Sunday at noon. I’ve got a vagueish sort of plan.

Hey! I was going to do a punctuated equilibrium video, but I got hung up on spiders this week. I’ll still wrap one up on PE next week, but in the meantime, I thought I’d talk a bit about Stephen Jay Gould, and then segue into whatever you all want to chat about.

You can either leave comments in the live chat, or if you’ve got something you desperately want to share in person (or you just really like Gould, too), contact me and maybe I’ll send you the magic link to join me on the video.

Or just watch and send me hatemail. That’s a valid choice, as is not watching at all.

Everyone was asking how big those baby spiders are, so I made a video with scale bars so you can see exactly how tiny they are.

This is something that could someday be corrected with mutagens, or gamma radiation. Give me time.

Christie Wilcox describes a terrible experiment. Investigators were mystified by an area around a Pacific island that was empty of lobsters, so they dumped a bunch of lobsters there to see what happened. And then…

“Visibility was great that day, and virtually the entire sea bottom started to move,” he said.

That movement was countless whelks. They started to climb onto the newcomers, sticking to their legs. “I didn’t know then, but they’d started to suck them alive, basically. It was like a horror movie,” Barkai said. “It actually was a bit frightening to watch.” The lobsters simply didn’t know how to respond. They were outnumbered and overwhelmed.

“To my horror, in about 30, 40 minutes, all the lobsters were killed.”

Barkai managed to bring two whelk-coated lobsters back to the surface to show the crew—which is when the first photo in this piece was shot. The bewilderment on his face says everything. On the ship, they carefully pulled the whelks off—over 300 per lobster. “When we removed the whelks from the lobsters, they were empty shells. There was no meat left at all whatsoever. They were simply empty shells,” he recalled. “Basically the only thing that kept them together was the whelks, so the moment we removed the whelks, the lobsters just fell apart.”

But perhaps the most awful part was seeing up close how the whelks had done the lobsters in. They had penetrated every single soft tissue that they could find with their tubular mouthparts—the lobsters’ eyes, joints, anywhere with even a little give. “You could see these very long pipes coming in from the inside of the lobster,” Barkai explained. The poor lobsters—”they didn’t have a chance.”

So, to oppose the lobsters, one must be a whelk. Which is interesting, because the lobster-devouring whelks don’t seem to exhibit much in the way of hierarchical behavior, and do have some anti-lobsterian social behaviors.

Pity the male of the marine whelk, Solenosteira macrospira. He does all the work of raising the young, from egg-laying to hatching — even though few of the baby snails are his own.

The surprising new finding by researchers at the University of California, Davis, puts S. macrospira in a small club of reproductive outliers characterized by male-only child care. Throw in extensive promiscuity and sibling cannibalism, and the species has one of the most extreme life histories in the animal kingdom.

Now that I’ve stuck the knife in, let’s twist it a bit.

“The promiscuity in the female snails is extraordinary,” Kamel said, noting that some females mate with as many as a dozen different males.

Whelks: the lobster’s worst nightmare. I’ve been saying for years you’ve got to admire a good mollusc.

I don’t want Jesus to come back, I’d much prefer to see Mars Rover Opportunity rise from the dead. It’s been silent for almost 3 months as a massive dust storm prevented its solar panels from charging, but that storm is finally subsiding, so there’s hope it will recharge and start transmitting again.

It’s been working for 14 years, which is amazing. I’ve had cars that lasted that long, but we brought them in for tune-ups every year. It’s sister robot, Spirit, went dead in 2010. Mars Rover Curiosity landed in 2012 and is still cruising around. These robots are a pretty good deal — I don’t think an astronaut would last anywhere near as long, and he’d be too busy growing poop potatoes to get much science done.

It’s a short one.

Just look at these estimates of total biomass on Earth. Why are we wasting our time harvesting cows, when there’s so much more worm and mollusc meat available to us?

Of course, even that’s a silly question. Go take a look at total plant biomass.

It’s an honor he deserves. First he was extrapolating from lobsters to people with a lot of naive and misunderstood neurobiology and evolutionary biology, and now Jordan Peterson is misreading a paper about ants to misapply it to humans.

30% of the ants do 70% of the work. Not a consequence of the West, or capitalism, in case it needs to be said :) https://t.co/z45k6ENzYJ pic.twitter.com/pWuwF4d37d

— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 19, 2018

Because “the West” and “capitalism” are social constructs that ants are not aware of. Unfortunately for Peterson, an ant expert stepped right up.

The point Jordan Peterson is trying to make is that people he doesn't like are lazy, and is misquoting a research result as some sort of proof.

The paper itself did not show that 70% of ants are lazy. They stepped up as soon as the working crew was removed. https://t.co/Dkr5eDIeYY

— Alex Wild (@Myrmecos) August 19, 2018

Maybe Peterson will announce that he’s a myrmecologist next?

Anyway, I read the paper. He doesn’t get it. The research shows that when fire ants are excavating narrow tunnels, where only a few at a time can be at the digging face, they optimize their behavior, avoiding a mad, industrious rush that would merely clog the tunnels and hinder hauling grains of dirt away. They did things like remove the 5 most active digging ants, and found that there was no reduction in the rate of digging, because others would readily step forward to fill in. It’s not at all about what fraction of the population are doing their fair share of the work; it’s about an optimal strategy for a specific task.

I guess he thought he was making a joke to reinforce the biases of his followers — but instead people who know something about ants and logic have turned him into the joke.