Tusk Titles | Light Trap | Octo Outfits

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Happy New Year and welcome to the final week of our first annual Casual Awards! 🥳

Time for Genome Joggers, the best Biology stories of 2024.

• Last Week: Healing Hoodies (medical)

• 2 weeks ago: Celestial Sweatpants (space)

BONUS: Check out Special Edition st3v below!

-New Year’s Steve

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Tusk Titles

We call them elephants, but they refer to each other by name. Researchers discovered the floppy-eared behemoths gossip in low-frequency rumbles.

• Machine learning helped ID specific name sounds

• Then played the names back to elephants

• Individuals responded more to calls originally directed at them

Call-patterns were not consistent across different groups, indicating elephant names may be on an individual relationship level. We still have much to learn about their intricate nicknamed lives. They really have great memory for all those names, including their own!

rumbles in elephant-speak

Light Trap

Spiders have hacked firefly morse code. Orb-weaving spiders capitalize on firefly mating pulse-flashes to lure in meals.

• Males = multi-pulse, females = single pulse

• Enwebbed males are kept alive and bitten

• Triggering single-pulse flashes, attracting more males

Further research will determine how the spiders manipulate flash patterns and possibly uncover other forms of mimicry as a hunting tool in nature. Blink twice if you’re all the small things.

-... .-.. .. -. -.- / .---- ---.. ..---

Octo Outfits

Fitting in can be tough, especially if you’re an octopus. Changing color requires the same amount of energy used just to stay alive, while resting.

• Tiny muscles control chromatophores to change color

• Blue light triggered color change in skin samples

• Metabolic cost measured by change in O₂ consumption

This makes octo-camo-mode one of the animal kingdom’s most “expensive” adaptive traits, not even including the neural effort involved and energy cost of changing skin texture. Almost as difficult as changing out of sweatpants.

Octopuses always have matching socks

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Unnatural Selection

Last week: “Which UNO card is better?”

“Do you have a comment on this victory?” - UNO Reverse, when asked for their comment on this victory.

st3v on site

Happy New Year

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