Animal facts!

I did it. I did all of the school and now I am done with school. I buried a hatchet yesterday, which felt emotionally and metaphysically fantastic. Today I accidentally dug up the hatchet again, and now I've kinda kicked some dirt over the hatchet and am staring at it warily. We'll see where this metaphor goes. Anyways, things are drawing to a close. So now, I'm going to do something that I've wanted to do since late in my first semester here.

It's time for some animal facts.

A Black Soldier Fly, Hermetia illucens.

Black soldier flies are neat. Their larvae are used for composting and then subsequently for feeding. The coolest bit about them, though, is their adult stage. Specifically, their abdomen. If you look right behind the back legs, you can see that there's a little bit of their abdomen that is see-through. No, it's not just colored green. That bit is genuinely clear. I know this because one of the students in my Terrestrial Arthropods lab last year (I can't remember her name, which is embarrassing because there were literally eight people in that class) collected one of them for her bug board and wrote a little thing about it. Apparently there's been almost no investigation as to why they have this clear bit, other than to say that it's probably to disguise the fly as a wasp.

A Strepsipteran. Note the evil emanating from the eyes.

Strepsiptera are terrible. They're an order in the family insecta, and they're sometimes called "spiral-wing flies" or "twisted-wing parasites." They engage in "hemocoelous viviparity." Viviparity is when an animal's young are formed within the body, as opposed to oviparity which is when animals lay eggs (this is of course simplified because nature be cray). The hemocoel is essentially the blood of an insect, but it is different from our blood in that it isn't confined to veins but instead freely floats within the organism's body, distributing nutrients via diffusion. Hemocoelous viviparity is viviparity but in the hemocoel. Instead of having anything analogous to a womb, Strepsiptera babies just float around inside their mother's body, crawling through her blood between her organs. Of course, then the babies have no nice way out when it's time to become adults. So the babies eat their way out of their own mothers. THESE THINGS PARASITIZE THEMSELVES! There is more to say about them, but I will have none of it because I have no respect for these creatures. If you'd like to learn more about these unholy abominations, click here.

A Lyrebird, Menura novaehollandiae.

Lyrebirds are beautiful and are wonderful singers. There's only two species of them, together making up the genus Menura. They can imitate the songs of birds they hear around them. I'd say more, but really it's best if you just watch this video. Anyways, an interesting fact about lyrebirds, and all other songbirds that we know of, is that they have absolute pitch. They can sing back their calls at exactly the same frequencies every time, never drifting above or below the "key" they're in. More to the point, they do not have relative pitch. Relative pitch is the ability to distinguish between different intervals in frequency. It's how we can tell that the first two notes in Happy Birthday (a whole step) are a different jump than the first two notes in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (a fifth) but the same jump as the first two notes in Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (also a whole step). As far as we can tell, we humans are the only species who can do this. I might explain this more later, in another medium entirely. The point is, the Lyrebird is pretty, but humans are alright as well. Also lookit dem tail feathers. Pretty.

An adorable squid, Doryteuthis opalescens.

So, this semester I worked (and am still working I guess) at the Peabody Museum photographing slides for their digital collection. I'm all excited because I managed to finish my second box of slides (each box has 80 trays, each tray has 30 slides) pretty much exactly when my shift was up on Friday. Also, the last trays in that box were all parts of crustaceans, so I got to take some pretty rad photos (if I do say so myself). But before I had the pleasure of seeing all these rad crustaceans, I had the pleasure of seeing item 73992-1: a baby squid of the genus Doryteuthis. I named them Squoonchy. Squoonchy the Squid. According to Wikipedia, "In Dortteuthis the tentacular clubs are expanded and bear suckers in 4 series. The hectocotylus is on the left ventral arm IV with unmodified suckaers near the base, lack f a vntral crest while the reduced on elongated stalks form papillae on the dorsal series or on both dorsal and ventral series. The fins are situated in a posterior position. The spermatophore has a short, cement body cement body and they do not have any photophores." I'm not quite sure what "suckaers" are, nor what "f a vntral" signifies, nor can I hope to grasp the importance of repeating "cement body" twice in one sentence. I may never know.

Humans in their unnatural habitat.

Lastly but not leastly, humans! They're a neat species. They made me this computer! Now I can type things. Also, they've got a lot of neat stuff going for them, so they kinda took over the world. Which is great for me, because I am currently a human! Also they're kinda breaking the planet. It'll be fine. For some people. Probably. Anyways, I took a whole class about humans and animals and human infants and how the three relate in their mental states. I've already talked about the relative pitch thing, but there are also lots of other things that make humans unique. I might in the future expand on this list, but for now here they are without explanation: marathon running, generative and recursive language, desire to punish complete strangers, desire to aid complete strangers, desire to be like others, intentional teaching, complete alliance with in-group, creation of fiction. We're a strange bunch.

Well, that's enough for now. It is, after all, half an hour into tomorrow right now. And I do have things to do. But hey, at least this is not one of the things I have to do anymore. Anyways, midnight and all. Bye!