Algal pun valentines part 2. Enjoy!
Today we learned that conches, the sea-dwelling mollusks who live inside those big, beautiful conch seashells in warm tropical waters, peer out at the world with cartoonish eyes on tiny eyestalks. They see you. They see everything. And what’s more, they can regenerate their peepers should they happen to lose one or both of them.
“One 1976 paper dug into the specific behind these animals’ alien eyestalks. Sitting at the tips of long stalks, they contain retinas with both sensory cells and colored pigment cells. But the story gets weirder because obviously, it gets weirder. After amputating the conchs’ eyes, a fully-formed replacement took its place 14 days later. Humans, we really are losing this evolutionary game.”
But wait, that’s hardly the only surprising set of eyes under the sea. Scallops have eyes too, LOTS of them:
Conch photos by Redditor buterbetterbater and via @shingworks.
[via /r/pics and Gizmodo]
every time I start thinking about lepidodendrons I always end up thinking about what it would be like to Jurassic Park one back to life and settle the 10099880 questions about how they existed once and for all
That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.
What in the world are you?
(via)
undisclosed moodboard
Cute cat who loves shopping in the supermarket. Supermarket rush is in progress.