Shauna Rasband

Introduction: Economic Importance of Ducks: It is difficult to overrate the economic importance of ducks, and undoubtedly their estetic and recreational worth is fully as great.

Maybe I should just do a thread of text screenshots that amuse me. For instance, this is big if true (from a 1939 US government report):

"Mic-UK: Safe microscopic techniques for amateurs. Lactic acid is not a forbidden substance. It is a clear liquid which has a"

I googled "lactic acid insect microscopy" and this was the mysterious result

A small toy orca sitting atop a full-sized orca skull replica

He has vanquished a much larger foe

Observations iNaturalist is a social network for naturalists! Record your observations of plants and animals, share them with friends and researchers, and learn about the natural world.

Anyone who needs a smile today, look no further! Someone made a collection of photos of grebes standing on their legs. www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Wow, super cool to see a live northern short-tailed shrew. They're so fossorial, when you see em it's usually because they're dead (as I'm sure you learned flicking through iNat). They are venomous and great hunters

Wow, great work! Maintaining extremophile-type tolerance after 40 generations in the lab is a really cool result.

The charitable mother pelican who wounds herself to feed her young is one of my favorite cultural bird symbols, even if pelicans don't really do that (and we've known that for a long time). Wildly, we only laid to rest that flamingo crop milk is milk and not blood (it's bright red!) in a 1979 study.

This makes sense, but I can't say I ever thought of this particular logistical challenge before.

I love the concept of this list. Penugins are remarkably weird in so many ways.

Hawaiian 6th graders in particular might wonder about the palila, which have a diet almost entirely of highly poisonous māmane beans, but don't get ill from it. What are they doing? Breaking down the poison and pooping out harmless remains? Sequestering it in a safe part of their bodies like ifrits?

There are some. hypotheses for how the lens or other parts of the eye might accomplish it, but nothing has really explained what's going on yet.

If you open your eyes underwater, everything is blurry unless you're wearing goggles, due to the different index of refraction of water.

Penguins have to be able to see well on land and underwater, since they actively hunt small prey! But we don't know how they do it without goggles! :)

Congratulations! Look forward to the posts! Also fair warning, first it's this, then you find yourself ordering obscure film photo chemicals online to do species-identification tests of common lichen metabolites... this is the gateway ;)

Yep, I don't even know where to begin solving it. It's not a huge priority for donor or govt funds. All of the experiences that informed my above thoughts were from medium to very large groups. It's not just a problem for the little guys. Having a huge overall budget still doesn't = intern funding.

answer is clearly more funding and a robust system of paid internships, but I don't know how to make that happen & clearly lots of these places don't either. They're already doing so much on a shoestring budget.

...non-representative group of people who can get any training opportunities when it moves from "all people who can afford to work for free for a summer" to "these 10 people who have a relative working there who are willing to bend rules and let nepo kid 'shadow' them or 'just help out a bit.' The

Agreed. It's a trickier problem to solve than I initially thought, though. "They need to be paid" doesn't bring funding into being. So instead all internships are cut. Which is equalizing in its own way, until under-the-table unpaid internships start sneaking in. It becomes an even more selective...

"Before" of course being from herbarium specimens.

Thanks for your reply! Yes, seems the signal is certainly there, which is really cool! It would be interesting to look at the pop gen before & after common cultivation (and I'd guess this is likely a sp. that is mass seed sourced by gov't restoration projects too, so not just gardeners).

*sow dangit

seed but many will have sourced it from nurseries, leading to a nebulous genetic origin. Lots & lots of Prairie Moon seed both directly ordered and via resale. Prairie Moon (probably?) sourced it locally from the Upper Midwest. Or is this a small enough effect on the data that wild variation emerges

This is incredible work! Can't see beyond page 1 of the preprint, so forgive me if you address this in Methods! My question is how you've accounted for many of the observations being of garden plants. Users are meant to mark them "Captive" on iNat but they usually don't. Some gardeners sew local 1/2

Nice! Two birds, one stone.

This is so cool! Is it a field trip or do you take samples from the wild? Or is it from established tanks in your lab? Or a secret fourth option?

In fact, the traditional ones have an upscale bakery texture whereas the shortcut ones have a cheap grocery store/Hostess texture.

The crumb and mouth-melting qualities of the traditional leavening method (beating eggs for several minutes until ribbon stage is vastly superior). Would that the baking powder shortcut produced the same results, but the baking powder ones are aggressively springy and a bit strange.

The King Arthur Flour madeleine base recipes for vanilla and chocolate inexplicably use the two different leavening methods (vanilla = traditional, whipping air into eggs; chocolate = nontraditional, baking powder). I was curious to see what the result would be...

Yeah. Unfortunately the "so much plastic" never really goes away. I hope we can move to more sustainable workflows that still prevent contamination.

This is so real. A part of me wishes RNA were the incredibly stable molecule conspiracy theorists made it out to be during the height of COVID vaccine panic.

That said, I kind of like working with it? The challenge makes it satisfying.

Wow, this is really neat work! Surprisingly few Fₛₜ peaks.