Friday Cephalopod: Live! From Iowa!

Uh-oh. It turns out that Iowa is even more remote from the ocean than Minnesota (we at least have a great lake connecting us to the Atlantic, sorta), and it’s darned hard to find an Iowa-Cephalopod connection. Except, of course, that once upon a time the great inland sea stretched up this way, and mighty ammonoids would have been swimming about my hotel room. Oh, well, in honor of our absent shelled cephalopods, here’s a nautilus.

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It’s going to take an awful lot of global warming and some major geological activity to submerge Iowa again, you know.

Botanical Wednesday: Acrobatic trans-species sex!

Let’s turn this into a kinky porn blog with a titillating photo of a gecko servicing a Trochetia flower.

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What do we call this? It can’t be bestiality or zoophilia, since this is actually trans-kingdom.

You know that I’m on a slippery slope here…once you start flashing photos of Animalia getting it on with Plantae, the next step in degeneracy is dirty talk about horizontal gene transfer between whole domains.

SDB 2011: Posters!

Those of you who’ve been to a poster session at a science meeting know that they’re noisy and chaotic and entirely reliant on interaction to work…so I’m not even going to try and describe it. Instead, I strong-armed Eric Röttinger into describing his poster on video for me, and here it is. He’s describing his work on Kahikai, an online database for collecting information about the development of marine invertebrates.