Seth Donoughe

Great thread on the "palm" of a fish's fin

(and those illustrations...!)

Physalia megalista, a cnidiran with a gas filled float, raised sail, and long blue tentacles hanging below. Image credit: Dalila Destanović

Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌

"given the very likely course of AI improvements over the next few years, how EXACTLY should I change my work in my field right now" is an extremely practical question.

I liked this exercise by @jefftk.com to think through some specific answers for his research group's work

Career update: About a year ago, I became the AIxBio group leader at SecureBio, a research non-profit.

We study how rapidly accelerating AI is changing biology research, with a particular focus on making sure we mostly get the upsides.

Check out this thread for our new paper:

A scanning electron micrograph of a wing scale. It is a flat structure with 8 long ridges and many tiny cross-ridges. It is also punctuated with holes.

A scanning electron micrograph zoom-in of a single wing scale from a pantry moth (Plodia interpunctella)—you know, the ones in your baking supplies.

Can't wait until somebody discovers how the underlying cell takes on such a wild shape & how the ECM is laid down.

Width of the image is ~8 microns.

Neat, thanks! Indeed, I also post a fair amount about insect cuticle, which is yet another aECM.

A fluorescent micrograph of a crumpled insect wing, with muscles and cuticle highlight in different colors. Scale bar of 200µm. The whole wing is about 1mm across.

A wild-type female hindwing from a cricket, mounted flat. The whole thing is maybe 10mm across.

As insect wings develop, they form "crumpled up" in a very particular way. Unlike origami, there are no crisp folds.

Then, at adulthood, the wings emerge and open up.

Here is a cricket hindwing that I prepped from a juvenile, compared to an adult wing (from Turchyn & Popadić, FEVO 2024) 🧪

Yep fly larvae are baby flies that hatch from eggs. Those eggs have eggshells. Indeed, these arthropod eggshells evolutionarily pre-date amniote eggs with eggshells (like those of lizards, dinos, birds, echidnas, etc)

Those areas are fluid-filled during eggshell secretion (a liquid called hemolymph—mostly water). And then two more layers are added on top, covering everything including the cavities—"the roof network" & exochorion. Then, I suspect, the water evaporates from the laid egg if it's laid somewhere dry.

Yeah, it might be. In fact, fairly little is known about how insect eggshells get their fine-scale structure. But the idea of "spatial templating" is one of my favorite hypotheses.

Ya, you can think of the cells that build the insect eggshell as working like a 3D printer. The cells surround the yolk, secreting a bunch of protein layers onto it. Then those cells slough off and you're left with just the egg + eggshell. The eggshell is dead in the same way that mucus & teeth are.

This is a different protein :)

It's called Cp7Fc, which is only found in the eggshell. Very little is known about it. In this case, a copy of Cp7Fc has been fused to a fluorescent protein called "superfolder green fluorescent protein" (sfGFP). Unlike tubulin, Cp7Fc is secreted outside the cells.

A fluorescent image of an insect eggshell. Polygons with black edges, each of which is filled with a quasi-orderly arrangement of tiny blobs. A scale bar that is approximately the width of one polygon is labeled "20 µm"

Geometric order at multiple scales.

This is an optical slice into the eggshell of a fruit fly.

Every dot is the cross-section of a tiny pillar holding up the "roof" that is the outer surface of the egg. The black polygons are cavities left where cellular interfaces used to be. 🧪

An SEM of a vein joint from a damselfly. There is an horizontal cuticle strut, with two other struts meeting it perpendicularly. Where they meet, the other struts have spikes protruding towards the horizontal one.

You know those "veins" on the wings of insects? In some species, they join together with surprisingly complex mechanical linkages.

This is an electron micrograph we captured of a vein joint from a damselfly. Note how the cuticle spikes allow more flexibility in one direction than the other. 🧪

A pen and ink drawing of the "lesser house fly" Fannia canicularis, illustrated in the Manual of Nearctic Diptera. The surface has detailed textural features.

A larva of the "lesser house fly" Fannia canicularis, illustrated in the Manual of Nearctic Diptera.

This book has astonishingly detailed and loving drawings of larvae. 🧪

thanks! I appreciate it.

Could I join the list? I am a biologist who makes SciArt within and apart from my research. Thanks for curating an excellent feed. (I love the guidelines, btw)

A series of 7 stages of dragonfly embryogenesis, showing the embryo re-orient itself by doing a backwards flip.

~Embryo gymnastics~

In some insect species, the developing embryo does half of a backwards somersault (a movement called "katatrepsis").

Kozo Miyakawa captured this process in a dragonfly in a 1987 paper w/ tons of pen & ink illustrations. 🧪

(freely available: http://aesj.co-site.jp/raiejp.html)

Hand-drawn illustrations of amphipods

Nice! This is the first I've heard of him. Just found some of his amphipod drawings online. These are lovely.

Four pen and ink drawings of insect embryos. At these stages, the embryos have the shape of a blobby worm with constrictions between each body segment.

The old descriptive embryology papers had some gems of hand-drawn illustration.

These are drawings of the developing embryo of a cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae), a species that is often an unwelcome muncher of your kale and bok choy plants.

by L.E.S. Eastham (Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., 1930) 🧪

strong agree. i come across deeply unsettling forms at the microscope more often than i would have anticipated. it's spooky down there.

i'm standing next to you pointing at you in intense silent agreement, nodding vigorously while scowling at everyone else in the room

reminds me of the Far Side cartoon about a "Beware of Doug" sign that Larson said was especially popular...

...with guys named Doug.

SEM images of tardigrade eggs. The eggs are spherical with regularly spaced, lobed protrusions emerging from the surface.

Tardigrade eggs! 🧪

Some bizarre surfaces on these things. I'm trying (and failing) to imagine the cellular processes that give rise to the branched surface structures. Any ideas? Let me know.

From Vecchi et al 2021: https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/75978

every once in a while this comic will pop into my head and I will laugh out loud. The facial expression in every panel kills me.

Macro photo of a cricket, viewing the head front-on.

Portrait of a two-spotted field cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus), taken with my collaborator Taro Nakamura 🧪

No need for chopsticks or fork if you have eating utensils built-in on your face.

Hi folks, I'm a biologist who also just arrived here. Could I be added too? I really like the rules for the feed.

I'm so embarrassingly new that in the absence of a DM functionality I wasn't sure how to message @danirabaiotti.bsky.social except for jumping in to reply to a relevant convo.

A forewing and hindwing from a grasshopper (Arphia conspersa)

Wings from a speckle-winged rangeland grasshopper (Arphia conspersa).

This specimen was collected by Wayne Schennum in CO in 1973, & then I recently imaged it at the Chicago Field Museum. Wayne passed away in 2021, leaving a wealth of notes & specimens that are still giving rise to new discoveries.