earth

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3556495

By turning off your lights all day every day for a month, you conserved about 1 percent of the energy needed for AI to generate a picture of a duck wearing sunglasses. Isn’t he cute? Aside from the fact that he has the feet of a human man, of course.

While biologists usually describe octopuses as solitary, the cephalopods have shown in numerous ways that they pay close attention to the creatures around them, said Alexandra Schnell, a comparative psychologist affiliated with the University of Cambridge and a peer reviewer of the new paper.

These comments made me laugh.

Dr. Sampaio compared the octopus’s role in these groups to that of a chief executive, while the fish act more like a company’s research and development team.

“You can be a leader by pushing forward and expanding boundaries and taking the group to new places,” he said. “Or you can be the leader in terms of being the decider.” The octopus lets other animals study the marketplace and then chooses the company’s direction.

[...]

However, Dr. Papadopoulou said, “I personally don’t like the use of the word ‘leadership’ when we talk about animals.” The word might make us imagine a boss making thoughtful decisions for everyone else, she said, but the movements of an animal group can emerge because everyone is following simple rules.

Dr. Papadopoulou said the octopus was more like an online influencer than a corporate executive.

Herbivores rock

This funky-looking snake is the Tentacled Snake

To answer your question, the tentacles are little sensory organs. They hunt fish underwater, so maybe they help? They have a better tool than those tentacles for hunting fish, though, and it's behavioral.

For context, fish have a few extremely quick "starts" that are deeply embedded instinctive responses to threats. They happen quicker than a larger animal can really even think, and they start with a specific bend of the body. The most studied (and the most common I think?) is the "C-start", so named because it involves the fish bending its body into a C-shape away from a threat before they start swimming away.

Snakes have quick predatory reflexes, but a fish small enough for them to eat will be quicker. To overcome this fact, tentacled snakes have an incredibly simple and elegant trick.

To put it simply, the snake "herds" the fish into its mouth. It will slide in alongside the fish out of striking range, and suddenly flick a few vertebrae down the length of its body, on the opposite side of the fish from where the snake's head is. When the fish then instinctively "c-starts" away from the movement, it flees directly into the snake's waiting mouth.

Yes, this snake abuses the fish's aggro mechanics for maximum farm efficiency

LET'S GOOOOO

by Basten Gokkon

• Indonesia’s recently revised conservation law retains a heavy focus on terrestrial protection and largely ignores marine and fisheries issues, experts say.
• Despite improvements such as clearer authority for managing marine and coastal conservation areas, critics argue the law still falls short in addressing urgent marine conservation needs.
• The law strengthens penalties for illegal activities and outlines responsibilities for protecting fish species and marine life, but many fear the minimal inclusion of maritime conservation will worsen illegal fishing and environmental degradation.
• Indigenous groups have also slammed the new law, citing its failure to include Indigenous participation and protect their rights over customary lands and forests.

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s recently updated conservation law continues to prioritize terrestrial protection, raising concerns over much-needed improvements to the management of the country’s rich marine ecosystems and resources.

Parliament passed revisions to the 1990 conservation law this past July, seven years since it was submitted for legislation. The update introduces 24 provisions that modify or expand provisions in the 1990 version, while also repealing some provisions from the 2019 law on water resources.

And while the 2024 conservation law now adopts provisions on protection of coastal areas and small islands, it continues to focus for the most part on forestry and land-based conservation, said Arisetiarso Soemodinoto, an adviser at the NGO Fisheries Resource Center of Indonesia.

“Two-thirds of Indonesia’s territory is waters, the rest is land,” Arisetiarso told Mongabay. The few mentions in the law of marine, coastal areas, small islands and fisheries thus comes across as the bare minimum, he added.

Indonesia is home to some of the most diverse marine life on the planet, especially in its eastern region that falls within the Pacific Coral Triangle, an area renowned for its richness of corals and reef fish. The country’s maritime sector also holds untapped potential as a vast carbon sink.

Full article

The call / name of the gecko

In a study published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, scientists filmed juvenile Japanese eels staging Houdiniesque feats of escape from inside a predatory fish. After being swallowed and deposited into the fish’s stomach, the young eels swam up the hunter’s esophagus and escaped through an opening in its gills, much to the fish’s displeasure.

[...]

[They] escape by wriggling their way, tail first, out of the digestive tract, up the esophagus and out the gills.

https://archive.ph/VqezR

The NYT uses SEO garbage in the title...

The Terrifying Way That Eels Escape a Hungry Fish’s Stomach

Found from https://todon.nl/@schratze/110324142911883396

Wikimedia source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Powerful_Owl_-_April_6_2009_Chatswood_West_edited..JPG

Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – live socially in colonies while most species (>90%) – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.

Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants. The most common bees in the Northern Hemisphere are the Halictidae, or sweat bees, but they are small and often mistaken for wasps or flies. Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species, whose workers are less than 2 millimetres (0.08 in) long, to the leafcutter bee Megachile pluto, the largest species of bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres (1.54 in).

Bees feed on nectar and pollen, the former primarily as an energy source and the latter primarily for protein and other nutrients. Most pollen is used as food for their larvae. Vertebrate predators of bees include primates and birds such as bee-eaters; insect predators include beewolves and dragonflies.

Bee pollination is important both ecologically and commercially, and the decline in wild bees has increased the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees. The analysis of 353 wild bee and hoverfly species across Britain from 1980 to 2013 found the insects have been lost from a quarter of the places they inhabited in 1980.

Human beekeeping or apiculture (meliponiculture for stingless bees) has been practised for millennia, since at least the times of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. Bees have appeared in mythology and folklore, through all phases of art and literature from ancient times to the present day, although primarily focused in the Northern Hemisphere where beekeeping is far more common. In Mesoamerica, the Mayans have practiced large-scale intensive meliponiculture since pre-Columbian times

Bees may be solitary or may live in various types of communities. Eusociality appears to have originated from at least three independent origins in halictid bees. The most advanced of these are species with eusocial colonies; these are characterised by cooperative brood care and a division of labour into reproductive and non-reproductive adults, plus overlapping generations. This division of labour creates specialized groups within eusocial societies which are called castes. In some species, groups of cohabiting females may be sisters, and if there is a division of labour within the group, they are considered semisocial. The group is called eusocial if, in addition, the group consists of a mother (the queen) and her daughters (workers). When the castes are purely behavioural alternatives, with no morphological differentiation other than size, the system is considered primitively eusocial, as in many paper wasps; when the castes are morphologically discrete, the system is considered highly eusocial.

True honey bees (genus Apis, of which eight species are currently recognized) are highly eusocial, and are among the best known insects. Their colonies are established by swarms, consisting of a queen and several thousand workers. Africanized bees are a hybrid strain of A. mellifera that escaped from experiments involving crossing European and African subspecies; they are extremely defensive.

Many bumblebees are eusocial, similar to the eusocial Vespidae such as hornets in that the queen initiates a nest on her own rather than by swarming.

Most other bees, including familiar insects such as carpenter bees, leafcutter bees and mason bees are solitary in the sense that every female is fertile, and typically inhabits a nest she constructs herself. There is no division of labor so these nests lack queens and worker bees for these species. Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax. Bees collect pollen to feed their young, and have the necessary adaptations to do this. Solitary bees are important pollinators; they gather pollen to provision their nests with food for their brood. Often it is mixed with nectar to form a paste-like consistency.

• Children of the Sun – Wild Bees

• Hornets and Honey Bees: A Coevolutionary Arms Race between Ancient Adaptations and New Invasive Threats

• Beekeeping In The Mediterranean, From Antiquity To The Present

• The Global History of Beekeeping

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