Whenever I see an ad with people living in a house I automatically excuse myself from the experience. These people have house money. You expect me to afford the same product as people with house money? Laughable. Return at once, and tell the algorithm that sent you to try better.
Ads really should be treated like emisarries from rival lords.
I see here you’ve come to tell of an electronic service which, for a monthly fee, will read aloud to me literature from across the globe. And you say it shall provide me the fist tome free as a token of goodwill. A generous offer, or so it would appear, save for the fact that such a service is readily available to me publicly online and at my local library. Ah, you were hoping perhaps I was not aware of such resources? Begone, you slinking devil! Such trickery will not be tolerated in the house of James.
Conservation of the Puerto Rican Harlequin butterfly
Our USFWS Caribbean Ecological Services Field Office coordinated and conducted the first release of captive-reared Puerto Rican harlequin butterflies! This butterfly is an imperiled species and is currently proposed as a threatened species under the ESA.
Fifty-one butterflies in different life cycle stages (11 adults, 34 chrysalids and 6 caterpillars) were released into their natural habitat in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico.
In a truly double-take-inducing finding, geneticists recently surveyed a population of critically endangered California condors and found that two of the birds reproduced without actually mating.
This phenomenon, called parthenogenesis (a nice callback to Athena springing from Zeus’s head), happens occasionally in reptiles and fishes but rarely in birds. The scientists stumbled across the discovery when going back through the genetic records of the condors from the mid-2000s. Their findings were published today in the Journal of Heredity.
“It’s a remarkably improbable occurrence,” said Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the Wildlife Alliance at the San Diego Zoo and co-lead author of the paper, in a phone call with Gizmodo. “In their lifetimes they weren’t even recognized to be parthenotes… we’re definitely keeping our eyes out anytime we get a batch of blood samples for testing…”
This Tiny Crustacean Trapped in Amber Tells a Different Story About Crab Evolution
The Cretaceous-era fossil suggests that crabs left the sea some 50 million years earlier than scientists previously thought
A team of scientists has discovered the oldest aquatic animal preserved in amber. The tiny crab encased in tree resin is over 100 million years old, dating back to the Cretaceous era, according to the study published this week in Science Advances. The find—the most complete fossilized crab ever seen—is helping researchers piece together when the crustaceans began to migrate away from the sea.
Scientists can piece together what life was like millions of years ago from preserved specimens like amber fossils and bones. Insects, plants, feathers and microorganisms are specimens most likely to be found entrapped in amber. However, finding an aquatic critter fossilized in resin is extremely rare. “Finding a crab in amber is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Heather Bracken-Grissom, a biologist from Florida International University, not involved with the study, told Riley Black for National Geographic…
