Treasures

Treasures: Stellar Nucleosynthesis

by Jakob
August 1, 2014May 2, 2023

Most of the things in our “Treasures” series are living organisms. I think this is partly because lots of living organisms are easy to identify with: they exist on a scale similar to ours and are easy to categorize as discrete entities. Phenomena are a little harder to sell, for the most part. Stellar nucleosynthesis has had some help though, in the form of Carl Sagan’s wildly popular and surprisingly durable “star stuff” monologue. And it’s true: we’re literally made of atoms that came here from dying stars. Of course this is equally true of centipedes, norovirus and Rob Ford, so admittedly the magic relies on a bit of anthropocentrism.

by Amanda
September 17, 2013April 27, 2023

If you were around during the late seventies or early eighties, you grew up knowing that insects will inherit the Earth after the nuclear apocalypse. However, apart from mad survival skills, did you know that they also beat us at engineering?

Read More »Insect cogs and jumping bugs

Treasures: The snapping shrimp

by Jakob
April 10, 2013April 27, 2023

The first thing I need to tell you about the snapping shrimp is that I did not make it up. This is science. Really.

A Habronattus coecatus jumping spider facing down and to the right.

Jumping spiders: Communication and miniaturization

by Jakob
March 7, 2013April 27, 2023

This should be evident from the title, but in case it’s not: If the combination of the words “jumping” and “spider” disturbs you, this is not the post for you. But if spiders only make you a little uncomfortable, I suggest sticking this one out, because from the perspective of animal behaviour and physiology, these things are cool. They’re also really small, so if for example you had a traumatic experience once involving a very large spider crawling onto your hand without you noticing (hypothetically of course) the miniature marvels that I talk about in this post should seem friendly enough.

This just in: Twitter users like cats (#MyParasite poll)

by Eve Rickert
February 7, 2013April 27, 2023

A couple of days ago we posted the first of a series we’re going to call “treasures”: stories about random things in science that we think are beautiful, surprising, amazing or just plain cool. They’re going to be paired with the little circular image icons on our homepage, which we’ll begin rotating, so over time visitors to our site will see a changing set of discoveries. Tuesday’s treasure was the tongue-eating sea louse, a parasitic crustacean that lives inside the mouths of fish—and does exactly what its name says.

Cymothoa exigua inside its host. Photo © Matthew R. Gilligan, Ph.D.

Treasures: The tongue-eating sea louse

by Jakob
February 5, 2013April 27, 2023

One of the things I love about science is the appreciation it can inspire for things I might otherwise consider horrifying, or just gross. One great example of this is Cymothoa exigua, also known as the tongue-eating sea louse. I should mention that the animal in question doesn’t necessarily “eat” the host’s tongue in the conventional sense: It latches on and consumes blood and mucus until the tongue completely shrivels up. Then the isopod crustacean stays right where it is and switches to just grabbing part of whatever the fish eats and slowly growing larger, before eventually detaching and swimming away. A few things about this before we go back to the whole wonder and fascination part…