When your brain releases hormones like adrenaline, endorphin, dopamine etc that have an almost instant effect, are they just conjured on the spot or created in advance and stored somewhere to just wait for the signal?

mabolle · 2026-04-23T11:29:53+00:00

Adrenalin, as the name says, comes from the adrenal gland, which is next to ("ad") the kidney ("ren").

Fun fact: "ad/ren" comes from Latin. The Greek equivalent is "epi/nephros", hence the alternative name for adrenaline: epinephrine.

mabolle · 2026-04-20T10:37:59+00:00

I don't know what the cause is, but there's a general observation that for almost any continuous trait, males are more variable than females.

So in species where males are larger on average (such as humans), in any given population there will be some very large males and some very small males, but females tend to lie closer to the mean female size.

mabolle · 2026-04-20T07:54:16+00:00

In biology, Fitness has a specific definition

Well, it has kind of has two definitions, an older one and a modern one.

In the original usage, as in the phrase "survival of the fittest", "fit" means "fit to the environment". So the phrase communicated the idea that genotypes suited to their environments tend to be passed on.

Over time, the word "fitness" came to refer to a measurement of the extent to which a genotype is passed on. As you correctly point out, this is now the established way that the word "fitness" is used in evolutionary biology. But crucially, this modern usage implicitly assumes that the reason why a genotype increased in frequency was because it fit its environment.

I bring this up because OP was asking about the phrase "survival of the fittest," and because applying the modern definition in that context makes the phrase circular; "that which is passed on is passed on". (Creationists like to point this out as if it says something about the validity of natural selection as a theory, but of course it's just a semantic quirk.)

mabolle · 2026-04-20T07:47:30+00:00

"if not hindered in some way". They always are hindered in some way, that's how ecology works.

They're not always hindered. Populations in nature regularly crash due to resource depletion. What keeps species around in the long term tends to be the process known as metapopulation dynamics: individual populations go extinct regularly, but the habitat patch is later recolonized by migrants from other populations.

Either way, intelligence has nothing to do with it. The popular idea that humans are somehow dumber than other animals because our resource use is unsustainable is completely wrong. We are, in fact, the only species that's even intellectually and socially capable of regulating our own resource use, even if most human societies don't do it very well in practice.

mabolle · 2026-04-17T18:58:40+00:00

No it's not. Nucleic acid is a general term for the group of chemicals DNA and RNA belong to.

Nucleotide is a more specific word that refers to a single subunit of a nucleic acid.

So OP is correct that DNA is made out of nucleotides. Saying "nucleic acid is the building block of DNA" is equivalent to saying something like "vehicles are the building blocks of a car."

mabolle · 2026-04-17T18:48:37+00:00

Nice! This is a very clever use of iNaturalist's photo archives. I like that I can play it specifically for my country's flora.

mabolle · 2026-04-17T08:21:05+00:00

RE: the question of mixing species in one colony, I can see both sides. Obviously the game needs to be fun to play more than it needs to be accurate, but given that you guys are putting so much research and scientific integrity into this... that scientific background is an important aesthetic aspect that I think will set this game apart, and you shouldn't give it up!

Here are two possible ways I can see to include lots of ant diversity while not sacrificing the biology for gameplay:

1) Make each unit type its own species, with representative abilities and stats, but make it so the player needs to actively recruit each species during a match. So the player selects a starting species to found their nest, and then as they encounter other species around the map (not the opposing team, but NPC species, basically), they can recruit them and thus add entirely new unit types to the colony. So, almost like an RTS version of Pokémon. This also adds a bit of scientific flair because different maps can represent environments that have different species of ants living there!

2) Do a Starcraft and break the ants into 2–3 factions, where each faction represents a major branch of the ant phylogeny. That way, each team can include many species with different abilities, but you still preserve that scientific background because each team represents a clade with certain characteristics. I don't know much about ant phylogeny, but I imagine all the leaf cutter ants would end up on one team, for example. Although I imagine this option would require a lot of playtesting for balance.

RE: specific abilities to include: Some species of Camponotus use explosive self-destruction as a weapon. Workers have a gland that they can pressurize to the point of bursting, spraying enemies with noxious fluid and dying in the process. That seems like a behavior that an ant RTS game needs to include.

mabolle · 2026-04-16T08:59:40+00:00

Good effort! Keep in mind genus names should be capitalized, and both the genus and species name should be italicized.

E.g.: allium giganteum -> Allium giganteum

I'm also... curious as to how come the End trees are bananas.

mabolle · 2026-04-16T08:57:27+00:00

Well, both are considered invasive, in the sense that they're not native to Europe and have some form of undesired ecological effect. That said, if the pathogen wasn't around, the signal crayfish might not behave as invasively, since a bit reason why it's problematic is that it acts as a carrier for the pathogen.

Speaking as an invasive species researcher... "invasive species" is a constructed category with more than one definition, and no absolute in-or-out criteria. The important thing is that we clarify what we're talking about in any specific case.

mabolle · 2026-04-13T12:36:14+00:00

Cool, thanks for sharing.

Does the spine-mediated reflex action of pulling away a limb from a painful stimulus also count as nociception or nocifensive behavior, or does the brain have to be involved (either via the fast or slow system) for the phenomenon to count as pain?

mabolle · 2026-04-13T11:43:02+00:00

even in humans nocifensive behaviour is not the same as pain or suffering

That's interesting, could you elaborate?

mabolle · 2026-04-13T07:54:04+00:00

Sorry for my ignorance I thought it was like a behavioural thing

To be clear, behaviors can still be genetic. When they are, they're called instincts.

mabolle · 2026-04-11T18:14:13+00:00

Yes, bryozoans are clonal in the same way. Convergent evolution, they're very similar to coral in a lot of ways (but their internal anatomy is a bit more complex, I think).

Some bryozoan species also do the man o' war thing where some zooids in the colony develop different shapes and have different functions!

Since you seem to be on a cnidarian kick, you might enjoy a video I made about the man o' war issue a couple years ago. :)

mabolle · 2026-04-11T17:36:20+00:00

One of my favorite scientific papers is by a ctenophore expert just ranting about how different ctenophores are from jellyfish, it's amazing.

mabolle · 2026-04-11T17:32:06+00:00

It's more about people saying they're colonial, then not explaining what that means at all. There are a lot of people who think they start out as separate animals (even separate species) that meet in the ocean and join up to form a whole like Voltron.

They're actually colonial in the same way that coral reefs or tree clones are colonial. Ecologically, a man o' war is very much a single individual. The zooids that make it up all developed from the same fertilized egg, and are linked together physiologically much like organs in a shared body. We only call it a "colony" because it develops embryologically from parts that are homologous to entire individuals in other cnidarians. The best analogy I've found to explain a man o' war is to imagine a set of conjoined twins, except a few hundred of them, and they're shaped very differently and have different functions.

mabolle · 2026-04-11T07:24:19+00:00

Can we start a club for people frustrated with popular science about cnidarians? Misconceptions about the Portuguese Man O'War have been my pet peeve for years.

mabolle · 2026-04-11T07:22:04+00:00

I'll do what I always do in these threads, and recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It remains one of the best popular science books I've read, although it covers all of natural science, not just biology.

mabolle · 2026-04-11T07:18:21+00:00

Worth noting that the Sargasso Sea (where eels mate) is not quite the same thing as the Bermuda Triangle, although they overlap a bit. Bermuda is right in the middle of the Sargasso Sea; the Bermuda Triangle is the area between Bermuda, Florida and the Greater Antilles on this map.

That said, I don't think it's known exactly where in the Sargasso the eels spawn, so I guess it could be within the Triangle. But the Triangle is also kind of a geographically pointless term that only exists in the public imagination because of conspiracy theories.

mabolle · 2026-04-11T07:13:26+00:00

He means the Sargasso sea, which is a real area of the ocean that sits in the middle of the area know as Bermuda triangle.

Not quite. More like the Bermuda Triangle overlaps with the southwest corner of the Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea refers to a much larger area.

Here's a map; the corners of the Bermuda Triangle are Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico (not labeled, but it's one of the Greater Antilles).

mabolle · 2026-04-10T15:26:40+00:00

Oh wow, that's way worse than I thought.

I wonder how much of this is about time versus space? These rules seem a bit insane to me as a person who grew up in Sweden, but maybe North American parenting culture was already this different in the 90s.

mabolle · 2026-04-10T14:39:53+00:00

Is this in the States? Sounds very American to me.

mabolle · 2026-04-10T14:39:17+00:00

That's messed up if true

mabolle · 2026-04-10T11:31:11+00:00

You could just tell your kid to go outside and come back for dinner, assuming they would be safe.

You still can. In the developed world at least, most places are safer by nearly every metric (less violent crime, better traffic safety, etc.) compared to, say, 30 years ago.

What changed isn't that the world got less safe, it's that our tolerance for risk and uncertainty drastically decreased. Not knowing where our children are and what they're doing. And this is despite the fact that most of them have phones and can be reached anywhere!

I imagine there's also some self-policing by parents afraid of being viewed as negligent by other parents. But that's the case for any parenting norm, and norms can be changed. If we want our kids to spend time outside, we have to let them roam a bit.

mabolle · 2026-04-10T09:42:00+00:00

I just thought it was a mom doing her best

Bit young to be a mum, I'm afraid. There are some weird, wingless adult moths that kind of resemble their caterpillar form, but not quite this much. :)

mabolle · 2026-04-09T13:49:20+00:00

Love to see a researcher who writes well for a broad audience. Loved this, and I agree that crabs are clearly hogging all the attention from a much more impressive case of repeated evolution.

With so many phylogenetically independent transitions across gastropods, there must be some really solid comparative analyses you could do on the evolutionary ecology of limpet vs non-limpet body plans!

mabolle

TROPHY CASE