This is a blog. On it are fannish squees, liberal politics, and the occasional personal post.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
my-life-just-for-one-more-day:
A picture in 365 slices. Each slice is one day of the year.
wow.
i don’t even know what to say to this
this is just, wow.
AWESOME
This is amazing. No other words to describe it.
It’s time for another visit to the Department of Awesome Natural Wonders. These pretty amphibians with perfectly transparent underbellies are called Glass frogs. They live in the cloud forests of South america, are one of the relatively small number of species where the fathers exclusively care for the young, and scientists are still trying to figure out why they evolved to have transparent tummies.
Complete transparency has evolved multiple independent times. This suggests that a translucent underbelly provides some evolutionary advantage. Juan Manuel Guayasamin, an evolutionary biologist who studies glassfrogs extensively as a researcher at Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica’s Center for Research on Biodiversity and Climate Change, explains:
“Most frogs are not transparent because this would expose organs to the deleterious effects of sunlight and heat.” But in transparent glassfrogs, key organs like the liver and digestive tract are covered by a thin layer of light-reflecting organelles called iridiphores. These iridescent cellular subunits may provide a layer of protection from heat and sunlight, a feature that Guayasamin says could give glassfrogs the ability to optimize their internal homeostasis by simply moving about, “covering each organ at a time, as opposed to the entire body cavity.”
Guayasamin says another hypothesis holds that transparency evolved to help glassfrogs avoid predators (an ability commonly referred to as “crypsis”). ”Most glassfrogs are green and reflect light almost as a leaf. For predators (and amphibiologists), it is quite difficult to find a glassfrog if it is not, for example, calling.”
You can even see their hearts beating inside their bodies. That’s pretty awesome.
Top photo by Heidi & Hans-Jurgen Koch, via National Geographic, bottom photo by Martín Bustamante.
We see right through you, little glass frogs.
This is What Happens When Sand Gets Struck by Lightning:
Fulgurites are natural hollow glass tubes formed in quartzose sand, silica, or soil by lightning strikes (at 3,270 °F), which instantaneously melts silica on a conductive surface and fuses grains together over a period of around one second. Photographed by Ken Smith.
This eerie lake in Bolivia has blood red water and is dotted with strange white islands made of borax, the same stuff used in many detergents. The color of the water comes from tinted sediment and a large amount of red algae, which thrive here. Even more striking, pink flamingos often wade in its waters, adding to the contrasts of this otherworldly landscape.
13 of the most bizarre lakes in the world
cwnl:
Janthina janthina
Or more commonly known as a bubble-rafting violet snail (The purple snail). This occasional upside-down swimmer is a snail that excretes mucus from its foot and uses the raft of bubbles to float from place to place.
Snails that get around on rafts of mucous-y bubbles inherited the talent from ancestors that carried their eggs around like balloons on a string, a new study finds. In the process, the slimy snails transformed themselves from ocean-floor dwellers to free-moving floaters.
The mucous-y snails have been known since the 1600s, but this is the first time that researchers have been able to trace the origin of their snotty ways. Researchers led by University of Michigan graduate student Celia Churchill suspected two possibilities: The first was that the rafts are an advanced version of a snail-moving technique called “droguing.” Young marine snails produce a thread of mucus, or drogue, that helps them drift around like a kite on a string in the water. Another possibility was that the rafts were modified versions of egg masses.
(Source: ikenbot)
Conrad Roset is no new face to this blog, but seeing him on Pikaland inspired me to feature him once more with this gorgeous leopard.
