- Birds are dinosaurs: Comforting, joyful. Accepted and liked by most people. A little tartness in your sweet.
- Trees are a lifestyle, not a clade: Mildly unsettling. Generally tempered by how plant evolution is impossible to understand. The slight pleasant bitterness of a good cup of coffee.
- Snakes are lizards: Of course they are. You know this in your heart already. Nobody is bothered by this. A squeeze of lemon on fish.
- Tuataras aren't lizards: Only disturbing to a very specific kind of person. Like finding a dog-ear in a library book.
- Mosasaurs are lizards: A delicious little morsel. Fun for the whole family. They're varanids! They're big monitors going for a permanent swim. The crackling sensation of a Pop Rock.
- Insects are crustaceans: The New Coke of phylogenetic facts.
- Horseshoe crabs are chelicerates, not crustaceans, and thus most closely related to spiders and scorpions: The Pepsi of phylogenetic facts.
- Barnacles are crustaceans: Ohoho. Hohohoh. Now we're getting a little spicy. Now it's a little hot in here.
- Echinoderms are bilaterians: As in, starfish are part of the animal group characterized by having two symmetrical sides. Their embryos curl up in a complicated and impractical way to grow their entire radially symmetric body out one side. This is spicy, but rarefied, like a little horseradish in your sandwich.
- Echinoderms are more closely related to vertebrates (and their close relatives) than to anything else: Fairly messed up. The big division among complex animals is "do you develop asshole-first, or mouth-first"? Starfish live with us in the asshole-first clade. A slightly-too-generous dab of slightly-too-hot sauce.
- Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants: Anything having to do with fungi is inherently unsettling. The tartness of sour candy.
- Sharks have been around longer than trees: Not a phylogenetic fact, but it hits in a similar way. Like szechuan peppercorns to hot peppers.
- Tuna are more closely related to humans than to sharks: Like going into a corkscrew on a moderate rollercoaster. The world falling away a bit as your perspective gets twisted around.
- Whales are ungulates: Squirming, unpleasant, dry in the mouth. Inexplicably much more offputting than "mosasaurs are lizards." All the wasabi for your sushi meal in one hit.
- Salps are chordates: You are more closely related to a gelatinous colonial organism than to 95% of animal species on earth. A wasp's sting while you're trying to eat a fig.
- she/her
- fofarrell.neocities.org/
writer, seamstress, onliner
just trying to have a good time
secrets page was @schlock
my blog!
fofarrell.neocities.org/blogYou must log in to comment.
in reply to @bruno's post:
Some fungi lives forever, some is so genetically close it gives your body a reaction, they are simply beyond our comprehension
As someone who didn't study biology in English, this is the Dark Souls of reading posts. Can't wait to get the book and experience ego death
This is what I thought, too, and was surprised to see this before looking it up.
Apparently treating insects and crustaceans as sister clades is as paraphyletic as treating birds and dinosaurs as sister clades.
I would give more precise examples, but the wiki article on Pancrustacea doesn't seem to have any definitive answers to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancrustacea
I saw it as well yesterday, and that still doesn't make Insects part of Crustaceans, since those aren't a valid taxonomic grouping anymore. Pancrustaceans are something different, in the same sense that Archaeosaurs (the group that includes all "Reptiles" and Birds) are something different than was previously considered to be just Reptiles.
Sure! I can definitely agree with that.
But I'd still consider the statement "Insects are a sister group to Crustaceans" to be as """wrong""" as "Birds are a sister group to Dinosaurs".
If I really wanted to keep these categorically separate, I'd say "Insects descended from Crustaceans" or "Birds descended from Dinosaurs".
But sometimes it's okay to say that birds are dinosaurs.
Or that mammals are reptiles.
Or that tetrapods are fish.
Or that butterflies are moths.
Or that insects are crustaceans.
So long as the intent of what we mean is clear.
...Which is what maybe you were critiquing in the first place.
Oh yeah it is wrong, I noticed it as well 20 minutes after I posted it. The problem here is more a personal one, since I spend years at university thinking and reading about the specifics about how biological taxonomy can be done, and the reflex to just shout "what you just said is wrong!" is still strong and now we're at a point where I'm very close to digging out my books to explain exactly what I mean, but we're in the comment section of a fun animal post and I'm alredy very deep in the "gets way too specific about a joke" territory.
Also back when I was at Uni, there was still a debate going on if that Pancrustacea thing was actually true, because before that it was fairly established that Hexapods and Myriapods (milliepedes etc.) were a sister group.
And to maybe redeem myself here for a moment: In the mid 90s there was a very flawed study that analyzed genetic relationship within mammals that came to the conclusion that Whales where a sister group to Monkeys. It was wrong, but for a very short moment and for a small number of people, Whales were primates
Ahh, okay, but I said """wrong""" in scare quotes because tbf the statement "Insects are a sister group to Crustaceans" could also be as """correct""" as "Shrubs are a sister group to Trees [under the supergroup of woody plants]" — but that may just be me being too charitable??? 😅✨
And that's crazy!
The closest thing that I can think of is morphologists wanting bats to be the sister group of primates + colugos, since that'd be a lot cooler than the molecular data pointing at rodents (+ bunnies!) being the sister group.
Certainly a lot less crazy and probably less obscure than whales apparently descending from primates???
(and sudden long conversation w/ arguably way too many words in the comment section yey!)
Fun Fact: One characteristic that was used to argue in favour of a the Bat/Primate Clade was that both groups had free hanging Penises.
I tried explaining the trees thing to my bf and he just looked at me like id burdened him with something he wishes he could unknow
The solitary life history phase, also known as an oozooid, is a single, barrel-shaped animal that reproduces asexually by producing a chain of tens to hundreds of individuals, which are released from the parent at a small size.
OOZOIDS.
Not phylogenetic, but adjacent to your antique shark fact and of a similar savour- sharks have been around since before Saturn had rings. A shark with unusual visual acuity could have stared up from that primal ocean and glimpsed a gas giant, hanging pristine among its moons.
The way I cope with the idea that barnacles are crustaceans is by remembering the quote that the barnacle is "nothing more than a little shrimp-like animal standing on its head in a limestone house and kicking food into its mouth."
Trying to cope that salps and sea squirts are chordates in the same way, however, just straight-up feels like body horror.
Where does "'Apes' and 'Great Apes' are meaningless groups unless humans are included, fit? This would taste odd to many. I myself like it, I like being grounded in a group.
Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants
that one really fucked with me the first time i heard it
I saw a post of a hippo "swimming" underwater (they actually just bounce along the bottom) and someone joked if it was evolving out of the water or back into it. The answer is that's basically what wales are - hippos that learned how not to drown.
I always feel bad for sea squirts. They start life as a little tadpole swimming along, eating stuff, seeing light, and having a very simple brain. Then they find a nice patch on the ocean floor, attach themselves to it, and absorb all that fancy "animal" crap because they're going to sit in one place and be filter feeders, and you don't need a brain to do that.
some of my favorites are
"it's starting to look likely based on molecular evidence (1 2) that arachnids (as currently defined by morphologists) are not monophyletic, and horseshoe crabs are actually derived arachnids" - cheese which is a little too sharp, leaving your senses just slightly overwhelmed, and yet you go back for more
"it's very likely that eukaryotes are actually just highly derived archaea, evolving within the asgard clade (1)" - fucking absolutely zesty if true
"termites are just highly derived cockroaches (1 (sorry i don't have a better way to link this episode))" - what the actual fuck
I have never been more happy to not understand big sciencey words
one of my favorite fun biology facts is the whole Brassica situation. sure, a lot of people now know that cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi, kale and brussels sprouts are the same species (Brassica oleracea), but the same also holds for turnip, chinese cabbage and bok choi (Brassica rapa), and that rutabaga and rapeseed (Brassica napus) are a tetraploid hybrid of oleracea and rapa.
My personal favorite is "Birds are reptiles." It follows so closely and retrospectively obviously from "Birds are dinosaurs," yet it tastes so wrong, leaving an aftertaste like slightly sour milk.