Today i learned that weaver ants bend leaves together and stick them together with the silk of their larvae. Colonys can have hundreds of nests and contain over 500 thousand ants
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Today I learned that 75% of Bees build there nests underground. Apparently, building hives in trees is a minority.
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Do any build those stereotypical external bulbs or is it only a wasp thing?
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Yes, but only about 3%, and only 4% make Honey, and apparently, only 8% are Eusocial. The most well known and stereotypical bee around, the Honey Bee, is apparently very atypical in that way.
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A reminder that they are the descendants of the parasitoid wasps of the old (and the relatives to the current ones).
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Today I learned there is a thing called Mad Honey (which has hallucigenic effects).
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I remember hearing about βflesh honeyββ¦
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I hadnβt heard it called that before, but I think that Mad Honey was in A Haunting in Venice.
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Adding, it is the labour of these bees:
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Today I learned there is a Fusulinid, or type of shelled, single-celled protist, known as Obsoletes obsoletes.
The top of the Moscovian (base of the Kasimovian) is at the base of the fusulinid biozone of Obsoletes obsoletes and Protriticites pseudomontiparus , or with the first appearance of the ammonite genus Parashumardites .
How Fusulinids looked like.
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They do kind of look and sound like diatoms
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Convergent evolution!
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Could a case where something more or less the same (like that one bird which went extinct and then βcame backβ sometime later) evolves again be called βre-evolutionβ?
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I believe it is called Iterative Evolution. Though I happen to like the name βRe-evolutionβ.
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Like that Aldabra rail species that flew from Madagascar to an island, lost flight, regained flight when sea levels dropped, and then lost it again during the process of becoming different subspecies?
https://www.science.org/content/article/evolution-brings-extinct-island-bird-back-existence
Picture in case people cannot access the article.
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That is certainly the best known example, but I believe it has also happened in Plants, Molluscs, and possibly even in Sea Cows as well.
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Now that I checked this is THE bird Iβve meant in my reply about this re-evolution topic
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Today I learned that there is a question mark shaped organism from the Ediacaran, which is earliest known motile animal that seems to have right-left symmetry.
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That seems like a kind of a strange take on a bilateral symmetry, perhaps why itβs signified by this mark of questionsβ¦
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I would not be surprised if someone eventually made an emoticon out of Quaestio.
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