gills-jaws-ears

[gills-jaws-ears]

Ok so to like. Explain what the hell is going on here. Moodjar is a parasitic plant that infects the roots of other trees and draws nutrients from them. Which by itself is not super weird; there’s actually lots of parasitic plants (all 900+ species of mistletoe, for example). Moodjar, though, does something that no other parasitic plant does, and it’s fucking terrifying.

Parasitic plants suck nutrients from their hosts using specialized root-like tendrils called haustoria. In almost every case, the haustoria invade the host by slipping in between the host’s cells, spreading until they reach the vascular system where nutrients are transported. Moodjar, though, apparently just does not have time for that shit, and takes a much more direct approach. When it wants to infect the root of a new host, it uses its haustoria to chop the damn thing in half. Like, with a blade. What the fuck.

What happens is that the moodjar’s haustoria wrap around the root, then they grow a literal blade out of wood that’s sharp enough to cut your lip open. Then they inflate some hydraulic glands and just shove the blade through the root they’re attacking. It gets cut clean in half, and the moodjar sends its tendrils up into the root to feed.

Like, this is just so insanely fucked up. The actual scientific name for this structure is the sclerenchymatic guillotine, for Christ’s sake. It’s such a ridiculously overengineered organ that occasionally moodjar plants will actually damage underground power cables because it thinks they’re roots and starts slicing into the insulation.

So remember: nature is beautiful, and scary as shit.

Compelled by forces deep within myself to make memes about the Australian moodjar tree:

It’s Fine, Just Don’t Worry About The Knife Plant

[Images: Hermanus, Gnangarra, MILOSLAVvonRANDA]

[gills-jaws-ears]

Compelled by forces deep within myself to make memes about the Australian moodjar tree:

It’s Fine, Just Don’t Worry About The Knife Plant

[Images: Hermanus, Gnangarra, MILOSLAVvonRANDA]

[gills-jaws-ears]

A weird little poem about prehistoric lemurs and the end of the world (transcript under the cut)

Keep reading

[gills-jaws-ears]

Hey you wanna know something fucked up? You know ginkgo trees? Those ones that smell super weird and bad but have the super pretty leaves?

These guys?

They’re fucking gymnosperms.

I swear to god this is not some boring nerd shit*; what that means is that their closest relatives are PINE TREES. Pine trees! A whole world of other broadleaf, deciduous trees out there that would make sense for them to be related to, but noooooo, this fucking thing is related to pine trees. Turns out that gymnosperms (the group that includes pines, redwoods, stuff like that, plus a few other weirdos like ginkgos) used to do all kinds of absolutely buck wild stuff back in the day a couple hundred million years ago, way more than just evergreen needles and cones, and ginkgos are like a living fossil record of one tiny piece of that. So be nice to them about the smell, they’ve been through a lot.

Literally the last descendant of an ancient lineage from what was basically an alien world, and now they’re all over cities everywhere and we hardly notice. The world is just so beautiful and absurd.

*it is absolutely nerd shit, it’s just not boring nerd shit

[gills-jaws-ears]

Listen I need to tell y’all about the animal with the single most fucked-up skull you’ve ever seen in your life:

[Image ID: a side-view drawing of a skull from a scientific paper. There is a small set of jaws at the front of the skull, as you’d expect, but there’s also what is clearly a second set of jaws attached to the back of the skull. This second set of jaws, highlighted in blue, is positioned directly behind the first set, which are highlighted in purple. It looks for all the world as if this animal had two separate mouths on its head. End ID]

This is the skull of a cichlid fish (pronounced SICK-lid), and just. What the fuck, man. This thing is ridiculous. And cichlids aren’t even weird-looking fish! Like this isn’t some deep-sea nightmare or something, it’s a completely generic fish that you can literally buy at Petsmart. And this is what their skull looks like.

The reason you’ve never seen a fish with two mouths, despite them being incredibly common worldwide, is that those second jaws aren’t on the outside - they’re actually in the back of the fish’s throat. A cichlid’s main jaws (the oral jaws) are super specialized for catching prey out of the water, but the trade-off is they kind of suck at chewing it once they have it. So to fix that, they need a whole other set of jaws, the pharyngeal jaws, that don’t have to deal with prey capture and are optimized just to chew*.

It gets even wilder though, because while they might look fine in profile, the pharyngeal jaws actually don’t look anything like the oral jaws, or any idea you might have about what a jawbone looks like. Instead, they look like this:

No nice rows of teeth here, just a flat triangular plate, literally covered in a whole surface of teeth. Jesus Christ. This is probably living in your local pond right now. I fucking love this thing; it fills me with such a specific brand of existential dread that you absolutely cannot get anywhere else. It is my all-time favorite bone, which is not a thing I even had until I learned about the beautiful horror that is the cichlid pharyngeal jaw.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

*technically, what happened is that lots of fish have primitive pharyngeal jaws to help with chewing, but cichlids’ are so advanced and specialized that they were able to handle all of the chewing by themselves, which freed up the oral jaws to focus entirely on catching prey. So the pharyngeal jaws being good at chewing is the reason the oral jaws could evolve to ignore it, not the other way around.

[Images from Hulsey et al. (2006)]

[gills-jaws-ears]

I just really enjoy how the different animal phyla feel so much more distinct than different plant phyla, like plants can be hard to tell apart at a glance sometimes but at the phylum level animals just look like completely different artists came up with them and even out of “different materials.”

[gills-jaws-ears]

Check it out! Slime molds!

You might think from the name that these are some kind of fungus, but they’re actually so much weirder than that... they’re giant amoeba, single cells big enough to be seen by the naked eye! For most of their lives, they exist as a pulsating networks of gelatinous tubes, crawling around the forest floor scavenging for bacteria and fungi. These networks can act almost like brains, transmitting signals through physical pulses to solve surprisingly complex problems (like solving mazes and balancing their diet). Once conditions are right, they stop moving and undergo an absolutely wild metamorphosis, transforming into clusters of fruiting bodies packed with spores. That’s what you see in the pictures above!

If you look closely, slime molds are pretty easy to find basically anywhere - I took all these right in the firewood pile behind my house. Even “normal” backyard nature will blow your mind if you let it!

[gills-jaws-ears]

God literally no animal is funnier than the sloth… so there’s this whole thing in biology that every mammal has exactly 7 neck vertebrae, ok? It’s always a constant number. In other animals, like birds, that isn’t true - a swan has way more neck vertebrae than a sparrow because duh, its neck is longer. But this rule is so extreme in mammals that you have the same 7 neck vertebrae as a fucking giraffe; theirs are just more stretched out. You absolutely cannot fuck with this because it’s like, deep in the mammal source code for some reason and you’ll wreck so many other things if you change the development of something as important as the spine.

Sloths, though? Sloths are the only mammals with more than 7 neck vertebrae, because… it just doesn’t matter. It turns out that hanging upside down and moving that fucking slowly puts so little physical strain on the spine that it can basically be busted to hell without bothering the sloth one bit. Some individual sloths of the same species even have different numbers of neck vertebrae from each other! Sloths are so absolutely chilled out that their literal spine got away with breaking a fundamental rule of mammal anatomy and natural selection didn’t even notice. Genuinely some of the good lord’s best work; every waking moment I am grateful for the absurdity of sloths.