yuh (Posts tagged cool)

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
rebeccathenaturalist

archpaladin asked:

Little world-building question: In a fantasy world where giant bugs and other such arthropods (like, the size of things like cows or wolves, not kaiju-sized like Humans-B-Gone's macrovolutes) are a thing, what do you think would be the best kinds for a civilization to try and domesticate, whether for resources or riding?

revretch answered:

…..That is waaaaaayyyyyyy too broad a question, lmao. Insects alone are like 75% of *ALL ANIMALS,* period. If you bring in the other arthropods, that brings it up to more like *85%*.

Vertebrates, by contrast, comprise just 5% of all species on Earth. Half of that is fish.

If arthropods were giant, there would not *just* be suitable equivalents for the existing vertebrates we’ve domesticated (caterpillar leather; cockroach or jumping spider milk; ant hunters, guards, and mousers; wasp versions of homing pigeons and falcons; scarab and dragonfly flying mounts; ants are already excellent shepherds to aphids; and worker ants of many species already lay trophic eggs just for eating). There would be unimaginably vast potential for things we’ve never domesticated anything for!

Mountains of silk, honey, wax, paper, shellac, etc. etc. etc. are just the beginning. We’ve got nasute termite glue; we’ve got durable buildings and furniture constructed by bagworms and caddisfly larvae; we’ve got ants and termites farming fungi, or possibly trainable to do all of our farming for us; we’ve got bees for exploring and sniffing out any resources we can think of (we already can train them to detect drugs and cancer)!!! And forget plastic and metal for most uses when we have all this renewable chitin armor.

This is just the tip of iceberg. It would take me a series of novels to even scratch the surface, here!

cool ref
gunsandfireandshit
phys.org

How a single-gene change led to a new species of monkeyflower

Monkeyflowers glow in a rich assortment of colors, from yellow to pink to deep red-orange.
mindblowingscience

In the Feb. 10 issue of Science, UConn botanists explain what happened genetically to jettison the yellow pigment, and the implications for the evolution of species.

Monkeyflowers are famous for growing in harsh, mineral-rich soils where other plants can’t. They are also famously diverse in shape and color. Monkeyflowers also provide a textbook example of how a single-gene change can make a new species. In this case, a monkeyflower species lost the yellow pigments in the petals but gained pink about 5 million years ago, attracting bees for pollination. Later, a descendent species accumulated mutations in a gene called YUP that recovered the yellow pigments and led to production of red flowers. The species stopped attracting bees. Instead, hummingbirds pollinated it, isolating the red flowers genetically and creating a new species.

UConn botanist Yaowu Yuan and postdoctoral researcher Mei Liang (currently a professor at South China Agricultural University), with collaborators from four other institutes, have now shown exactly which gene changed to prevent monkeyflowers from making yellow. Their research, published this week in Science, adds weight to a theory that new genes create phenotypic diversity and even new species.

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Source: phys.org
cool