Plethedon cinereus
My boyfriend (Beaglestowaway) found this little guy next to his house. I wasn’t able to measure him/her, but males are 73mm on average while females are 78mm on average.
Roger Hangarter, Indiana University Department of Biology
The Spanish dancer (Flabellina iodinea) is the most common and flashy of the nudibranchia. It is easy to see why it is called the Spanish dancer, as its colors remind one of flamenco dancer costumes. This species also ‘dances’ occasionally by letting go of the substrate and wildly thrashing its body back and forth, creating the same look as a flashy flamenco dancer’s skirt. This is just one of the thousands of species of “tidepool treasures” — marine plants and animals found in the small bodies of water left by the ebbing tide that fill the rock basins and depressions along California’s rocky shores.
Egg-laying may very well have been the downfall of the dinosaurs, a new study shows. Since there are limits to how large an egg can be, due to the fact that they require a great number of the mother’s resources to produce, the newly hatched offspring of dinosaurs was astonishingly small in comparison to their parents. Not so for mammals, who’s offspring could be born much larger. While most species occupy one ecological niche, the widely varying sizes of dinosaurs had to pass through several niches before reaching adult hood, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
Dolomedes, aka. Fishing Spiders, are semi-aquatic arachnids that are covered in hydrophobic hairs, allowing them to use surface tension to walk and stand on water. The above video shows their hunting/ feeding habits. Some days you’re the spider, some days you’re the fish.
A pinhole camera created from an egg. Pinhole cameras are often used in introductory physics courses to illustrate the principles of optics. The following was taken from a lab exercise at Rice Univerity:
A pinhole camera consists of a darkened box or room with a small hole at one end. Because light travels in straight lines, the hole permits rays from each point of an object to fall only within a small circle on the opposite wall, effectively forming an image. As the pinhole is made smaller the image will become more distinct until the hole is so small that diffraction becomes important.
Although pinhole cameras were probably known to the ancient Greeks, they are still used in preference to lens systems in some situations. Pinholes are obviously useful for imaging x- rays or particle streams, where no lens materials are available, but even for light they offer complete freedom from linear distortion, virtually infinite depth of focus and a very wide angular field. Modest resolution and a very dim image are the disadvantages. Overall, pinhole cameras are worth study because they are useful and also because they illustrate some interesting physics.
Porpita porpita—the blue button jelly —is a neustonic species mostly found in the tropics; that is, it floats right neat the surface of the water. The circular disc is made of chitin and filled with gas, allowing these jellies to float. The tentacles (zooids) radiating from the disc do all the feeding. MIT/WHOI graduate student Kelly Rakow collected this one while diving in the waters near the Liquid Jungle Lab in Panama. (Photo by Kelly Rakow, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
In case it wasn’t obvious, I have a serious love for WHOI.
Diatoms are unicellular, sometime colonial, algae species. They bear a unique cell wall made of silica. This asymmetrical cell wall is separated by a split along the median, hence the group name. The coloration, shape, and patterning of the cell wall varies dramatically between species, giving many artistic microbiologists the opportunity to create breathtaking arrangements, as seen above.
Beauty aside, they are also incredibly helpful bio-indicators, allowing ecologists to measure water quality by examine their population.
Reblogging this because I think it’s just too cool for my new followers to not see!
My unfairly sexy boyfriend is taking developmental biology this semester and sent me this video!
It’s a chick embryo that has been removed from the yolk after an incubation period of 72 hours. You can see the head in the right hand portion of the screen. Below that is a small sac-like organ. That would be the heart, and yes, it is beating.
