#taxonomy filter

[markscherz]

Hello, I was wondering what criteria you personally use to decide if something is a species or a subspecies?

I quite like Kevin de Queiroz's recent take on the matter, so I will refer you to him. There has been quite a bit of subsequent discussion, some of which I agree with, some of which I think is a bit moronic.

TL;DR: They should be treated as a difference of degree, not of kind, and can conveniently be used to capture the grey zone that we know characterises the incipient stages of speciation.

[unpretty]

my kink taxonomy complaint: "petplay" often carries implications of physical discipline, which I cannot abide in that scenario. if you are hitting your dogs or horses you are a bad pet owner. also you should not be fucking your pets. but I don't know of any terms that filter these out while leaving the good stuff like harnesses, speech restrictions, permission to be bitey, etc

askdjhashdjkas responsible pet play...

[taxonomytournament]

Taxonomy Tournament: Crustaceans

Decapods. This order includes crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, and prawns.

Isopoda. This order is made up of isopods, including terrestrial species like the potato bug and aquatic species like the giant isopod. Some eat dead matter, others are filter feeders, and some are parasites, mostly of fish.

[encyclopika]

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #246

Brought to you by a marine biologist with some recent history...

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!

Look - all sharks are cool. They're the reason I became a marine biologist. Even now, in my 30s, I am still fascinated with them and their diversity and their mystery. Today's shark really exemplifies both of those things as it is a deep sea weirdo, but perhaps the most mysterious of them all. AC Pocket Camp gave us the Megamouth Shark!

I gotta tell ya, my eyebrows were in my hairline when I was checking to see if ACPC had given us any new fish since I last left off with this series. Not only did they do the frilled, but the megamouth, too?! Holy shit. It was available for the Deep Sea Shark goals in July 2023 for a measly 4 day stint and it was tier 4 RARE. (Honestly it should have been Tier 5, but I understand in a game something has to give.) If ACPC plays on the accurate rarity, though, this guy should never ever show up in the game again. In real life, that's how rare these are and I'm gonna get a little more history than biology here in a moment, but you know I gotta do the taxonomy.

The Megamouth (Megachasma pelagios) is a large shark in the Order Lamniformes, the mackerel sharks, meaning that of all the sharks in the AC franchise, it's most closely related to the Great White and the Smalltooth Sand Tiger. Which is so mind boggling because those sharks, and most of Lamniformes, are amazingly modern, fast, active sharks and the Megamouth...isn't. In fact it spends its life in the slow lane, taking basically all day and night to make its vertical migrations to the surface at night and back down to depth in the day time. This is a big shark though - it can grow to be 17 feet or a little over 5 m, we think - so it doesn't really have to be doing that to avoid predators. Instead, it's a filter feeder simply following its planktonic food up and down the water column. The Megamouth is in its very own family all by itself - Megachasmidae.

I don't think I'm a fan of the ACPC sprite and I'm allowed, considering how accurate some of them have been. They got the head shape right and all the fins, but. The megamouth has teeth, but they are tiny and I just don't think they needed to be in the sprite. It makes it look toothier than it really is. The eye is actually really accurate, though, so I will give credit - someone was looking at pictures of this thing and doing their best.

But what I really want to focus on is the fact that it hasn't been very long that we've known this thing existed. The very first specimen was captured, by accident, by the US Navy off Hawaii in 1976. For some of you whose birth years start with a "2", I get it - that seems like eons ago, but it really isn't. I'll be 35 this year. My PARENTS, NOT my grandparents, are a decade OLDER than our collective knowledge of the Megamouth shark. And this thing isn't small. It's not every day that we discover a new species this big and not need DNA to say "Oh, yeah, that's different." This discovery was about as sensational as the discovery of the (living, extant) coelacanth.

And since its discovery, less than 300 megamouths have been seen (these being official sightings...the sharks seem to be regularly encountered in fisheries off Taiwan, so many probably go unreported *sigh*). Many of those were dead, but with targeted scientific capture, many more are being studied alive and are tagged. I know 300 sounds like a lot, but that is actually so few that each of these sightings and captures have been recorded. Sharkmans-World.org seems to be keeping the most up-to-date records of this that I could find, so check that out for photos and videos of the specific specimens. For some more in-depth reading on the specimens, check out the Florida Museum's website. The write-up for the very first specimen in 1976 by Hugh Gallagher (all the way down at the bottom) is a great read and also hilarious. Please take the time to read it - it's everything you could ever want in a 70's at-sea US Navy tale.

And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?

[bogkeep]

when i was a teen, i was in love with my best friend. to this day i cannot tell you with any certainty whether or not i was in love romantically or platonically. i don't know and i don't care. it's very possible there is a difference, but i never found it. i've asked many people about it and everyone has their own definition of where that line goes, none that ever applied to my own experiences. there is no satisfying, universal and objective line. i think that's good, actually. the idea that there is some shining abstract concept that's specialer than all the other concepts that can only be achieved like nirvana by some people and not others is not a comfortable idea. this is not to say that everyone has the same feelings and experiences, absolutely not - but we categorize our experiences within the contexts we exist in. or maybe that's just word salad.

i know that - at the time, i knew i was deeply connected to this other person and kept thinking about her all the time and we talked about wanting to be close friends for our whole lives and wrote poetry together about our soulmateness and we made mutual friends feel like a third wheel. i knew i had no desire to kiss her or take her on dates, and she crushed on some boy at summer camp, but the connection between us was mutual and explicit. if the concept of a queerplatonic relationship had been available to us at the time, maybe we would've recognized it as such. i just knew that what i was feeling didn't match up at all with what i've been told 'being in love' was supposed to be like - especially because, at the time, Being In Love also included sexual attraction. we had just cracked open the 2010's and asexuality was a punchline and a joke.

i know that - during the time i was made to feel ashamed of my aroace identity and the narrative was that i'm actually just repressing my TRUE queer identity, i reframed my memories - i had obviously been in love with my friend Romantically. i was a Real Gay. i was Valid. I Was Sapphic Actually. you can't kick me out of the parade if i had pined for my best friend as a teen!!!!

i know that - once i reclaimed the pride in myself, i reframed the memories again: i had obviously been in love with my friend Platonically, because otherwise i would've been a traitor to the good name of aromanticism. if i knew what it was like to have a crush i would contradict myself. who am i to write about romantic love as if i know? what was i doing at the devil's sacrament?

maybe it is a mystery. maybe i don't know shit. it's hard, actually, to know anything at all when the way my strange brain filters emotions through my body reads so different to the user manual. how can anyone stand to pine for another when it's all anxiety, all day? "butterflies"???? really????? how am i supposed to know anything for sure when my brain's favourite hobby is to pick thoughts apart and run them through the distortion machine on repeat, on repeat, on repeat? i don't know if i've ever loved anyone at all, now that i think about it. maybe i'm an empty shell of a human and everything i do is an act of puppetry and wishful thinking.

i just gotta trust that the love is there, in some form or another. even when i can't reach for it and confirm its existence - let alone deduce a detailed taxonomy. what do you even need that for.

[plant-taxonomy-showdown]

Algaes and gentleferns, the fight is on!

As those of you who have been following @battle-of-the-taxons know, the winner of their kingdom contest was Fungi. Congratulations Fungi! However, these brackets don't just get to choose a winner, they also provide lots of opportunities to learn more, and share more of what we already know, about every participant in the competition. And to show our love for them. I know a lot of us have a deep appreciation for plants and want a chance to talk up our favorites. Therefore this blog was created: To continue the battle for tumblr's most favorite organism -- going one traditional taxonomic level at a time, from kingdom to phylum to class to order to family to genus to species -- as it might have gone had Kingdom Plantae won.

Hosted by Ray @rotationalsymmetry -- I have never done this before (also, I'm not an expert, just an enthusiastic amateur) so please be kind.

Similar brackets:

The original, the fungal: @battle-of-the-taxons

Amazing animal kingdom spin-off: @animalshowdown

The newest bracket/oldest kingdom, bacteria: @bacteriashowdown

~ Please someone do protists please please please ~

Not directly related but an animal taxonomy thing: @taxonomytournament

Tournament status:

Paracryphiales won the only battle in Order Round One. Order Round Two, with eight battles, will begin soon.

Order Round Bracket

Order Round Polls

All Order Round Propaganda and Polls

Notes/technical details ("behind the scenes" tag)

Last day to vote reminders are tagged "reminders" and all propaganda is tagged "propaganda" for people who want to filter those out. Lemme know if you want anything else tagged.

[sanders1665]

Quiet Rules I Live By.

I don’t care for your titles, your affiliations, your place in the grand taxonomy of belief. Those are constructs—flags we plant to feel safe, to feel known. What matters to me is something quieter, more human: how you behave in the in-between moments, the spaces where no one is applauding, where nothing is expected. That’s where your essence lives. If you move through this world with grace and decency toward others, then we already understand something important about each other.

We’re all just flickers in the vastness—temporary gatherings of atoms given names and memories. Whatever truths we claim are filtered through our particular senses, our personal wounds, our cultural myths. I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours. Truth, as we experience it, is always partial—angled like light through stained glass. But behavior? Kindness? That’s real. That’s observable.

I suppose I’m a dreamer, or maybe just someone still asking the big questions. What are we doing here? Why is anything here at all? I don’t have answers, but I’ve noticed that those who chase power, certainty, or control rarely have peace. I don’t want to conquer this life—I want to understand it, even if that understanding always slips just out of reach.

So I’ve made a few rules for myself. I don’t lie to manipulate. I don’t cheat people out of trust or time. I don’t steal—not just objects, but dignity, credit, truth. I don’t betray those who show me loyalty. These aren’t laws handed down from on high; they’re decisions I’ve made in the quiet of my own becoming. Break them with me, and I won’t retaliate—I’ll just disappear. Not out of anger, but from a sense of self-preservation. My time is finite. My energy, limited. I will not invest it in dishonesty.

We are, all of us, passing through. One moment laughing with someone we love, the next gone without warning. How absurd, and how sacred. This fragile condition of being. We argue over meaning while orbiting a star that doesn’t know we exist. And yet—we feel. We create. We reach out across the void.

In my corner of the world, people are a wild mosaic. Loud, quiet, strange, kind, wounded. I get along with most of them, because I’m curious about them. Beneath the noise, every one of us carries a secret constellation—our joys, regrets, absurd dreams, late-night doubts. I find that beautiful. Not in some romanticized way, but in a raw, honest, soul-level way.

So if I meet you, I’ll pay attention. I’ll listen for the contradictions, the awkward pauses, the things you don’t say. I’ll laugh at the absurdities and, when the time is right, maybe share some of mine.

This life is strange. Mysterious. Infinitely complex and terrifyingly short. I’m not here to win anything. I’m here to witness, to feel deeply, to seek out the kind of connections that make this improbable journey worth it.

If you’re the same—if you carry questions heavier than answers—then we’ll probably understand each other just fine.

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

taxonomy as a field is so fucked. im hate the fact that corals are related to jellyfish. but NOT sponges. Left to right: jelly, coral and sponge

LOOK AT THIS SHIT.

pretend this is your first day on earth, and i ask you which of these animals (yes all three are animals.) are related you'd be like "hm based on physiology i'd say it's the two sessile filter feeders with the calcified bodies!" and you could not be more wrong. you buffoon. you absolute rube. leave this place in shame and never return.

[therapardalis]

[Headcanon Meme from @thestorycontinues.]

[ ❄️ ] is there any special meaning behind your muse’s name? what is it? ------------

[Answering for her Main!Verse.]

Thera's had an assortment of names over the centuries, many of them only briefly and/or only on paper.

Her true given name is Therese, which may have come from the Old English or filtered over from Gaul. It was said to mean 'summer' which fit her as she was born at the beginning of that season (equivalent of June 6th). In due course it was shortened to become Thera, which although it was meant as simply a diminutive of her proper name had the meaning of 'untamed', 'wild', 'hunter' and, according to some sources, 'guardian'.

Her full birth name is Therese of Lands End, after the westernmost part of Cornwall where she was born. As time went on she shortened this down to 'Landsend', and went mostly by that for several centuries (when information traveled slowly, if at all, and names followed you rather than getting there first).

Another surname she used during the 1960s and 70s was 'D'Gaea', which pretty much explains itself.

Most of her aliases have leaned toward something to do with cats. Leading us to -

'Pardalis', a name she chose for herself sometime around the 1980s; it's the Latin taxonomy for the Ocelot (Felis pardalis).

(Quick note that 'D'Gaea' also led to 'D'Galen' in her Middle Earth verse!)

[unpretty]

kink taxonomy hell: look it's a very understandable mistake to make and I try not to hold it against anyone. but I just wish that on ao3 if you went to add the tag 'strapping' there was a friendly little popup that said "hey! this tag refers to hitting someone with a strap, and it will show up for anyone filtering for impact play in general. is that the sense you meant it in, or did you possibly mean to use the tag 'strap-on sex'?"

oh god

[taxonomytournament]

Taxonomy Tournament: Arthropods

Isopoda. This order is made up of isopods, including terrestrial species like the potato bug and aquatic species like the giant isopod. Some eat dead matter, others are filter feeders, and some are parasites, mostly of fish.

Xiphosura. This order is made up of horseshoe crabs, marine arthropods whose bodies are covered by a hard carapace. They mainly feed on worms and molluscs on the ocean floor. The blood of some species is harvested for LAL, which is used to detect and quantify bacterial toxins

[iamthekaijuking]

Any ideas for Balahara's taxonomy?

At first I thought I could make it a reptile, maybe a snake line lizard.

Then the gills threw me for a loop and made me think it could be a Polypterygian.

Then after discovering that the gills are closer to the shoulders than the head and corkscrew with the body, I’m back to the proto snake idea just this time with sand filtering air vents.

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

people not knowing the taxonomy of barnacles does not mean they are not curious

Yes, you’re right, I couldn’t find the words for what I meant! I meant that, sometimes there’s these things that you don’t really stop to think about because the thing is so obvious and always there, and you know what the thing is and what it does, but like… you don’t think to wonder why and how it’s there, you know? What made it? How it was made? Like that. Everyone knows what a whale is, you know it’s a mammal and they filter feed and they’re aquatic, but you may not ever think to yourself “hey, I wonder where whales came from?” unless that information is presented to you, yeah? Strange example, fishblr is pretty caught up on whales, but.

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log pt 12

56. Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicholson. This book really, really wants to be High Literary Art. The author writes about tide pools and coastal organisms, but is much more interested in dissecting what these have represented in art, culture and a Jungian sense of shared humanity more than he is in the actual animals, algae and other things he encounters. Throughout the book, he builds three artificial tide pools, each time devising ways to carve rock and set up filters to catch water but exclude some organisms, and I couldn’t help but think, why? Why not find natural tide pools and observe them? Why must you put your stamp on a coastline? His whole thesis seems to be something about the beauty of how the shore is a liminal place, between land and water, where ecosystems and humans alike exist in an unstable equilibrium, and yet he feels the need to attempt to control it, and does not reflect much on the contradiction. I did not care for this book, as either a work of natural history or philosophy.

57. Spirit Beings in European Folklore 1 by Benjamin Adamah. A birthday gift from my girlfriend, @abominationimperatrix. This is one of a four part encyclopedia of European monsters—this volume focuses on Scandinavia and the British Islands. The decision to edit it into multiple volumes was made relatively late in the book’s development, and it shows—there are cross references to entries that do not appear in this book, but are in other volumes. The author is an occultist, and so plays somewhat coy with whether or not he believes in the literal existence of supernatural entities; near as I can tell from this volume, he’s a believer in the idea that they have material reality as thoughtforms created by human imagination. Putting aside that quirk (which is fairly easy to do), this is a pretty good compendium of monsters, especially but not limited to the sorts of things that would be called “fey” and “undead” in RPG terms. I do have the whole set, and am looking forward to reading the rest of them.

58. If It Sounds Like a Quack… by Matthew Hongolz-Hetling. This book is a look into “alternative medicine” grifts and cranks, following the stories of six quacks from their origins to the modern day. This modern day is the COVID era, where even the most reasonable-sounding of them goes off the deep end into conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant hysteria. The author does an excellent job of using alternative medicine as a lens to look at how consensus reality has been damaged in the United States, and there are a surprising amount of connections, both direct and indirect, between these frauds and perhaps the most successful con artist of the modern era, Donald Trump (who the book refers to exclusively as “the game show host���). The book has a light touch and is very funny throughout, which makes the ending, where he discusses how people are committing real murders in the belief that COVID vaccines are turning people into zombies, hit all the harder.

59. Remnants of Ancient Life by Dale E. Greenwalt. This is a book about biomolecules found in fossils, from the famous (like pigments found in dinosaur feathers) to the rather more obscure (using trace elements to pinpoint the affinities of conodonts and Tullimonstrum). The author is an entomologist by trade, and so is a little bit unclear about the appropriate taxonomy for other groups—an editing pass over the chapters about dinosaurs would have been useful. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is on the supposed discovery of dinosaur proteins, such as collagen and even intact blood vessels, which have been almost entirely done by the lab of Mary Schwietzer, and thus are the subject of a lot of debate and skepticism.

60. Strange Bedfellows by Ina Park. This is a book about sexually transmitted infections. It can be divided roughly in half—the first half is chapter long looks at particular topics, like the stigmatization of herpes and the possible health risks of vigorous pubic hair removal. The second half is a historical survey of the history of government investigation of sexual health, including both unethical human experiments such as at Tuskegee and Guatemala, as well as the history of contract tracing in public health offices. The author’s voice comes through strongly—she’s funny and opinionated and not at all ashamed at working in a sex related field. Mary Roach wrote one of the blurbs on the back of the book, and that seems like a pretty apt comparison.

[sagan-4]

Clade of the Day: Krakowozoa

Welcome to Clade of the Day, where we cover different groups of organisms on Sagan 4. Today's clade is the kingdom Krakowozoa, which contains the shrubites, the malakommalis family, and their extinct microbial relatives.

(sources: x/x)

Shrubites evolved from a blight afflicting crystal flora which eventually took up binucleid red tissue as an endosymbiote. They are simple and sponge-like, and highly calcified; as nigh-untouchable filter feeders, some species are also important reef-builders. Technically, the malakommalis family is descended from shrubites, but they abandoned the reef-building lifestyle in favor of becoming an infectious disease which more or less turns their hosts to stone.

Krakowozoa is by far the least popular of Sagan 4's founding kingdoms, at only 34 species recorded on the wiki. However, this number may partially be an artifact of the same taxonomy overhaul mentioned in the COTD post for the krakowpedes--as, in fact, they were formerly placed in a kingdom with the krakowozoa, called "Anipedia". However, the discovery that the the krakowpedes were mistakenly classified based on a krakowozoan endosymbiont instead of the phoenoplastid host cell rendered that shared kingdom invalid, and so a new kingdom was erected for the shrubites and their relatives.

--

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[udaipurwebdesigner01]

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