c0nc0rdance

a man in a black coat is smiling and holding a key and the word newman is on the bottom of the picture Alt: a man in a black coat is smiling and holding a key and the word newman is on the bottom of the picture

I read "Nieman", but the resemblance is uncanny.

"c1880 Stock Victorian Trade Card, Fat Man With A Top Hat Roller Skating"

It's the same picture.

Bugguide photo of a "Thief weevil" (Attelabidae: Pterocolus sp) by user Metrioptera. He is a jolly iridescent turquoise and sort of rectangular in shape, with an unusually wide stance.

let's all take a moment to consider the Thief Weevil and his outrageous pantaloons

a night sky with a lot of stars and mountains in the background Alt: a night sky with a lot of stars and mountains in the background, the Milky Way is faintly visible.

"The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home."
- Carl Sagan.

Perfect description 😀

Local man excited to tell you about his eggplant recipes.

A baby aardwolf, an animal that looks like a chihuahua crossed with a zebra and a hyena. Pointed ears stick up on a doglike head with a black muzzle, and the coat has lots of floofy black bits on top, a floofy black tail, and zebra stripes (black and grey alternating) along the rest of the body. I can't find the source for the image.

Meet the cutest animal on Earth, the baby aardwolf.

A close relative of the hyena, this species are insectivorous, eating termites with a sticky, bumpy tongue.

"Aard" means 'earth' in Afrikaans. Unlike aardvarks, the aardwolf doesn't dig, relying on scent & hearing to find already open mounds.

Oh, they do. 90% of the animals are returned without injury, although they're less active for several days afterward. The primary concern is it could interfere with their reproductive success.

I'm far from an expert, but they eat dead fish, marine worms. I suppose they could haul in beach sand and enrich it, but probably better to get them back into the ocean as quickly as feasible.

Saving the horseshoe crab: A synthetic alternative to horseshoe crab blood for endotoxin detection Horseshoe crabs have been integral to the safe production of vaccines and injectable medications for the past 40 years. The bleeding of live horseshoe crabs, a process that leaves thousands dead annually, is an ecologically unsustainable practice ...

There's a synthetic alternative, recombinant Factor C (rFC), that is in the process of phasing out 90%+ of animal testing, but we require validation testing to ensure the animal-free alternative is equally safe.

Très bien dit.

Yeah, no-one involved is thrilled about it.

I have a thread on the limulus amoebocyte assay, and why we'd like to stop asking our armored friends to take risks to protect our health.

So fortunate to share a planet with these weird little guys.

a stingray is swimming in the ocean on the sandy bottom . Alt: A horseshoe crab is walking on the sandy bottom. The image has a blue tint, and the camera is panning around the fast-moving critter.

They have copper-based blue blood (hemocyanin) that is essential in detecting even tiny amounts of bacterial endotoxin in medical products that could harm patients.

So, they may not be the cutest little guys, but they're saving human lives every day. ❤️🦀

The abundant eggs are a critical component in the diet of many seabirds which depend on the fat & protein from picking the tiny eggs out of the sand.

Some birds time their migrations to correspond with the egg-laying of the horseshoe so they'll have fuel for the journey.

Forget Dinos: Horseshoe Crabs Are Stranger, More Ancient—And Still Alive Today But now evolution’s ultimate survivors may be in danger

They're more ancient than the dinosaurs.

The oldest known horseshoe crab relative, Lunataspis aurora, is estimated to be nearly 450 million years old, where it crawled through shallow seas.

Fossils found from 250 MYA are essentially morphologically indistinguishable from modern species.

Horseshoe crabs swim "upside down".

The movement of leg & gills synchronize, but can only push "down", so swimming on their backs (gills up) is the only way they can generate lifting force.

There may also be advantages to having your armored side down during the awkward swimming movement.

A human hand holds three horseshoe crabs of different sizes. Each are dark grey-brown with long "tails" and a sort of half-moon shape, with spikes sticking up.

After hatching, the babies look just like adults, but with initially translucent shells that progressively darken with each new molt.

The young ones also exhibit intense fluorescence under black light/UV.

Their 10 eyes can see in UV wavelengths, so this may aid in finding mates on moonlit beaches.

Let's learn about horseshoe crabs (family Limulidae).

In a few nights, a female can lay over 100,000 transparent eggs.

The fertilized eggs hatch within 2-4 weeks, having gone through 4 embryonic molts within the egg.

During this time, they're sometimes called "trilobite larvae."

Exactly right! You had to find a lake or reservoir above the level of your town, then locate the castellum aquae (towers) at the highest points for each neighborhood to feed the pipelines.

ancientengrtech.wisc.edu/pompeii/wate...

There's a tendon that runs along the base of a cat's foot, just between the toe beans, the 'digital flexor tendon'. Contracting it causes the claws to extend, but notice that the motion isn't "forward", it's "rotational".

Let's look at the remarkable claws of the cat!

Ugh. Hope you feel better soon.

Organic bodies are stupid. I'm ready for my cyber-body, preferably sooner rather than later.

'Blindness does not benefit mankind; the fool finds no contentment; wisdom causes weakness to flee.'

Seeing a lot of campaign ads about all those MAGA candidates standing strong against Sharia law being implemented in Plano or whatever.

Islamophobia has been de rigueur in GOP ads since at least 2001, in my experience.

I assume you mean "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea" and not the classic Cure song: "Standing on the beach with an Opthalmosaurus"

Ah, like the old maxim: "Set a squirrel to catch a squirrel."

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a Saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."
-Brazilian Archbishop Hélder Câmara.

Happy National Napping Day from a few of our napping experts! 💤

Enthusiastic early reviewers.

Death Valley’s best superbloom since 2016 is here The National Park Service said the colorful display is being fueled by multiple rounds of rain since autumn, with blooms expected to continue at low elevations into mid-late March.

In the hottest, driest, lowest National Park in the US, flowers are blooming. It's the best "superbloom" since 2016.

A reminder that when the conditions are right, amazing things can happen.