:)

we all know people who go out of their way to be rude on bug appreciation posts are annoying as heck but sometimes they manage to read the room so absurdly poorly that it's just funny. You'll see a photo with 200 notes by someone called "flylover4ever" with the caption "look at this beautiful blowfly I found on my morning bug hunt 😊" and every comment note and tag is something like "look at that coloring!" "what beautiful eyes you have 😍" "KISSING HER ON THE TERGAL PLATE" and then there's just one rando person being like "EWWW kill it with fire 🤮". And it's like how did you even get here. are you lost, where did you even come from

This was from a 2015 study by Fossette et al. which observed wild Rhizostoma octopus jellyfish, aka barrel or dustbin lid jellfish, and found that they actively orient themselves and swim against the current, contrary to the popular image of scyphozoan jellies as passive directionless drifters! Based on these observations, they (the scientists) ran computer simulations of virtual jellyfish moving through ocean currents demonstrating that this active swimming is probably really really important for allowing them (the jellyfish) to form and maintain large blooms while avoiding getting stranded alone or ashore

thinking about that time scientists put tracking collars on jellyfish

Penis worms is serious business! been no-joke half-considering making an account to make a PSA about it (and other invertebrate stuff) for a while ^^; I like priapulids a lot, they’re a really underrated (and understudied) phylum

Hi, created an account just to let you know the photo you posted earlier is not a priapulid but a spawning sea cucumber, likely genus Paracaudina. It was misidentified on iNaturalist and went viral before it got corrected, and now it comes up on the search results along with a bunch of other worms like spoon and peanut worms that people misidentify as priapulids. The only priapulid that there’s good photos of is P. caudatus which is very distinctive if you know what it looks like. Love the blog!

Ah!!! Thank you very much for letting me know friend (even going as far as to make an account about it), sucks that these incorrect images have spread so far x(

The first image linked is not actually a priapulid but a sea cucumber in its spawning posture! It was misidentified on iNaturalist and went viral before it was corrected— see the original observation here. (It gets kinda heated which I think is kinda funny. Penis worms are serious business!) I have always said before that I want internet fame specifically for two reasons: to make PSAs about Anomalocaris’s head carapace which everybody always leaves out of drawings because of that one inaccurate museum model, and about the incorrectly identified sea cucumber photo about which is now like the first image result you get when searching for penis worms and is my NEMESIS 😠 (the misinformation, not the photo or the sea cucumber, those are great)

For all the worm fans— priapulids are super easy to identify; there are as of the time of writing only 22 recognized species, and for many of them the only photos of them are from articles in scientific journals. Over half the species are microscopic, and the macroscopic ones are mainly found in polar regions, often in the deep sea, where they are usually burrowed in sediment and thus are little-encountered by people. The only one of them that is commonly photographed (and studied) is Priapulus caudatus, which is broadly found across the northern northern hemisphere even in shallow waters and I think probably has to be the most accessible species in general. They look like this:

image by Thomas Trott

This species accounts for probably 99% of the images of priapulids out there, and its relatives look rather similar, such as its southern hemisphere counterpart Priapulus tuberculatospinosus or the two-tailed species Priapulopsis bicaudatus. The intricate, feathery tails (referred to in the literature as “caudal appendages”) are probably the most distinctive feature of this group; they are believed to be involved in respiration, though as with many things about the phylum it is not known for certain. (See this recent paper for a review of macroscopic priapulid morphology.) In the zoomed-out photos of that sea cucumber you can see on the iNat page, it lacks a tail which is a dead giveaway that it is not any of these; also note that while it has some longitudinal striations along what sorta looks like a proboscis, they don’t actually bear any teeth! The spined, toothed proboscides of priapulids are indeed super cool and are their most distinctive feature setting them apart from other proboscis-bearing worms like peanut worms or spoon worms, which are often also misidentified online as priapulids. A fun fact is that the shape of their teeth varies across species in a way that appears to be closely correlated with their diet, see this paper for a neat study that uses tooth shapes to examine the different ecological niches occupied by extant priapulids and their Cambrian relatives!

The only other macroscopic priapulids that don’t look much like Priapulus are the two species Halicryptus spinulosus and Halicryptus higginsi, the latter of which I believe there are literally like two full-body photos in existence of it, one of which is from a login-walled journal article from 1999 and the other of which is one of the specimens from that 1999 article photographed after 25 years preserved in a museum. There’s a decent number of photos floating around of H. spinulosus (though still not as many as P. caudatus); they look like this:

image by Claude Nozères

As you can see, Halicryptus lack tails and have a much less prominent proboscis than Priapulus and its relatives, which you can only see the spines of on the very tip; H. spinulosus in particular has a rather short and small body that distinguishes it a lot, while H. higginsi is the largest known species of priapulid in the world (see this paper for a review of both of them). They’re maybe less distinctive-looking but idk, I don’t know off the top of my head if there’s super anything else you would mistake them for, and images of them are pretty uncommon anyway. In any case as far as macroscopic priapulids go, these are the only ones you have to look out for; if you’ve got those down you’re all set! As stated before, most priapulid species are actually microscopic; just for fun here’s the tropical meiobenthic species Tubiluchus corallicola:

image by Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

look at that squiggly tail!

And yeah in conclusion priapulids are super cool and underrated and I wish there were more people paying attention to them; there’s soooo many neglected taxa that we’re still only just discovering basic aspects of their biology and priapulids are one of them! If you want to see their amazing extensible proboscis in action, linked below is by far the best priapulid video out there, I highly recommend it. And most of all remember everybody THAT PHOTO IS A FRICKING SEA CUCUMBER, NOT EVERY WORM THAT LOOKS LIKE A PENIS IS A PENIS WORM AAAAAAA 😭😭😭

Can't believe any real animal has teeth as awesome as penis worms have.

They are meat eaters :)

During the storm, I've had a wasp sheltering on my window.

It's been two days now, and she's still there, so I gave her some honey

Lookit her! slurping away!

@onenicebugperday

Oftentimes I see people just make shit up about bugs and other invertebrates. People will say stuff like "actually it's been scientifically proven that insects are physically incapable of cognition" with no source, and then you look it up and in fact there is tons and tons of literature reporting results on this exact thing. A while back after getting into an argument with people online about wasps, I decided to try compiling sources on invertebrate cognition out of spite and I had to take a break at some point because there is so much literature out there, it is actually overwhelming. Just with fruit flies alone, there's studies on how they form stable social networks and fight to establish hierarchies; how they make group decisions and act differently in crowds; how they pay attention to what other flies are doing and teach and learn from each other, even with other species. When subjected to pain out of their control, they can develop depression and respond to SSRIs to the point that they are literally used as animal models to study how to treat depression in humans. And that's just like, one animal!

Even with all the research there is though the truth is that we just haven't studied things like cognition, perception, behavior, sociality, etc. for the vast majority of invertebrates (i.e. the vast majority of animals). Most behavioral research (honestly, just bio research in general) is focused on vertebrates -- particularly mammals -- and the research that has been performed for invertebrates has still only been done for a small handful of species and lineages. Fruit flies are one of the single most studied organisms in the world (and there's still a lot we don't know about them). If idk, clams felt emotions, do you think you would be able to tell by just looking at them? (I have no idea if they do or not, I don't think anyone has studied this. we do know scallops can see.) But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and given the small glimpses of insight we have gotten into the vast world of unknowns, I think yeah it's pretty obvious that there is way more going on with a lot of animals than people think. Scala naturae my behated

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

On a more philosophical note, in general it's still very up in the air what conscious experience "is"; I know neuroscientists have proposed various theories of consciousness attributing it to various cognitive processes like multisensory integration, associative learning, working memory, etc. I haven't read all that much of the literature to know what the scientific consensus is on those theories (I don't think there isn't one) but my own personal (unsourced but I don't think very controversial) guess would be that it probably involves all of those things, and also probably that consciousness is a spectrum, not just a yes-or-no thing (cf. how it feels like to be fully awake vs. in the middle of falling asleep vs. dreaming). I don't think we'll ever really be able to prove or know for sure "what it feels like" to be a fruit fly or whatever, but strictly speaking this is technically the case even with other people, right— you can't do a brain scan to find a person's subjective experience, cuz it's well, subjective; yknow there's all the classical debates about philosophical zombies and the Chinese room thought experiment and so on that philosophers have talked about. Ultimately I think people intuitively ascribe consciousness to others because yknow they have a theory of mind, like I don't think I could be a solipsist even if I wanted to. When we anthropomorphize animals (or inanimate objects 😜) this is what we're doing; we view them and recognize aspects of ourselves, accurately or not, just cuz it comes more or less naturally. From a scientific perspective I think that's basically all we can really do, is to observe animals in a rigorous manner and see what they can do, and idk from the results we do have, at least to me it sure looks a lot like these animals have consciousness. They process complex sensory information in real-time, they form novel behaviors based on experiences in context, they display signs of emotion in a statistically quantifiable way, idk what do we call that if not subjective experience?

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

In the fish tank straight up "grisping it" and by "it", haha, well. Let's justr say. My rok.

also I want to append to this, we shouldn't necessarily assume that animals will be like humans; in scientific research you want to be careful with your preconceptions and personal biases, and in dealing with animals in person over-anthropomorphizing them can even be dangerous, for you and for them. But I think dismissing it out of hand in the other direction is just pretty ignorant given all the things we do know and all the things we know we don't, dubious from a moral perspective (if a creature looks like it's in pain, uh should not the null hypothesis be that it is in pain?), and stems from a really anthropocentric philosophy that has plagued even certain areas of biology itself (if you've read about like, human brain evolution you know what I mean) in a way that is soo frustrating and just is like, augh stop the ghost of Aristotle haunts you

Also I picked those fruit fly examples because they demonstrate ways in which insects are like us, but there's also by no means anything lesser about animals or other organisms that aren't like us either! Not everything is going to be like us and I think there's value and respect-worthiness in that too.

also there's evidence that white garden snails can distinguish numbers up to five

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

some standard and heirloom pumpkaboo varieties 🎃