Sarah Faulwetter

Look, @thelongestjohns.bsky.social , the Wellerman also comes to marine science conferences nowadays! 😃

Evidence of novel symbiotic relationships between Christmas tree worms and coral reef blennies and gobies - Symbiosis Ecological interactions between sessile invertebrates and reef fishes are well documented, yet novel associations continue to emerge. Based on photographic and behavioral evidence, we describe the fir...

Fish sleeping on serpulid worms?!? link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Very lovely photos (and very interesting symbiosis of #fish and #polychaetes) in this paper.

I think I will have to try again in autum/winter. It does not love heat I think. I gave up and just threw the remaining seeds all over the garden and something started to grow in the shades of the tomato plants, but it'll probably die soon as well...

In my experience dill does not like heat/sun too much. Rosemary (in the ground) though does not require watering at all for months in scorching hot weather (I am in the Mediterranean). But not much experience with it in pots. I have the same problem as you have with dill, but with coriander...

This is just stunning. The northern Baltic Sea with ocean temperature anomlies of up to 11 degrees C, absolute temps of up to 24°C 🤯, the Norwegian Sea up to 7 deg C too hot, absolute temps of up to 23 deg C, due to the unprecedented heat wave in Scandinavia.
The future is grim.

Delightful!

Agreed! I have taken countless photos of its ceilings...

@franzanth.bsky.social i saw this and thought of you while i was diving. you have destroyed me. all crabs are now synonymous with franz.

A very long-legged crab with little flappy red algae growing on its legs for camouflage. It sits on a muddy seafloor with more red algae and is basically not visible.

Diving over a #rhodolith bed the other day. Rhodoliths are calcareous red algae that are not attached to anything and just form little balls on the seabed. They are a highly biodiverse habitat and I saw so many species I have never seen before! Spot the cheerleeder #crab!

Bluesky has many many critter people and artists and nerds. Exactly what I want from social media.

mushroom shaped organism with translucent base

Many may not remember the DENDROGRAMMA mystery! This weird mushroom-shaped thing was described in 2014 as a "new metazoan" of unknown affinities! They were hinting that it might be a new phylum-but THEN 2 years later @drtimohara.bsky.social sequenced it and BOING! BENTHIC
#SIPHONOPHORE!

View from the deck of a traditional Greek fishing boat, showing the prow above the water with the horizon in the distance

The deck of a traditional greek fishing boat, fill of diving gear

Another day in the office... #greece #scuba #marinebiology #research #bestjobintheworld

Syllid polychaetes. Because you can barely get weirder. bsky.app/profile/sara...

We recognize that this announcement has caused a lot of upset and confusion among people who care deeply about iNaturalist. In the hundreds of comments, we hear that many people feel betrayed, disrespected, and without agency. We sincerely apologize. With respect for the ethical and environmental concerns raised, we'd like to offer more clarity about our plans with this grant and program. We know that trust is not easily rebuilt, but we'd like to try. First, to clarify some things we did not clearly communicate: 1. We are not replacing or changing the current human-curated system of identifications. Many of you have rightly pointed out that this is at the heart of iNat, and we wouldn't dream of doing away with it. Anything we explore with Al would only be meant to enhance the experience of some users: by, for example, providing an interesting tip about identifying the species, suggesting that the photographer try to capture a particular aspect of the plant or animal that might aid a human identifier, or explaining the computer vision's logic for the identification it's suggested. 2. We are not giving Google special access to your iNat data, and we have no obligation to use Google's infrastructure as part of this grant. Google is providing funding and advice on how to potentially leverage Al. 3. Naturalist has successfully incorporated machine learning and computer vision (kinds of Al) since 2017, with a very small footprint (primarily three machines running in spaces we control). We understand that new technologies can have much larger environmental impacts, and we aim to quantify the environmental footprint of Naturalist's infrastructure for 2025 and beyond. 4. This grant funds our team exploring new ways to surface and organize helpful identification comments - and if the demo we create is not helpful, compromises data quality, has outsized environmental impacts, or is overall too flawed, we will not keep it. This project is just getting off the ground, and we …

Done • inaturalist.org AA The Naturalist community has always been a core partner in informing the direction of the platform, and we appreciate and hear your feedback (including but not limited to): • We understand that you are concerned about inaccurate, out-of-context and/or hallucinated information being provided by a tool like this. We agree that any Al-provided information be clearly labeled as such and that there be a way to upvote/downvote or otherwise flag potentially misleading information, and we are excited to explore more ways for how this may happen. • We hear that people would like to be able to understand and control how their data is used on and beyond iNaturalist. On iNaturalist, you own the copyright to your data, and iNaturalist Terms of Use prohibit the use of data for commercial Al training. Whether commercial Al companies are beholden to copyright law or terms of use or can argue "fair use" of publicly accessible data is being worked out in the courts and is something we are paying attention to. • Most importantly, the community will be involved in the creation of this and any major new features. We will not be implementing any new changes to what you see on iNaturalist right now without involving the community. Our plan is to have an initial demo available for select user testing by the end of 2025. If you have more feedback, ideas, concerns, or questions you'd be willing to share, please use this form so we can more easily keep track of them. Additionally, if you would like to attend a virtual Q&A session to have some of this discussion in real time, please let us know in this form (more details to be determined). Again, the project funded by this grant is just getting started. We will proceed carefully and respectfully, and we're immensely grateful for this incredible and engaged community.

inaturalist•org
Update on June 11, 2025 9:15pm EDT
“We are not giving Google special access to your iNat data, and we have no obligation to use Google's infrastructure…If the demo… is not helpful, compromises data quality, has outsized environmental impacts, or is … too flawed, we will not keep it.”

A photo of a seahorse. It is grey-brownish in colour, over a muddy seafloor with shells and other detritus. Two sea urchins are half visible at either end of the photo. The seahorse has affixed its tail to something on the bottom and is swaying in the water, its snout almost touching the floor.

Lil' seahorse I saw today while snorkling...😍

##wormwednesday

Art of a shimmery marine worm with golden, paddle-like limbs.

Wormification - #InsertAnInvert2024
"Long, not limbless." I chose to do a paddleworm, specifically Phyllodoce medipapillata. I think this is the most beautiful worm I've ever seen on land or sea. I was DELIGHTED like a child seeing glitter for the first time looking at reference pics.
#sciart

A paddleworm that has leaf-like parapods on the side of the body (like paddles), two eyes on the head and a shimmery segmented body.

Look at this absolute beaut paddleworm Phyllodoce medipapillata.

How cute is that face?
And the beautiful luminescent shimmer on the body. Small but mighty.

📷Alex Heyman via iNaturalist
#NoVERMber

the new developments on inat inspired me to make a diagnostic thread for every insect order because there's only like 30something of them. going to try and avoid exceptions and extremely technical characteristics when possible. 🧵

They were amazing! 😍 a field of sabellid #polychaetes for early #wormwednesday

This looks amazingly useful! Congrats to the authors for this huge effort!

MOBS 1.0: A Database of Interspecific Variation in Marine Organismal Body Sizes Motivation Body size is a fundamental trait influencing an organism's life history, ecology, physiology and evolutionary dynamics. While extensive body-size databases exist for terrestrial vertebrat...

To give you an idea of the scope of #MOBS onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... There are 52,505 species of marine Mollusk, MOBS has body size data for 46,110 of them (88%).

Macrophyte-based ecological assessment of coastal areas near fish farms in the Aegean and Ionian Seas This study examined the effect of aquaculture on benthic macrophytes growing on coastal hard substrates across Greece. Stations were categorized into …

Congratulations to my master student Alexandra Zachariadou for her first paper. She studied the impact of #aquaculture on coastal macrophyte communities in #Greece. Apart from a nice work that came out of this It was really a pleasure to work with her! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I've been accused of AI quite a bit lately.
I get it, the current social media trends do not foster an environment of trust.
But with real photography, we have the human touch and true imagery of nature that can uncover secrets about our world that an AI eye simply cannot.

This is beautful. And so simple.

Queer people are scared. This is all you have to do as a cis het person to help take some of that fear away.

浅瀬で見つけたのは、泳ぐウミウシの仲間「ムラサキウミコチョウ」

初見はまさに胡蝶の夢🫧
ウミコチョウと名付けた人のセンスに脱帽です！

In the shallow tidepools, I found a swimming sea slug—
Sagaminopteron ornatum🫧

Seeing it for the first time felt like Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream.

Whoever named it “Umikochou” (Sea Butterfly) had truly poetic sense!

One of the biggest, most beautiful larval-stage #dragonfish ever!
.
Shot while drifting in the open ocean at night
#deepseafish #larvalfish #blackwater #blackwaterdiving #blackwaterphotography #chrisgug #gugunderwater #gug #scubadiving #underwater #plankton

Skyline of the port of Hamburg

Packing up to go to Hamburg for the annual meeting of the @icesmarine.bsky.social Working Group on Comparative Ecosystem-based Analyses of Atlantic & Mediterranean marine systems (COMEDA). Looking forward to seeing familiar faces, meeting new ones & discussing the amazing science they are all doing!

I had not thought of that! I had only wondered why all animals are the same size, I could not see any small ones in any of the videos. I really want to study these in more detail. I know of about five to six other locations in Greece and I think two of them are a different species...

A low angle view of a dense aggregation of sabellid worms. These live in tubes which are whitish and upright and from their top the worm emerges. Only their tentacular crowns are visible - a feathery, flowery light blue crown with a few dark spots. The sabellid field is bright in the foreground, illuminated by the lights of the remotely operated underwater vehicle, and dark blue above.

A view of the same sabellid field from.a higher angle - the field of feathery crowns stretches far into the background of the photo until.it becomes one with the dark background.

Last week we explored an area with our new ROV and came across this gorgeous field of sabellid #polychaete worms. We don't know the species and generally not much about these aggregations. But they are very beautiful! #wormwednesday