Melancholianarcissus - Pink Narcissus

tchaikovsky donating his skull to the royal shakespeare company in the hopes of becoming yorick is the most dramatic ass dark academia shit ever and you can’t convince me otherwise 

Raining at Versailles

James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed in The Devils (1971)

huge shoutout to trees and also rain

Gore Verbinski, The Ring, 2002 VS Pere Borrell del Caso, Escaping Criticism, 1874

Benjamin Alire Saenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

AFRICAN PENGUINS IDENTIFY PATNERS BY THEIR CHEST DOTS

Birds are known to be highly social and visual animals, and penguins are not the exception, as they live in dense colonies. Yet no specific visual feature has been identified to be responsible for individual recognition in birds. Now, researchers demonstrate that african penguins (Spheniscus demersus) can recognize their each others using their ventral dot patterns.

Researchers placed a experiment at the Zoomarine Marine Park, in Rome, Italy, to test how penguins will react to a model with plain with no dot penguin, and to penguins with dots, to find out penguins actually could visually recognize the dots of their lovers and friends in the zoo.

Penguins rely strongly on their ventral dot patterns for individual recognition, and may have holistic representations of other penguins in the colony. In this video below, an african penguin named Gerry appears to recognize his mate, Fiorella (left), in an individual recognition experiment.

These findings suggest that african penguins may rely on a more holistic visual representation of their partner, which includes both the ventral dot patterns and their partner's facial features. Notably, these abilities are not dependent on the ability of a pair to produce offspring together. Nemo and Chicco, male partners, showed the same preference for each other as other penguin partner pairs, suggesting that the ability to distinguish the partner from others is driven simply by the special bond developed between nesting partners.

Photo: Few members of the Zoomarine Italia penguin colony. Unique ventral dot patterns are visible on each penguin's chest. Photo: Cristina Pilenga.

Baciadonna et al., 2024. African penguins utilize their ventral dot patterns for individual recognition. Animal Behaviour.

Dungeness crab Megalopa Research

Hello fellow POE students! The host organization I work with is known as Pacific Northwest Crab Research Group (PCRG). They are a research group whose main function is to find ways to sustainably manage Dungeness crabs in the Pacific Northwest. Within PCRG, my specific role is to monitor Dungeness crab megalopae (larva) abundances. I am able to do this using a tool called a light trap. These traps are programmed to essentially “fish” for megalopae for two nights. Once the two nights are up, I check the traps and count how many megalopae they have caught.

Through working at my internship, I have experience and learned some really interesting things. I would say the most intriguing thing I’ve learned to far is how to properly ID certain crab megalopa species. It is fun to learn because it involves getting a closer look at the larvae under a microscope and getting an idea of the morphological differences between all the species. This aligns with my future goals because I want to work in species conservation after college, and it is hard to know how to conserve certain species without first knowing how to ID them.

The biggest challenge I’ve faced in my internship so far is coming up with an effective way to address my research question. My research question involves comparing Dungeness crab megalopa abundances to other crab species megalopa abundances in order to predict interspecies competition. However, other crab megalopa species almost always appear in the trap at much smaller numbers than Dungeness crab megalopae. In order to better address the research question, I have decided to not only compare the megalopa species abundances at the light trap, but I will also compare the juvenile species abundances in the nearshore habitats. This will give me a better idea of which crab species are able to successfully outcompete other crab species while settling in nearshore habitats.

-Brendan Beaudette

Here are a couple microscopic photos I took in the lab. One photo is a hermit crab megalopa and the other photo is a mussel crab juvenile.

Thank you for reading my blog post, I will wrap things up with one question for my readers. Do you think interspecies competition has any correlation to Dungeness crab decline, or do you think the decline is caused by other phenomena?

French legal documents dating from 1847 and 1832. I’ll transcribe and translate soon. 

IG : saint.rouge