habitat loss, pollution, and the capture of horseshoe crabs as food, particularly as the females of one species are considered a delicacy. And other animals that rely on horseshoe crabs are suffering, too. The American rufa subspecies of the red knot, a medium-sized shorebird, is critically endangered as the horseshoe crab eggs it must have in order to successfully complete migration have become increasingly scarce, and it is likely the bird will become extinct if trends continue.
While there are guidelines for medical horseshoe crab harvest, they're considered optional. The few laws that exist are poorly enforced. Short of a complete ban on horseshoe crab blood in favor of the synthetic alternative, these animals are in very real danger of going extinct after a history spanning over 400 million years on this planet.
Thankfully, this article is not the first to bring forth the issues surrounding horseshoe crab harvest. Here are a few resources for further information and action (US based, though horseshoe crabs are threatened throughout their entire range):
Horseshoe Crab Conservation Network - https://horseshoecrab.org/conservation/
Wetlands Institute - https://wetlandsinstitute.org/conservation/horseshoe-crab-conservation/
Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition - https://hscrabrecovery.org/
These little guys cause a lot of problems, we gotta work together to stop these little bastards!
This species only arrived in North America nine years ago, but it has already spread to over a dozen states in the US (particularly in the Northeast) and is spreading beyond that. These flies--especially in their nymph form--can be incredibly destructive to plant life here, including various fruit trees, soybeans, and other crops, as well as several species of native tree. Their primary predator, a parasitic wasp, does not exist here, and none of our native wasps have yet been seen to use this species as a host.
People in all US States, as well as Canada and Mexico, should keep their eyes out for the nymphs and adults, as well as the egg clusters, and are encouraged to smash them with impunity. We've seen how much damage other invasive species can do to both natural and cultivated spaces, and while it's unlikely we can completely eliminate them, we can at least curb them.
ID info and other relevant stuff about spotted lanternflies can be found here.