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im sorry seals molt? my association with that word is insects so i am confused and intrigued

They do! I’d say most species of animals sloughs off “old” parts of their bodies at some point of their lives in some capacity. The word “molting” is used as a catch-all term for this process, although exactly what body part they shed and how they do it varies from animal to animal. Arthropods grow an entire new exoskeleton and shed the old one, but for most other animals, this process only involves shedding the outermost layer of their bodies, the pelage and/or their first layer of skin. Reptiles are quite famous for this because they sometimes manage to come out of their old skins and leave them almost fully intact as if they were kigurumi pajamas:

Mammals tend to mostly only shed fur or hair, growing thicker fur during colder months and losing it in favor of shorter fur during warmer months. How obvious this is depends on the climate, though. It’s quite perceptible in mammals that live in the arctic whose fur changes color depending on the season:

But even the difference between the summer coats and winter coats of domestic dogs can be palpable if you live in places with colder climates!

(I’m quite fascinated by this because I was born and raised in a tropical country and my dogs look the same all year round heh)

But back to the seals. Pinnipeds don’t really use their fur to keep warm like other mammals do, but they still have it, and they have to shed their old coats and grow new ones accordingly, which they do once a year!

In elephant seals, this process is so sudden and so extreme it’s called catastrophic molting. They don’t only lose their fur, but also a layer of dead skin all at once and this forces them to stay on land for a full month without swimming (and therefore, without hunting and eating) until the process is fully done. Because molting requires redirecting blood flow towards the skin instead of to their vital organs as usual, if they swam in the cold waters they’re usually accustomed to while molting, they’d freeze!

Bonus fun fact: despite having lost their fur during the evolution process, cetaceans like whales and dolphins also go through a molting process where they lose a layer of dead skin, which they scrape off by rubbing against rocks and rolling on sand banks.

It’s been recently discovered (as of 2020!) that the reason whales migrate annually from arctic waters to tropical waters is the exact same reason elephant seals spend a month on land: to molt! It’s much easier for a whale to keep warm while shedding its skin in warm waters than it is in cold waters.

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Male small mayfly, Baetinae, Baetidae

Male small mayflies in the family Baetidae differ from females in that they have seven eyes rather than five - 3 simple eyes, 2 compound eyes,and 2 turbinate eyes on top of the head. These upward-facing eyes are thought to be used for spotting females during aerial mating.

Photographed in Malaysia by Nicky Bay // Website // Facebook

Shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

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Holy shit, they got Voyager 1 working again!

15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.

Incredible!

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Wukongopterus lii was a pterosaur that lived during the mid-to-late Jurassic, about 164 million years ago, in what is now northeastern China. It was fairly small, with a wingspan of around 70cm (~2'4"), and showed a mixture of anatomical features in-between the long-tailed short-headed 'rhamphorhynchoids' and the short-tailed long-headed pterodactyloids.

Its long jaws were lined with tiny pointed conical teeth, suggesting it was adapted for primarily feeding on insects. It also had a very slight overbite, with the first two pairs of teeth in its upper jaw protruding almost vertically over the end of its lower jaw.

As a fully mature adult it would have had a low bony crest on its head that probably supported a larger keratinous structure – similar to other known wukongopterids – although the exact size and shape is unknown since the one confirmed specimen of Wukongopterus is missing that particular part of its skull. Another fossil nicknamed "Ian" may represent a second individual of this species, showing a different crest arrangement further forward on its snout, so I've made two different versions of today's image to reflect that possibility.

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NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

References:

Cheng, Xin, et al. "New information on the Wukongopteridae (Pterosauria) revealed by a new specimen from the Jurassic of China." PeerJ 4 (2016): e2177. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2177/supp-1

Garland, Nick. “Ian the Wukongopterid.” Pteros, https://www.pteros.com/pterosaurs/ian-the-wukongopterid.html

Wang, Xiaolin, et al. "An unusual long-tailed pterosaur with elongated neck from western Liaoning of China." Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências 81 (2009): 793-812. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0001-37652009000400016

Wikipedia contributors. “Wukongopterus.” Wikipedia, 8 Dec. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wukongopterus

XuanYu Zhou 周炫宇. Anatomy, Systematics and Paleopathology of Pterosaurs: insights based on new specimens from China. 2023. Hokkaido University, PhD thesis. https://doi.org/10.14943/doctoral.k1560

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Turkey tail mushroom

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Please look at the native range of this truly rare tree called Florida Torreya...how did you even make it

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Faeroe Islands by Prim Paul.

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Dolphins and whales use sound to communicate, navigate and hunt. New research suggests that the collections of fatty tissue that enable toothed whales to do so may have evolved from their skull muscles and bone marrow. Scientists at Hokkaido University determined DNA sequences of genes which were expressed in acoustic fat bodies—collections of fat around the head that toothed whales use for echolocation. They measured gene expression in the harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) and Pacific white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens). Their findings were published in the journal Gene.

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Amazonian Motmot (Momotus momota), family Momotidae, order Coraciiformes, Madre de Dios, Peru

photograph by Geoff Gallice 

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The beauty of the monastery kelp forest

We get by with the help of our fronds! Sea-riously! A new study by Monterey Bay Aquarium scientists found that denser kelp forests can better handle serious stressors like sweltering seawaters!

The study looked at kelp forests before, during, and after an extreme marine heatwave that hit west coast waters from 2014-2016. It found that denser and more sheltered forests, and the animals living in these forests, fared better against the extreme heat. These persistent forests were also able to keep hungry sea urchins from roaming around the reef and gobbling up the remaining kelp.

Another Aquarium study showed a certain species supports strong kelp forests by snacking on  sea urchins — you guessed it — sea otters!

You can dive deeper into this research here!

Healthy kelp forests not only provide homes for a wide range of marine life — they also absorb carbon dioxide — naturally pushing back against climate change (hurray photosynthesis!). 

Globally, kelp has been declining for a half-century and warming ocean temperatures present a serious threat to cold-water species like kelp. 

Studies like these help us understand what makes kelp forests strong, and how we can implement restoration efforts in areas with less kelp coverage.

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Trilobozoans (also known as triradialomorphs) are some of the more enigmatic members of the Ediacaran biota. In the past their unique three-way-symmetrical body plan was interpreted as linking them to groups like sponges, cnidarians, or echinoderms, but currently they're considered to be their own weird little phylum with uncertain evolutionary affinities, classified no more specifically than "probably some sort of early eumetazoan animal".

Lobodiscus tribrachialis is a newly-described member of this mysterious lineage. It lived in warm shallow marine waters covering what is now Southwestern China, and with an age of around 546 million years it's currently the youngest known trilobozoan, extending the group's time range by several million years.

About 3.7cm in diameter (~1.5"), it had the characteristic trilobozoan disc-shaped shield-like body, with a central depression surrounded by three triradially-symmetric lobes with branching ridges and grooves.

Its body would have been soft but fairly rigid, and it's not clear if it was capable of moving over the seafloor or if it had a more static lifestyle. Like its relative Tribrachidium it was probably a filter feeder, with the grooves on its surface directing water flow towards the central depression – and this surface ornamentation may also have been covered with cilia that actively caught and transported suspended food particles.

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NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

References:

Ivantsov, A. Yu, and M. A. Zakrevskaya. "Trilobozoa, Precambrian tri-radial organisms." Paleontological Journal 55 (2021): 727-741. https://doi.org/10.1134/S0031030121070066

Ivantsov, Andrey, Aleksey Nagovitsyn, and Maria Zakrevskaya. "Traces of locomotion of Ediacaran macroorganisms." Geosciences 9.9 (2019): 395. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences9090395

Hall, C. M. S., et al. "The short-lived but successful tri-radial body plan: a view from the Ediacaran of Australia." Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 67.6 (2020): 885-895. https://doi.org/10.1080/08120099.2018.1472666

Rahman, Imran A., et al. "Suspension feeding in the enigmatic Ediacaran organism Tribrachidium demonstrates complexity of Neoproterozoic ecosystems." Science Advances 1.10 (2015): e1500800. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1500800

Zhao, Mingsheng, et al. "A putative triradial macrofossil from the Ediacaran Jiangchuan Biota." Iscience 27.2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.108823

Wikipedia contributors. “Lobodiscus.” Wikipedia, 29 Mar. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobodiscus

Wikipedia contributors. “Trilobozoa.” Wikipedia, 10 Mar. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobozoa

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New Titanosaur Species Identified in Argentina

https://www.sci.news/paleontology/titanomachya-gimenezi-12853.html

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Escorpion Coral aka Rainbow Galliwasps (Diploglossus monotropis), family Diploglossidae, found in southern Central America and northern South America

photographs by Tropical Herping, Pitalua Liloy, Chris Kirby

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More than 150 years ago, a San Francisco whaler noticed something about killer whales that scientists may be about to formally recognize—at least in name. Charles Melville Scammon submitted a manuscript to the Smithsonian in 1869 describing two species of killer whales inhabiting West Coast waters. Now a new paper published in Royal Society Open Science uses genetic, behavioral, morphological and acoustic data to argue that the orcas in the North Pacific known as residents and transients are different enough to be distinct species. They propose using the same scientific names Scammon is believed to have coined in the 19th century.

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"A 2019 sighting by five witnesses indicates that the long-extinct Javan tiger may still be alive, a new study suggests.

A single strand of hair recovered from that encounter is a close genetic match to hair from a Javan tiger pelt from 1930 kept at a museum, the study shows.

“Through this research, we have determined that the Javan tiger still exists in the wild,” says Wirdateti, a government researcher and lead author of the study.

The Javan tiger was believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared as such in 2008...

Ripi Yanuar Fajar and his four friends say they’ll never forget that evening after Indonesia’s Independence Day celebration in 2019 when they encountered a big cat roaming a community plantation in Sukabumi, West Java province.

Immediately after the brief encounter, Ripi, who happens to be a local conservationist, reached out to Kalih Raksasewu, a researcher at the country’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), saying he and his friends had seen either a Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), a critically endangered animal, or a Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica), a subspecies believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared so in 2008.

About 10 days later, Kalih visited the site of the encounter with Ripi and his friends. There, Kalih found a strand of hair snagged on a plantation fence that the unknown creature was believed to have jumped over. She also recorded footprints and claw marks that she thought resembled those of a tiger.

Kalih then sent the hair sample and other records to the West Java provincial conservation agency, or BKSDA, for further investigation. She also sent a formal letter to the provincial government to follow up on the investigation request. The matter eventually landed at BRIN, where a team of researchers ran genetic analyses to compare the single strand of hair with known samples of other tiger subspecies, such as the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) and a nearly century-old Javan tiger pelt kept at a museum in the West Java city of Bogor.

“After going through various process of laboratory tests, the results showed that the hair sample had 97.8% similarities to the Javan tiger,” Wirdateti, a researcher with BRIN’s Biosystemic and Evolutionary Research Center, said at an online discussion hosted by Mongabay Indonesia on March 28.

The discussion centered on a study published March 21 in the journal Oryx in which Wirdateti and colleagues presented their findings that suggested that the long-extinct Javan tiger may somehow — miraculously — still be prowling parts of one of the most densely populated islands on Earth.

Their testing compared the Sukabumi hair sample with hair from the museum specimen collected in 1930, as well as with other tigers, Javan leopards and several sequences from GenBank, a publicly accessible database of genetic sequences overseen by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The study noted that the supposed tiger hair had a sequence similarity of 97.06% with Sumatran tigers and 96.87% with Bengal tigers. Wirdateti also conducted additional interviews with Ripi and his friends about the encounter they’d had.

“I wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t just about finding a strand of hair, but an encounter with the Javan tiger in which five people saw it,” Kalih said.

“There’s still a possibility that the Javan tiger is in the Sukabumi forest,” she added. “If it’s coming down to the village or community plantation, it could be because its habitat has been disturbed. In 2019, when the hair was found, the Sukabumi region had been affected by drought for almost a year.” ...

Didik Raharyono, a Javan tiger expert who wasn’t involved in the study but has conducted voluntary expeditions with local wildlife awareness groups since 1997, said the number of previous reported sightings coupled with the new scientific findings must be taken seriously. He called on the environment ministry to draft and issue a policy on measures to find and conserve the Javan tiger.

“What’s most important is the next steps that we take in the future,” Didik said."

-via Mongabay, April 4, 2024

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I have long accepted the weird fact that sea spiders's digestive systems extend into their legs, but did not know that this also applies to their gonads..

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Turning off a gene early in mouse development led researchers to end up with an accidental six-legged embryonic mammal. This strange result took the spinal cord research of developmental biologists Anastasiia Lozovska and Moisés Mallo and their colleagues at Portugal's Gulbenkian Science Institute in a new direction. "I didn't choose the project, the project chose me," Mallo told Sara Reardon at Nature News.

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