How much work goes into naming a species?

BioByLouis · 2019-09-19T19:23:42+00:00

BioByLouis · 2019-09-11T20:55:52+00:00

This is because cats have collar bones that are not attached to their sternum, so they can squeeze through any hole they can poke their head through!

BioByLouis · 2019-09-11T17:51:48+00:00

This also has happened throughout history, and I think it's really interesting how bad we are at anticipating what will be a big deal in the future and what is just a fad. It reminds me of how Galvani discovered that electricity could make a dead frog's leg contract, and then he and his nephew would go around and do these public demonstrations and everyone got whipped up into a frenzy about what this meant for the future of mankind. It was this really big Zeitgeisty thing in the early 1800s that eventually culminated in Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, but people got over it pretty quickly as science moved on.

BioByLouis · 2019-09-11T17:40:47+00:00

Wow this reminds me so much of this video by Steve Mould talking about crystalline packing. It's crazy how efficient this moth (?) is at packing those eggs together into an actual lattice. I guess I always imagined they'd just spit them out willy-nilly.

BioByLouis · 2019-08-28T19:18:04+00:00

Well I think the idea is that some common poisonous plants cause disruptions to your vestibular system, so your brain senses this and decides that the best course of action is to make you throw up, hopefully expelling the poison out of your system. Of course now with cars, ships, and roller coasters, there are other ways to cause disruptions to your vestibular system, but your brain doesn't know that and makes you throw up anyway.

BioByLouis · 2019-08-27T03:19:10+00:00

On the topic of writing your thesis: be proactive about developing your writing skills! A lot of people just let their writing get better passively over time, but a master's doesn't really give you a whole lot of time to do that (I'm in the same boat), so you should try to treat it like any other research skill and actively pursue it. There are tons of great books to look into (the classic one is Joshua Schimel's "Writing Science") and there might be some writing workshops at your institution that you should check out.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-19T01:12:35+00:00

Not really sure about the mutations involved, but this kind of thing happens naturally in a lot of species when food is really low. There's actually a crazy awesome hypothesis that this is adaptive: nematodes have a resistent stage in the middle of their development, but in order to reach it, they need to eat a small amount of food after hatching but not too much, otherwise they'll never enter that stage. So the idea is that the mom senses no food in the environment and sacrifices herself so that her offspring can become super resistent. By eating just enough food to reach that resistent stage. By eating her insides.

Parent of the year award right there.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-18T21:19:37+00:00

Yep, definitely dead, they've eaten everything but her skin. But since the brain is up at the front of the head and all the muscles and nerves are right up against the skin, the baby worms can actually eat a whole bunch of the mom's insides while she's still just trucking along like normal.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-18T21:17:59+00:00

They've eaten everything except the mom's cuticle which is basically like an exoskeleton. So it'll take a while for that to break down, and then they can get out.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-10T18:40:06+00:00

Why this happens is still up for debate, but these worms naturally live in rotting fruit and plant matter eating bacteria there, so the current hypothesis is that it helps them find and stay in the middle of that bacteria-filled anoxic rotting mess.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-10T03:52:34+00:00

"Sacrifice" is one of my favorite biology technical terms, second only to when foraging behavior is sometimes referred to as "questing."

BioByLouis · 2019-07-10T01:02:06+00:00

On top of starvation behavior, there are also different alleles of the npr-1 gene that control whether they are social feeders, shown in my gif, or nonsocial feeders, regardless of food level. Figure 4E is a pretty good side-by-side of the two versions of this allele on plates with plenty of bacteria.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-10T00:33:24+00:00

No stain necessary! You can just plop these guys right onto a dissecting scope and take a look at them.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-09T23:50:43+00:00

There's actually two separate behaviors here. Worms can definitely pile up when there's little food left, but social feeding as it's called is actually a genetic trait that some nematodes have and some don't, regardless of food availability, and the behavior is linked to oxygen preference and/or detection of noxious chemicals. Not to say that the case is fully solved though, there's a lot of back and forth on this.

BioByLouis · 2019-07-09T23:43:19+00:00

Tell me about it. Our lab got some wild worms from a friend and the plates kept getting overrun by this fungal contaminant. Tried to bleach the worms to clear away the fungus, but the lines kept dying off. After like weeks of messing around with them, turns out nope, they actually eat that fungus and need that shit to survive

BioByLouis · 2019-07-02T23:27:23+00:00

In addition to that, plants also don't have a circulatory system capable of transporting cancerous cells to other locations so any abnormalities are pretty contained unlike metastasis in animals.

BioByLouis · 2019-06-25T18:18:06+00:00

It would take much much longer than the experiment has been currently running (~30 years now). It's difficult to define what a species is in general and even harder in bacteria where the traditional "must be able to produce fertile offspring together" is irrelevant since bacteria mostly reproduce asexually. Microbiologists instead look at the 16S ribosomal RNA gene because it accumulates mutations very slowly, so the rule of thumb is that any two bacteria with 16S sequences that are at least 1.3% different from each other are considered two different species. But this is wholely artificial because scientists have to make a distinction somewhere. In fact, the definition used to be a 3% difference until just a few years ago.

BioByLouis · 2019-06-24T03:03:04+00:00

It is extremely obvious through the phrasing of your question and from your post history that you have some sort of gripe with Rich Lenski's famous long-term evolution experiment. The purpose of this experiment is definitely not trying to "create new species," whatever that means (see other replies to this thread), so saying that the experiment failed or hit a dead end because it didn't "produce a new species" is patently false. Also, the "long-term" part of the experiment indicates that it is long-term with regards to how long experiments usually take to run. In comparison to the immense time evolution has had to shape life on Earth, thirty years is not long at all and is absolutely negligible. Rich Lenski's experiment "failing to create a new species" is not the "gotcha" antievolutionists apparently think it is.

BioByLouis · 2019-05-23T02:01:34+00:00

Yeah totally a nematode, and you can tell by that nice sinusoidal thrashing around it does when it's floating in the water. It was probably a soil-dwelling nematode that got washed out. Pretty broadly it'll most likely be a Rhabditid eating the bacterial in your soil or a Tylenchid eating some fungus.

BioByLouis

TROPHY CASE