That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.
These
are more genetically compatible than These
and that’s why morphology-based phylogeny has Issues
The problem is perspective. People always think dogs are the ‘standard’ animal, the metric to use for whether or not two organisms “look like” they’re related. When in fact they’re a massive outlier due to the fact that we fucked up this lineage of wolf beyond recognition with selective breeding. It’s why people always say “breed” when they mean “species”, especially when talking about groups like lizards which can’t even be defined cladistically since some of them are closer to snakes than each other. To say nothing of fish.
I once read an article that emphasized there is no such thing as a fish.Sharks and rays, lamprey, lobe-finned fish like lungfish and coelacanth, bichir and sturgeon, and of course the multiple infraclasses of more “modern” fish groups are all only very distantly related to one another. They’ve maintained semi-similar body structures only because there are limited ways to efficiently move through water as a vertebrate.
This
And this
Are more distantly related from one another than you and I are from a lungfish
Which is absolutely fuckin wild.
Not only that, but all of us air-breathing land vertebrates, all the lizards and chickens and people and frogs, are closer to one another than those three “fish” are to one another as well.
these
are genetically closer than these
and…
these
are genetically closer than these
and my personal favorite, it really fucks with people…
these
are more genetically similar than these
COOL.
Some phylogeny for your evening reading, folks. :)
Is it true that some lizards are more closely related to snakes than to other lizards? Holy crap, I did not know that!
Um … anyone else having trouble uploading/editing multiple-picture-posts? Is this a my dumb internet thing? Or a new post-version thing? Ugh, annoying. I will try not to let it get me down and color my opinion of today’s lichen, M. polyphaea. This crustose lichen has a thin, wrinkled, gray-green thallus with black-disked apothecia. The surface is often coated in a thin layer of powdery pruina. M. polyphaea grows closely attached to smooth tree bark in the SW U.S. Pretty sure. There are records of it growing elsewhere, but the description I am reading is pretty specific about that range. IDK, a lot of things aren’t making sense to me today. But you know what does make sense? Falling in love with little dudes like this.
I have been really thinking I need a haircut lately. I can’t pull off the long-haired, brunette look like N. abbreviata. This brittle, fruticose lichen grows on conifers in chaparral and coast-adjacent woodland. It has a reddish-brown, fruticose thallus, and flat, concolorous apothecia surrounded in a ciliate margin. Nododobryoria was only recognized as a sperate genus from Bryoria lichens in 1995 due to a difference in chemical composition and cellular structure. Goes to show you shouldn’t judge a lichen by its thallus–it’s what’s on the inside that counts!
ok, before I get a bunch of messages and reblogs like “Oh! I’ve seen this! It’s all over my neighborhood!” I am gonna kill your hopes and dreams right now by saying what you are most likely seeing is Xanthoria parietina, which is super common pretty much everywhere and grows on just about everything. But, if your neighborhood happens to be a wind-swept, rocky, coastal habitat in Europe or northern Africa, this might actually be your guy! X. aureola is has a thick, golden-yellow to orange, foliose thallus made up of narrow, strap-shaped, overlapping lobes. It rarely produces apothecia, which are flat, round, and concolorous with the upper surface. It grows on nutrient-rich or siliceous rocks and cliffs along the seashore, and occasionally on walls and old wood.
Can you believe people have the gall to describe P. herrei as “ragged?” When it is probably the most stunning thing I have seen today? The nerve, honestly. This foliose lichen has long, thin lobes that grow straight-up or drooping over. The lobe edges are covered in a thick layer of isidia (clonal propagules containing both algal and fungal components). The upper surface is typically a pale gray or green, sometimes turning brown after prolonged sun exposure. The lower surface is patchy white, gray, and brown with few rhizines. P. herrei grows on conifers in the Pacific NW of North America. And is beautiful and perfect and not ragged even a little bit.
Venerating celebrities is out, venerating lichens is IN! Public figures will let you down and devastate you emotionally but you know who would never do that to you? D. venustum. They’re your unproblematic fave now. Deal with it.
This crustose lichen grows in thick, white rosettes dotted with black or chalky gray apothecia. It colonizes calcium-rich rocks and human-made surfaces in open areas of northern Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Greenland.
Dark lichens are easily overlooked compared to their flashier cousins, but when you get up close and personal, you can see how stunning they truly are! This strongly lobed, foliose lichen grows in rounded rosettes closely attached to vertical, siliceous rock. It has a dark olive to brown to black upper surface, and a dark, rhizinate lower surface. It produces dark brown to black soredia, and only rarely, sorediate-encircled apothecia. M. disjuncta grows in boreal and montane habitats in North America, Europe, northern Asia, and central Africa.
Can you believe this little little gray spot is a lichen? It’s true. A. trolocularis is a foliicolous lichen, meaning it grows on the surface of long-lasting leaves.
A little inside peak into Lichenaday HQ–when I search for images of a lichen, a lot of times I get pictures like this:
This is a picture from a botanical collection (The New York Botanical Garden in this one) of a lichen specimen. And a lot of times, these pictures are not that great. Like in this picture, it is hard to know what you are supposed to be looking at because there’s a big, dry, dead leaf with a bunch of splotches on it. And believe it or not, this is one of the better ones I’ve seen! Because A. trilocularis, the subject hear, is kinda just a splotch on a leaf, and this was the only picture of it I could find that actually like, shows *the leaf.* For a lot of other lichens, once they are dried and aged, they don’t look like the living specimen at all, and the pictures are often from such a distance that you can’t tell what the F you are looking at. But those are the only pictures I find for lots of species. I avoid posting them because they are usually not great to look at and not super helpful for field ID purposes, but I thought I’d share this one so you get an idea of the substrate for this little splotchy fella.
Naming a kid anytime soon? Have you considered the name Coralliza? And they can go by Liza, and people will be like, “oh, like Liza Minnelli?” and they can be like “No, like the lichen.” This crustose lichen is described as coralloid, or coral-like in growth form. It grows in 2 mm thick patches of cracked, grainy, bright yellow thallus. It has flat-disked, yellow apothecia, often with a gray or black tint. C. coralliza is ornithocoprophilic, meaning it likes to grow where there is lots of bird poop! So you can often find it near coasts or high in the mountains, growing on rocks and roofs frequented by perching birds. Maybe not what you want to name your kid after, but maybe it would be a reminder that even beautiful things can some out of shitty situations.
Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is most well known for establishing a systematic binomial nomenclature for describing biological entities. This system was first published in his Philosophia Botanica, published in Stockholm and Amsterdam in 1751. This week we present engraved plates from a Spanish edition of this work, printed in Madrid by the widow and children of Pedro Marin in 1792 under the direction of Spanish botanist Casimiro Gómez de Ortega (1741-1818), with additional material by the Swedish botanist Johan Andreas Murray(1740-1791).
Taxonomy is fucked up. You start out at “This is how our animal friends are classified and how they’re related to each other :)” and then you dip one inch below the surface and you get “There’s definitely no such thing as a fish and there might be no such thing as a reptile”
I spent my day working on describing new species of Rhombophryne, the ‘diamond frogs’ of Madagascar. I’ve been working on these frogs since 2013, and have described more than half of the currently known species, but there are still so many species to describe.
Here, I am working on the second most important part of the description of one new species: the holotype description. This involves very careful examination and description of the features of the one specimen that ‘carries’ the name of the species. As you can see, I talk with myself a lot while I am doing this. I’m noting aloud features that are substantially different from other species, or things that are worth describing. I find this quite the best way to keep the features in my mind while I am looking at a lot of things at once—but of course it only works while I have my office to myself.
The *most* important part of every species description is the diagnosis. This includes the list of features that are the ones that ‘define’ your new species, and in many cases also the way that it can be told apart from all the other relevant species. In the case of the paper I am working on here, that is the last thing I will be doing for each species, as it will depend on having everything described and ready beforehand.
Meet Brookesia nana, the Nano-Chameleon, probably the smallest reptile in the world!
On an expedition to the Sorata Massif in northern Madagascar, my colleagues discovered this minuscule chameleon. Now we have the pleasure of introducing it to the world. We published the discovery in the OA journal Scientific Reports.
At 13.5 mm in body size, the adult male is the smallest adult reptile ever found. The adult female at 19 mm is a bit larger, hence whether it is the smallest reptile or not is a question of definition!
We show also that these tiny chameleons have comparatively massive genitals, and that this is true of most miniaturised chameleons. So, to update the adage: it’s not about absolute size, it’s about relative size.
Glaw, F., Köhler, J., Hawlitschek, O. et al. Extreme miniaturization of a new amniote vertebrate and insights into the evolution of genital size in chameleons. Sci Rep 11, 2522 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-80955-1
Happy #WorldSnakeDay! To mark the occasion, I have just released this new poster showing 13 of the 19 genera of pseudoxyrhophiid snakes from Madagascar! These snakes are really amazing, showcasing the evolutionary potential of the snake bauplan, and occupying niches from slug-eating to egg-eating, vince-snakes to racers, and everything in between. You can get it on my RedBubble page—link in my profile! . . . . . . . . #snake #langaha #science #taxonomy #snakes #Psuedoxyrhophiidae #Pseudoxyrhophiinae #poster #scienceposter #scicomm #biology #zoology #herps #herpetology #herpers #herpetofauna #Madagascar #reptile #animals #forest #rainforest #wildlife #nature #infographic #animal #diversity #RedBubble #findyourthing #evolution https://www.instagram.com/p/CCt42QRsnAs/?igshid=1l752her4ogp4
