Nature-inspired memes

I think Yellow is the impostor. They’re a cackling goose, not a Canada goose like the rest.

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jokes 1

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Yeah…I’m starting to realize sponge taxonomy is one of the…cleaner taxonomic endeavors, as hard as that is to believe. Reptiles, amphibians, etc. are all bad. Plants are absolutely insane. Don’t even bother with brown algae. That’s hopeless.

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IMG_0388

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Ray-finned fish (Actinopterygii) taxonomy is pretty awful too. I legitimately have no idea what’s going on with large-scale family and order placements cus every single source uses a different taxonomy. Take good old Chaetodontidae (butterflyfishes) for example, I’ve seen them placed in 3 completely different orders, depending on which source you’re using - either Perciformes (which is a basically meaningless taxon, its just a dumping groud for assorted families and certainly is not monophyletic in the slightest), Acanthuriformes or Chaetodontiformes (I can’t find any information if Chaetodontiformes is even a valid order). Shit changes constantly, it seems every second week something is changed - woops, turns out Carangiformes is paraphyletic, and Pleuronectiformes is polypheletic. Oh and Scaridae is invalid now too, its now a tribe rather than a family. Did you like genus Premnas? Sorry, it’s invalid now (honestly was expecting that), and a load of species have been moved out of genera Chromis and Pseudanthias. Also Perciformes is a total mess, as is Haplochromis (over 200 species in a single genus, most of which really shouldn’t be there).

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Haha! the first one’s me X-D

I have a confession to make…

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Dicots have veined leaves. Monocots don’t.

I’m fairly sure all plants have veined leaves. The difference is that dicots have branching veins, while monocot veins all stem from the base of the leaf, never splitting or intersecting.

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Well, actually there’s no “never”, there’re dicots with lined veins and monocots with regular-looking leaves.

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Dicots have two cotyledons (seed leaves) and monocots have one. Grasses, lilies, orchids, and things like that are monocots.
If I’m unsure about things like that, I go to the taxon page and look at the sorts of things pictured and listed there.

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Typical outcome when using dichotomous keys:

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I know it’s only Wednesday, but damn

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image

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i feel like we need a third jar too: Friend picks something up and asks you what it is

(Happened to me the other day… “angiosperm!” was the best I had xD we have like 4 yellow flowers blooming right now and I cannot remember which is which)

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yep that’s Selenotoca fasciatus that egret is eating very cool :)

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If only! It appears that having the feeling that you are doing something about the problem is the most important. Pesticides are an addiction cycle where the first application seems very effective but more and more resistance develops requiring more and larger applications and stronger and stronger poisons. So, in addition to having the feeling that you are doing something about the problem, the inability to recognize that the problem is getting worse and worse and the “solution” is getting more and more expensive and toxic are the important things. The second factor is partly explained by the millions of dollars spent on advertising by the pesticide industry.

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And so is instant gratification. Spray the cockroach, the cockroach does not instantly drop dead, so keep on spraying it until it dies.

What if people applied that logic to their kids? Kid swallows poison. Parent thinks, well, kid didn’t instantly drop dead, so no need to call Poison Control. No. We know better than that. We know poison does not work instantly.

Spray a cockroach with just a tiny bit of Raid, then watch it. For maybe a minute, it seems to be still okay. But then you notice it dragging its hind legs as it runs. Over the next several minutes, it gradually loses control of its body as the poison takes effect, and will be dead within the hour. But people don’t want to wait that long; they want the cockroach dead NOW, so they keep spraying until they’ve drowned it rather than poisoned it.

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This reminds me of something that happened to me many years ago in Japan. A friend of mine who was in the Japanese Self Defense force was visiting my rented house when I discovered a centipede on the kitchen cabinet. Those ones have a very painful bite (I was told) so I started to boil some water to pour on it to kill it. But my friend looked in the cabinet and found some Raid that the previous renter had left. He sprayed it and it dropped to the ground and started crawling (running) into the living room. He walked beside it and sprayed as it crawled. It then ran up the front of my TV and seemed to run out of steam and stopped there. He then looked at me and said, “Final Engagement,” and then stepped forward and sprayed the heck out of it. It was all I could do not to laugh and, of course, I thanked him for his help, but that experience has forever been my definition of overkill.

I hope I have not offended the centipede fans here on iNaturalist. That was a few decades ago.

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