As The Ides Of March Approaches, Let Us All Remember It Not As The Day Caesar Was Stabbed A Whole Bunch,

i can’t believe this is real

Roasted chicken, ginger, daikon, shiitake mushroom soup with lime, cilantro, broccoli sprouts, and rice noodles

Launching my first art blogs with a small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin!

Synergistic innovations enabled the radiation of anglerfishes in the deep open ocean

Chase D. Brownstein, Katerina L. Zapfe, Spencer Lott, Richard C. Harrington, Ava Ghezelayagh, Alex Dornburg, Thomas J. Near

Summary

Major ecological transitions are thought to fuel diversification, but whether they are contingent on the evolution of certain traits called key innovations is unclear. Key innovations are routinely invoked to explain how lineages rapidly exploit new ecological opportunities. However, investigations of key innovations often focus on single traits rather than considering trait combinations that collectively produce effects of interest.  Here, we investigate the evolution of synergistic trait interactions in anglerfishes, which include one of the most species-rich vertebrate clades in the bathypelagic, or “midnight,” zone of the deep sea: Ceratioidea.  Ceratioids are the only vertebrates that possess sexual parasitism, wherein males temporarily attach or permanently fuse to females to mate. We show that the rapid transition of ancestrally benthic anglerfishes into pelagic habitats occurred during a period of major global warming 50–35 million years ago. This transition coincided with the origins of sexual parasitism, which is thought to increase the probability of successful reproduction once a mate is found in the midnight zone, Earth’s largest habitat. Our reconstruction of the evolutionary history of anglerfishes and the loss of immune genes support that permanently fusing clades have convergently degenerated their adaptive immunity. We find that degenerate adaptive immune genes and sexual body size dimorphism, both variably present in anglerfishes outside the ceratioid radiation, likely promoted their transition into the bathypelagic zone. These results show how traits from separate physiological, morphological, and reproductive systems can interact synergistically to drive major transitions and subsequent diversification in novel environments.

Read the paper here: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)00576-1

(behind a paywall, unfortunately)

You may be able to contact the authors for a copy if you wish. (here)

So cool, it looks like it has a screaming skull on its body

European pirate spider, Ero tuberculata, Mimetidae

Photos by macronocturno

Spill-footed lacewing larvae, Myiodactylinae, Nymphidae, Neuroptera (related to owlflies and antlions)

Found in Australia

Adult in the same subfamily:

Photos 1-4 by normfarmerimages, 5 by tjeales, 6-8 by doggy48, 9-10 by sofiazed1, and 11 (adult) bystreglystendec

Every contemporary video game RPG wants to give me a party of emotionally dysfunctional weirdos and then bends over backwards to ensure that none of my interpersonal decisions cause any intractable conflicts or have any lasting consequences, which just feels wrong to me – like the latter is actively undermining the former. I want to see an RPG that goes full early 90s dating sim. I want an RPG where organising my party composition is like that logic puzzle about getting a fox and a duck across a river.

question! if a workplace is violating labor laws (which they often are) is there anything that prevents an employee from:

printing out copies of the laws being violated, maybe with helpful highlights/summaries

(and a helpful reporting hotline, if possible)

taping these signs anonymously in the employee bathroom stalls

i know retaliation is something many workers worry about, but bathrooms at least still don't have security cameras. so is this a practical and anonymous thing to do? and if so, why isn't it more common?

Another selection of some of the better names I've come across in Regency era newspapers recently.

If there was a way to run SUPER MEGA AD BLOCKER on this website I fucking would