Our guest post this week comes from Emei Ma, a scientific artist. If you would like to contribute a guest post, please get in touch on Twitter or Facebook. Occasionally, we come across an image or a video that compels us to ask, “What is that?” Such was the case when I saw the mesmerizing work of Aaron…
Tag: invertebrates
Metamorphosis made eas(ier)! Breathtaking 3D scans reveal secrets of a developing butterfly
Ever wondered what biological witchcraft is going on inside the chrysalis (‘cocoon’) of a developing butterfly? One team from Manchester University and the Natural History Museum has a better idea than most – Tristan Lowe and colleagues used CT scanning technology to trace the development of living animals undergoing metamorphosis. Their use of CT ingeniously…
#FossilFriday: Ingenious camouflage found in ancient amber-preserved insects
While many species are known to have evolved specialised colouration to better blend into their environmental backgrounds, there is another important form of camouflage: incorporate your environment into your appearance! This can be seen across the animal kingdom, including in insects and their larvae, sea urchins, and snails. Now, researchers have found some of the…
Incredible electron microscope GIF gives an amazing sense of scale!
//giphy.com/embed/26BRQY7cHMMVzU6n6 This series of SEM (scanning electron microscope) images shows a tiny crustacean called an amphipod before zooming in on a miniscule diatom resting on its head, and finally picking out the shape of a single bacterium on the surface of the diatom. A truly awesome science GIF! Via Smithsonian mag, GIPHY.
New photographic project captures intricate beauty of insects
A new collection of images launched this week by the Oxford University Museum of Natural History reveal in stunning detail the intricacies of insect anatomy. Each image is a composite of around 8,000 individual photos, with the artist Levon Biss painstakingly adjusting the lighting and settings for each one to best highlight the microscopic details…
Section through an octopus shows the mouth passing through the brain
Octopuses and other cephalopods are well-known for their exceptional intelligence and complex brains, which appear to outstrip all other invertebrates’. But, they work within one strange constraint – like all other molluscs (snails, slugs, oysters and more), the nerve ring at the centre of their nervous system encircles the oesophagus. In cephalopods, this nerve ring…
A lovely Alitta virens for #wormWednesday this week!
This exotic-looking annelid worm was actually found off the Scottish coast at St Andrews, and appears in the 1910 Monograph of the British Marine Annelids. Also known as the King Ragworm, this regal creature can grow up to 1.2 metres (4 feet) long! This species was also the first to be shown to use chemical…
Ole’ blue eyes: scallops and clams have unique ‘mirrored’ eyes
It may seem alien, but think about this the next time you enjoy a scallop or a clam: they might be looking back at you. Some species have tens of tiny eyes which line the edges of their characteristic shells. Unlike almost all other adult bivalves, scallops and clams can grow eyes which use a unique…
Dragonfly eyes detect up to 30 different ‘colours’
Our retinas contain four different types of light-sensing photoreceptor cells: rods, which detect low levels of light, and three cone cell types which detect red, blue and green wavelengths of light. These allow us to see in (relative) black and white when it’s dark, and in vibrant colour when it’s lighter. The wavelengths that different animals…
Happy #DarwinDay! Celebrating Charles’s 207th birthday with his favourite barnacles
These bright and beautiful barnacle illustrations are from a monograph of Darwin’s from 1851, Living Cirripedia. Barnacles, along with fancy pigeons, were an extremely important group to Darwin’s work, and he spent eight years studying them in minute detail and reclassifying the entire group. His studies, which interrupted to some extent his writing of On the Origin of…
‘Solar powered’ sea slug uses captured algae to photosynthesise
Elysia chlorotica not only resembles a leaf, but uses plant-type cells to draw energy from the sun, too! This remarkable seaslug is able to extract chloroplasts from the algae it feeds on and incorporate them into their own tissues. The young slugs feed on algae and digest everything but the photosynthesising organelles, which are stored in the…
Young sea star
Close-up view of a young sea star or starfish, demonstrating two of the key anatomical features of echinoderms, the phylum to which they belong. The first is the pentaradial (five-way radial) symmetry that gives it its characteristic star shape, which is highly unusual. This symmetry means that, unlike most ‘higher’ animals, the sea star has no head or…
Anatomy To You 