Blorbsday - Tumblr Posts

Meanwhile, at the Annual Mollusk Taxonomy Convention

Taxonomist 1: I think this population of blorb snails count as their own species under the phylogenetic and biological species concepts. Their last common ancestor was between 5 and 100 million years ago, idk, my 35 year old copy of Clustal finally exploded so I just eyeballed it, but they totally got wack cytochrome C oxidase genes, even though for the most part they're genetically pretty similar and they still look and act exactly the same in every way and also both live in the same place as each other. The only reason why they don’t interbreed is they have like a single incompatible protein thingo, which is also more or less the only meaningful phenotypic difference between them.

(this is an actual thing that can happen. They’re called cryptic species and species complexes and they hurt my soul) 

Taxonomist 2: No. It’s more pragmatic and useful to just use the morphological and ecological species concepts here; and they say fuck you and your dumb snails. I wanna lump all existing species into half as many species, there’s too many fucking species.

Taxonomist 1: you wanna fucking say that to my face you little shit?

Taxonomist 3: Hey, real quick, what do you guys think about the possibility of reclassifying the Blorb genus under Littorinidae instead of Muricidae? Because I already wrote a paper on it, so that's the case now. Cry about it.

Taxonomist 2: I think today is the day bitches die.

*Mexican standoff using conch shells as blunt weapons ensued, there were no survivors.*

*This is unfortunately the leading cause of death among all taxonomists*