Archive for the 'Organisms'

At first glance, I thought it was an epiploon or omentum, but no, it’s a lovely octopus mother tending her brood. Go hug your mom right now, or if she’s not nearby, hug a mollusc instead.

How else is Google Maps going to get coverage of the 70% of the planet underwater? (via Cephalove)

…like I do, here’s a useful resource: Regular Care and Maintenance of a Zebrafish (Danio rerio) Laboratory: An Introduction. It’s text and a video guide to familiar procedures. Unfortunately, it also assumes you have a commercial zebrafish rack, which if you buy the smallest size available, will set you back about $10,000. I’ve just been using an array of 5 gallon tanks, each with its own filter system, which is cheap to set up, but a pain to maintain. I’m going to bite the bullet and build my own DIY flow-through system this summer, though, which I expect will cost a few hundred dollars…which is more in my budget. If you want to follow along, here’s a paper on a Modular, Easy-to-Assemble, Low-Cost Zebrafish Facility — it’ll be something like that. It’s not exactly the kind of show aquarium you’d have in your home, but if all you care about is embryo throughput, it’s loads of fun and lower maintenance than what I’ve been doing so far.

Boosting signal on this, because it’s potentially very urgent and the person at risk could be anywhere in the world at this point. A week ago, on April 30, a visitor to the Kelso Depot in the Mojave National Preserve had a bat land on his neck. The bat — a Myotis lucifugus a.k.a. little brown bat — has since tested positive for rabies, and now San Bernardino County officials are trying to find the man. They don’t know if he was bitten or scratched: it wouldn’t take much of a bite to transmit the disease, and if that happened he’s got to get vaxxed. Details on the incident and public health contact info are here. The guy doesn’t have a lot of slack before getting to the doctor at this point: onset of symptoms can start mere days after a bite. (Or years, which has caused people to falsely assume they’ve dodged a bullet.) Before symptoms start prevention is straightforward and no longer arduous. I’ve had rabies shots and they weren’t the worst injections I had that year. (Individual mileage varies there, but they’re way better than they were back in the day. Mine were a breeze.) And it’s a good opportunity to remind people in bat and rabies country that while transmission of rabies from bats to humans is quite rare, bats exhibiting unusual behavior (like not being shy or nocturnal) should be given a wide berth and reported to local authorities.

Oh, no. The metazoan curator sent me this photo for this time around, and I groaned a bit: more big furries. I told her, “Where are the tubeworms, the crustaceans, the zooplankton? Why no jellyfish or echinoderms?” And she said, “But they’re so cute!” and gave me that look. That look that means I have to do as I’m told. You know, if she starts sending me cats, I’m just gonna blow up. Me posting cats? That would be one of the signs of the End Times, along with the Last Trump and deluges of blood and whores riding dragons. (via NatGeo)