It’s summertime, and you know what that means…

Probably not what you think it means. To me, it means cold, a terrible chill in my lab that makes it uncomfortable to work there, just as I’m getting the freedom to work there. Every summer, when the physical plant starts working to cool the building, they seem to start with refrigerating my lab space. The whole building is out of balance, so while my lab is sitting at a chilly 15°C, the lab right next to mine is a feverish 27°C. It has been driving me mad for years, and nothing ever gets done to fix it.

It’s not good for the spiders, these Southern belles that were collected in Florida and dragged up to Minnesota.

They’ve all got heating pads under their cages, but there’s a steep gradient from the floor of the cage to the top, so no wonder they’re all huddled as low as they can get all the time. The babies are in incubators, so they don’t care, yet…but once they get to a size that demands more space, I have to move them out into the main lab.

It’s not good for me, either. I have to wear my winter coat every day to keep warm at the microscope and computer. I have to yell at the administration, but maybe you’ve noticed that I’m rather soft-voiced and apparently totally ineffectual.

My plan for this week, as my teaching responsibilities diminish, is to pack up all the adult spiders and bring them home. Don’t worry, I’ve already cleared it with Mary.

Maybe I should pack up all the microscopes and computers and bring them home, too. The university isn’t making the effort to create a livable working environment, so they can’t complain if I abscond with all the gear and instruments, right?

Suspicious!

We have a president who is notorious for openly despising journalists. For years, he has been shunning the White House Correspondents Dinner, where, in the past, some speakers have mocked him, and where he would be surrounded by people who write rude things about him. He finally plans to attend. Gunshots ring out, secret service agents rush in, quickly bundle the politicians out, and the whole event was cancelled.

Dog help me, I’m suspicious that the police-led shutdown of the event was the whole point. I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but it was all too pat — the establishment was looking for a pretext, and they found one. No one was hurt, they had a fun kerfuffle, and this year’s WHCD was silenced while the administration gets to claim persecution.

Afterwards, the president said nothing about how there are too many guns too freely available — instead, he spoke to the press about how this justifies his ballroom, which would be more secure and safe.

I hate thinking this way, but this country feels like it’s built on money, lies, and cheap stagecraft right now.

What a waste of an evening

The White House Correspondents Dinner is happening tonight, featuring remarks by the president himself. I won’t bother listening, because not only do I despise Trump, but it’s a room full of sycophants who have, with rare exceptions, enabled him.

I think Michelle Wolf had the perfect comment:


Comedian Michelle Wolf’s joke at the 2018 WHCD
resonates more today: “I think what no one in this
room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of
you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or
college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s
helped you sell your papers and your books and your
TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re
profiting off of him.”

Revealing photos

Two presidential photo ops:

The photographer who caught that one will be shot later today.

The subject for that one is the Georgia women’s tennis team. Can you tell? They’re the ones tucked away in back, behind the old white men in suits with garish red ties.

You now know everything you need to know about the current administration.

Now tempted to run a casino out of my house

Yikes. These data jerked me right back to the first lab of my genetics course, where we learn basic principles of probability with exercises in coin flipping and dice rolling.

More Americans incorrectly say that the likelihood of flipping two coins and getting two heads is 50% than correctly say it’s 25%

I never even thought to ask them if they had a different, incorrect assumption about probability, we just did ‘experiments’ to see what the results were (and also learned some simple statistics and calculations). I am confident that if my students were asked this question they’d say 25% with no hesitation…although they might also go on a bit about chance variation and bell curve distributions.

Although the ignorance on display in that chart might explain a different phenomenon: US gambling addiction is ‘out of control’ as betting markets boom, policy expert warns. Yeah. I swear that almost half the ads I see online are about betting.

Prediction market platforms – where users can bet on everything fromaward winners and war developments, to what someone might wear, or what an artist will sing on stage – have meanwhile surged in popularity in the last few years, with more than $1bn traded on Kalshi during Super Bowl Sunday alone.

Prediction market platforms contend that they are not gambling platforms, but rather financial trading platforms. Critics argue they are gambling under another name.

It’s gambling.

It’s preying on stupid people. That chart says that that’s about 48% of the US adult population, so I can see how it’s lucrative.

Wait. I just noticed the footnote on the chart: “Responses of ‘0%’, ‘75%’, ‘100%’, and ‘something else’ are not shown”. I assume that’s the difference between the frequency of responses shown and 100%, but I want to know how deep the ignorance runs.

An adorable baby

What a cute little dead baby.

That’s a Lystrosaurus embryo. If you don’t know Lystrosaurus, it’s an amazing species that survived the Permian extinction and experienced a remarkable population boom — it was a large vertebrate that came to dominate the planet after that mass extinction, yet most people have never heard of them. We ought to pay more attention! Memento mori, and all that.

Anyway, this fossil answers the least surprising question ever.

Detailed imaging of a 250-million-year-old fossil has revealed the first proof that the ancestors of mammals laid eggs. The discovery answers a long-standing question about the reproductive biology of our ancient forerunners and hints at how they managed to flourish in the aftermath of the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Scientists have long assumed that the ancestors of mammals—a group known as the therapsids—laid eggs like today’s platypuses and echidnas do. But they lacked any direct evidence of synapsid eggs in the fossil record.

It’s good to be able to tick off that one box, confirming that Permian therapsids laid eggs, but it’s hardly news. I thought this was much more interesting:

Most importantly, the new images reveal that the two halves of the lower jaw had yet to fuse in the youngest Lystrosaurus specimen. In turtles and birds, the lower jaw fuses before birth, allowing the baby to feed itself after hatching. The unfused lower jaw of this Lystrosaurus is therefore another indication that the animal died while still in its egg. The other two specimens exhibit signs of having been somewhat more mature; the largest one was preserved in a splayed-out posture that shows it was not in an egg and had traveled some distance before dying.

Mammalian ancestors invested more in maternal care than some other organisms. That might be a clue to how our clade survived through a couple of mass extinctions.

Not a spider

Spiders don’t usually look this pissed off.

I know it’s not as interesting as a spider, but I’m setting goals for myself this summer. I’m making a list!

  • Get that knee surgery, finally. I’m meeting with the orthopedic surgeon on Wednesday to, I hope, schedule the thing.
  • Visit the Boundary Waters before the Republicans poison them. Preferably after the knees are fixed.
  • Visit Paisley Park.
  • Look at more organisms than spiders. See, bird! I understand some people maintain life lists of birds observed. I’ve already checked this one off!

I’ll probably add more to the list as I go. I think if I add more goals than I can accomplish, I can never die.

I’m not the only one easily seduced by giant Cretaceous octopuses

You knew I’d have to read an article titled Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans. How cool is that? And then they’ve illustrated it with some very appealing figures.

Body size estimation of Late Cretaceous octopuses.
The graph shows an allometric relationship between the length of the jaw and mantle in long-bodied species of extant finned octopus . The name of the corresponding species is shown along each growth curve. The sizes of N. jeletzkyi and N. haggarti based on their largest specimen are indicated by black vertical lines. Reconstruction of these two species, the extant giant squid, and gigantic vertebrate predators in the Late Cretaceous are shown with their maximum total length.

Also, the abstract promises much.

Top predators drive changes in ecosystem structure. For the last ~370 million years, large-sized vertebrates have dominated the apex of the marine food chain, while invertebrates have served as smaller prey. Here we describe invertebrate top predators from this “age of vertebrates,” the earliest finned octopuses (Cirrata) from Late Cretaceous sediments (~100 to 72 million years ago), as identified based on huge, exceptionally well-preserved fossil jaws and their wear. This extensive wear suggests dynamic crushing of hard skeletons. Asymmetric wear patterns further indicate lateralized behavior, suggesting advanced intelligence. With a calculated total length of ~7 to 19 meters, these octopuses may represent the largest invertebrates thus described, rivaling contemporaneous giant marine reptiles. Our findings show that powerful jaws, and the loss of superficial skeletons, convergently transformed cephalopods and marine vertebrates into huge, intelligent predators.

But does the paper deliver? Sad to say, it doesn’t. I was disappointed on how far the authors stretched an interesting technique to reach an excessive conclusion.

What they did was collect fossil octopus beaks and subject them to grinding tomography — basically shaving away the rock, photographing each exposed slice, and using an AI to help reconstruct a detailed 3-D image of the beak that allowed them to view the wear and tear on the beak’s surface, presumably seeing the damage acquired as they chewed their way through their Cretaceous prey. The entirety of the data in the paper is an analysis of scratches and wear on these beaks.

Huge lower jaws of fossil octopuses and of an extant giant squid.
(A and B) The largest lower jaws of the Late Cretaceous finned octopus species N. jeletzkyi [(A) NMNS DS00042 3LmvTpM] and N. haggarti [(B) KMNH IvP 902001]. Both specimens show extensive loss of jaw material caused by wear. (C) A lower jaw of the extant giant squid Architeuthis dux (NSMT-Mo 85956), a species having the largest jaw among modern cephalopods. (A) is a digital fossil jaw visualized as a 3D model; (B) is an exceptionally well-preserved nondigital fossil jaw; and (C) is a modern jaw dissected from a carcass of ~10 m total body length. Solid lines indicate the extension of striation on the outer surface of the hood and broken lines show the estimated outline of the rostrum without wear. The hood and lateral walls lost by weathering, shown as shadowed areas, are reconstructed based on the holotype and specimens in fig. S4. (A) and (C) are exhibited in a mirrored position. Scale bar, 20 mm.

That’s good stuff. No data too small — it’s all data. But wait: this paper contains nothing but measurements of beaks, but manages to expand this into a whole set of conclusions about the marine ecosystem.

These wear patterns suggest that Late Cretaceous giant Cirrata were active carnivores that frequently crushed hard shells and bones. The long scratches distributed on wide areas of their jaw reflect the dynamic use of the entire jaw for dismantling prey. Asymmetric loss of the jaw edges suggests lateralized behavior, which has been linked to a highly developed brain and cognition. This, in turn, suggests that the earliest octopuses already possessed advanced intelligence. Laterality is known in modern octopuses, whose high intelligence matches that of vertebrates. The exceptionally large jaws of adult N. jeletzkyi and N. haggarti suggest a strong bite force because cephalopod jaw muscles enlarge as the jaw size increases. The long lateral walls in their jaws revealed by the new digital specimens reported here show that Nanaimoteuthis had large jaw muscles. The chipping on both the rostrum and jaw edge was caused by strong shear stress beyond the yield point of the most robust part of the jaw. The transverse cracks in N. haggarti are probably a trace of larger shear failures. These large fractures thus suggest a powerful bite. In giant Cirrata, the jaws are smaller than those of contemporaneous Cretaceous vertebrate top predators, which measure ~1.7 m in length. Instead of using a large mouth, the long and flexible arms of octopuses serve for catching large prey. The giant Cirrata probably consumed large prey with their long arms and jaws, playing the role of top predators in Cretaceous marine ecosystems.

All we’ve got are scratches on beaks, with extrapolation from beak size to overall size. From that we leap to the conclusion that these giant octopuses were rivals to mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and sharks. We assume they’re top predators in the absence of actual evidence of predation or their role in the ancient ecosystem.

Convergent evolution among marine top predators in the Paleozoic–Mesozoic.
This model shows the acquisition of jaws and the reduction of superficial skeletons in the evolutionary history of marine vertebrates (top) and cephalopods (bottom) to become top predators. The gray horizontal bars show the chronological range of some selected groups of vertebrates and cephalopods. For cephalopods, stepwise reductions of skeletons are indicated by the blue background.

I’m not even going to touch the idea that asymmetric scratches are good evidence of high intelligence.

I am reminded of the speculations of Mark McMenamin, who thought circular shapes in Triassic sediments were evidence of a gigantic Kraken. He also found a broken piece of rock that he extrapolated to claim it was the tip of a giant kraken beak.

At least McMenamin’s extravagant conclusions weren’t getting published in Science.