Профиль

Heading into Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a few days. Some facts as I go. Start here: this is the most biologically diverse national park in the country. Over 21,000 species documented, and scientists think 80,000+ more are still unrecorded. 🧪

The handoff isn’t just mechanical either. Oral arms can have pretty dense cnidocyte (stinging cell) coverage, so it’s more like a second capture surface than just a conveyor. #marinelife

Coast redwoods top 100 meters, and at that height pulling water up from the roots nearly fails. Their fix: absorb fog straight through their needles. That is why they only grow in California's coastal fog belt. The tallest trees on Earth cheat physics with fog. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #plants

#Godzilla could never stand up. Square-cube law: scale an animal up and its weight grows faster than its bones can bear, so a lizard the size of a building collapses under itself. The only place to be that big is the ocean, where water carries the weight. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant

Syrinx aruanus, the Australian trumpet, is the largest snail alive, a shell up to about 75 cm and 18 kg. Why so big? It hunts giant polychaete worms over a meter long, reaching into their tubes with a proboscis up to 25 cm. Big prey, big predator. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

Monday. The papers I did not read yesterday have been joined by new papers. They are forming a committee. I have decided to respect their autonomy and not interfere.

I love this graph but I hate that the Tesla is being compared to the Edsel. I kind of always liked that car as the kid of someone who used to restore antiques.

Sunday plan: ignore the stack of papers I swore I'd read, refactor an R script for the fifth time because the fourth version was merely functional and not beautiful, and misidentify four birds at my feeder with total confidence. Peak science.

The Japanese spider crab spans nearly four meters claw to claw, the largest arthropod alive. Why? Cold, deep water lets an animal grow slow and live long, and because water carries a weight that legs on land never could. On land an arthropod this size collapses. 🦀 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

Thrilled to share our #NSF award is official: we're heading to the abyssal Pacific to map deep-sea biodiversity using eDNA and ROV push coring. 16 stations, 1,024 cores, one incredible cruise. Huge thanks to co-PI @hollybik.bsky.social for leading this. 🧪 #marinelife

I can identify most gastropods to a genus from a photograph. Any gray bird smaller than my hand is, as far as I'm concerned, the same bird. I don't want to hear otherwise.

Worth noting: over 217 million of those genes came from hadal ecosystems, 6 to 11 km down. The hardest place on Earth to sample turned out to be one of the richest genetic libraries we have. 🧪 #marinelife

They start life a centimeter or two across. Every one of those two-meter barrels is decades to centuries of very slow accumulation. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

This is Julia, eight pounds. Across species bigger animals live longer, but within dogs it flips: Great Danes are lucky to see eight years, small dogs can hit sixteen. Meanwhile in the ocean the giants win, Greenland sharks pass 250. Julia likes her odds. #DogsOfBluesky #HowToBuildAGiant

The giant barrel sponge gets called the redwood of the reef. Some are over two meters across, and the biggest are estimated to be centuries old. Growth slows as they get bigger, so size down there is mostly a measure of time. #SpongeThursday #marinelife

A new catalog of deep-sea microbial genes, built from 2,138 samples, added 502 million genes and expanded known ocean gene diversity by 51%. The authors call the deep sea "a unique evolutionary engine driving the emergence of functionally distinctive enzymatic traits." #marinelife

When a tree washes out to sea and sinks, it becomes an island of food on an otherwise starving seafloor, colonized by clams that eat wood. We dropped 63 of them at 2,000 m to test what drives that ecosystem's function. New paper in The American Naturalist. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Abundance and Functional Roles, Not Richness, Govern Wood-Fall Degenerative Ecosystem Function in the Deep Sea | The American Naturalist: Vol 0, No 0AbstractBiological diversity is widely recognized as a key driver of ecosystem function, yet the mechanisms underlying biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) relationships in natural systems, particula...www.journals.uchicago.edu

I’ve always loved this piece

Indian Rock House. The rock is Ozark limestone, built from the remains of animals in a sea that covered Arkansas 350 million years ago. Groundwater ate a cavity into it. People sheltered there. Every layer of that place is somebody’s leftovers. #naturalhistory