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A Tsetse Fly Births One Enormous Milk-Fed Baby | Deep Look Video
Mammalian moms, you’re not alone! A female tsetse fly pushes out a single squiggly larva almost as big as herself, which she nourished with her own milk.
Mammalian moms aren’t the only ones to deliver babies and feed them milk. Tsetse flies, the insects best known for transmitting sleeping sickness, do it too.
A researcher at the University of California, Davis is trying to understand in detail the unusual way in which these flies reproduce in order to find new ways to combat the disease, which has a crippling effect on a huge swath of Africa.
When it’s time to give birth, a female tsetse fly takes less than a minute to push out a squiggly yellowish larva almost as big as itself. The first time he watched a larva emerge from its mother, UC Davis medical entomologist Geoff Attardo was reminded of a clown car.
“There’s too much coming out of it to be able to fit inside,” he recalled thinking. “The fact that they can do it eight times in their lifetime is kind of amazing to me.”
Tsetse flies live four to five months and deliver those eight offspring one at a time. While the larva is growing inside them, they feed it milk. This reproductive strategy is extremely rare in the insect world, where survival usually depends on laying hundreds or thousands of eggs.
This is another installment of the PBS Deep Look series. If no film or link appears in this email, go to the blog to view it by clicking on the blog title above. If the film stops & starts in an annoying manner, press pause (lower left double bars ||) to let it buffer and get ahead of you. [Chuck Almdale]
Can Wild Parrots Solve Puzzles? Parrots are famous for their intelligence. Sulphur-crested Cockatoos are particularly notorious for their curiosity and their ability to cause exploratory destruction to human-made structures in the cities where they live.
Sydney, Australia-based maker Angus Deveson create a 3D-printed and laser cut puzzle to test the ingenuity of a wild Sulphur-crested Cockatoo where he lives. Watch the Maker’s Muse video below.
This film is from the bird video selection of The kids should see this. If no film or link appears below, go to the blog to view it by clicking on the blog title above. If the film stops & starts in an annoying manner, press pause (lower left double bars ||) to let it buffer and get ahead of you. [Chuck Almdale]
https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/can-this-sulphur-crested-cockatoo-solve-a-3d-printed-puzzle
The entangled life of fungi
Your Book Shelf
Quick. What do you know about fungi?
Here’s what I think I know. Without fungi there would be no puffy bread or alcoholic beverages. No shiitake, morels or truffles. No ringworm on your arm or green stuff growing under your toenails. Way too many dead animals lying undecomposed on the ground. No white-nosed disease in bats. No American Chestnut Blight or Dutch Elm Disease. No penicillin. No LSD-25. No Salem witch trials. No dry rot in your house. All the orchids and all the trees in all the forests in the world would have a very difficult time getting enough nutrients from the soil. No zombie ants forced to climb trees where their heads then explode. No yogurt, kefir, buttermilk and most cheese. No Vegemite or Marmite. Nothing for pigs or dogs to do in the forests of France, Spain and Italy. Fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.
If your knowledge of fungi is as limited as mine, here’s a book for you.
[Chuck Almdale]
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
When we think of fungi, we probably think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain nearly all living systems. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
Sheldrake’s mind-bending journey into this hidden world ranges from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that sprawl for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’, to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision.
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms – and our relationships with them – are changing our understanding of how life works.
The Mysterious Life of Birds Who Never Come Down
Swifts spend all their time in the sky. What can their journeys tell us about the future?
The New York Times Magazine | Helen Macdonald | July 29, 2020
Its eyes seemed unable to focus on me, as if it were an entity from an alternate universe whose senses couldn’t quite map onto our phenomenal world.
I have always thought ‘vesper flights’ the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.
SANTA MONICA BAY AUDUBON SOCIETY BLOG 