wham bam thank you Odontodactylus

[americanbeetles]

Last week I took another ludicrously short trip to the US, to attend a wedding Back East, visit my littlest sister, and talk about iridescence research (of which more later). Not as jetlagged as I might be; I attribute this to having perfected Ultimate Planesleep, or at least a really passable way to snooze on a 777. It looks like this

Comments

[americanbeetles]

Does it count if all of my educational content is presented in the form of "OMG GUYS (name of obscure taxon) IS AWESOME"? Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that's the primary motivating factor for 99% of biologists.

[superdaintykate]

Okay, yeah, stomatopods, but c'mon,

BEACH SHREW!

How great is that little guy? Holy cow.

[americanbeetles]

Beach Shrew heard it was your birthday! He wishes you a very happy belated:

[superdaintykate]

OH MAN AWESOME

[daleof]

That is a great illustration!

[americanbeetles]

aw, thanks! I would like to do one in color someday, but tbh you can't top the natural colors of the actual animal.

[modnar]

Your Planesleep pose reminds me of how I used to sleep on the bus to school. Two hour long bus rides made for some good napping.

[americanbeetles]

Ha, I remember trying to nap on the school bus as a young'un-- they had padded strips on the walls, but your head would still smash up against the metal window dividers regularly. I'm sure that was nothing but beneficial for the development of li'l growing brains.

Apparently there is a whole airplane pillow industry, who knew?

[entomologist]

I used to think stomatopods were the coolest crustaceans out there, but then I read about pistol shrimp -- not only do they also cause cavitation with their claws, they actually use the shockwave as a weapon, whereas for the smasher stomatopod, the claw itself is the weapon and the shockwave just a byproduct of its use. Oh, and some of them are eusocial, with queens and worker and warrior castes, using large sponges as nests. It's not, perhaps, quite as big a deal as the discovery of mole rat eusociality -- shrimp are arthropods, after all -- but it's still only the second documented occurence of that form of organization outide the Hexapoda.

A giant stomatopod would make an awesome movie monster, though -- especially if, for movie purposes, it's assumed that the somewhat unlikely bubble fusion explanation for sonoluminescence is in fact the correct one....

[americanbeetles]

Movie monster, you say? But what if... they already are?

(to be fair I think that role is more of a plucky hero than a Tokyo-crushing monster)

Also, I 100% agree that pistol shrimp are completely badass; they just don't have the same personality, tho. Needs more googly eyes.