Cephalopod Awareness Day Alert #1

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Here’s the first volley of cephalopod recognition posts I’ve received. Do send me more, and I’ll put them up later. Do me a favor and put “Cephalopod Awareness” in your subject line so I can sort them out more easily.

Wild Alaska seafood?

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This ad campaign is going to have some troubles, I suspect. It’s saying something I want to hear: they’re marketing wild seafood from Alaska, and they’re trying to convince me that it is a sustainable fishery. I have my doubts; but they are about to start a series of ads to tell me that it is, and they’re pushing salmon and king crab. Mmmmm. I want to believe. Delude me, baby, I want to taste your sweet, sweet lies.

The slogan is “Grab a fork, and eat all you want. There’s a lot more out there,” though, which I find appalling. And worse, far worse, I watched the ads. Who is mouthing that slogan? Ben Stein. I heard it, and my brain instantly clicked into full cynic mode. “He’s freakin’ lying,” my brain whispered to me, “Don’t trust a word he says.” And now I’m convinced that evil goons are chumming the North Pacific with baby seal blood and killing the fish with dynamite. So, DON’T BUY WILD ALASKA SEAFOOD. It’s evil.

Ah, the power of advertising.

For all the facts on fisheries, check out blogfish—in particular, you can find out more on the topic of Alaska at this link.

Animeme

Chris Clarke callously infected me with a meme. I’m supposed to answer these five questions.

An interesting animal I had

An interesting animal I ate

An interesting animal in the Museum

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

My first thought was, “Dude! These are awfully personal questions. Why are you asking for these intimate details of my sex life?” But then I noticed that he brought up my little friend Snowball (you may not want to read that), and all of his stories were about non-human animals. Oh. Never mind. That’s completely different.

Or maybe not so different…

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Basics: Master Control Genes and Pax-6

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

One concept that is sometimes used in developmental biology is the idea of the “master control gene” or “master switch” — a single gene whose expression is both necessary and sufficient to trigger activation of many other genes in a coordinated fashion, leading to the development of a specific tissue or organ. It’s a handy concept on which to hang a discussion of transcription factors, but it may actually be of rather limited utility in the real world of molecular genetics: there don’t seem to be a lot of examples of master control genes out there! Pax-6 is the obvious one, a gene that initiates development of the eye, and other genes may be mentioned in certain stem cell pathways, but even in the eyes of vertebrates, for example, eye development is more complicated than a single switch, and similarly, many other developmental processes seem to use multiple or redundant regulatory controls — the cases where we have a single gene bottleneck are either rare or poorly represented in the literature.

They’re still at least pedagogically useful, though — it’s a simple case of imposition of a specific developmental pathway on a patch of tissue.

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