Paul Manning

Fall on the farm - just two weeks until I go chase another summer

Two photographs of black wasps that look roughly the same except that top one has hairy antennae with large gaps in between the segments, while the bottom one has more beadlike antennae. The lower one also has an ovipositor. Their legs are partly orange and their head and thorax have pits and short white hairs.

Male and female chalcids that emerged from redbud seedpods. Both are in the genus Eurytoma and are possibly the same species but further identification is beyond my skill set. I can't find any mention of them being recorded as parasitoids of redbud bruchids. 🌿 #wasps #hymenoptera #insects #bruchidae

Ouuu! Thanks for sharing. This is a banger of a paper!

History-changing day for labour relations at @dalhousieu.bsky.social. Lockout of faculty could begin as early as Wed morning. Rest assured, DFA members are ready for what is about to happen. #keepdalstrong @cupe3912.bsky.social @nsgeu.bsky.social @ansut.bsky.social @caut.bsky.social

To whom it may concern, and it should concern the editor: I was quoted in your publication: https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans/can-we-engineer-our-way-out-of-ocean-acidification/ Still, others aren't convinced that good intentions are enough. Dr. David Ho, Professor of Oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa, a cofounder and the Chief Science Officer of |C|Worthy, a non-profit that works on verifying ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, believes carbon removal efforts like ocean alkalinity enhancement shouldn't be left solely in the hands of private companies. "They have no way to prove that what they're doing is effective - that's a big problem," Dr Ho said. The crux of the dilemma, he explains, is that we are fighting a planetary-scale problem, but are doing it with tools that are still being built and tested. Geoengineering is not inherently good or bad, but it is inherently powerful. And power, especially when exercised in ecosystems as complex and fragile as the ocean, must be handled with caution. However, I have never spoken to your reporter, nor would I have said those things. I would like you to remove my quote from your story, and issue a public correction and apology. Furthermore, you should look into whether the other parts of the article are also factually correct. Thanks. d.

WTF? I was quoted in this story but I have never spoken to the reporter nor would I have said those things. Is everything just generated by LLMs these days?

cosmosmagazine.com/earth/oceans...

Wrapped up another series of super-fun radio interviews about the cool critters you might find on our Atlantic Canadian shorelines! 🌊🐚🦪🪼🐙🦑🦀🦞🦐

Keep your ears tuned for "A Shore Thing" on CBC Radio this summer!

Today I learned there is a ChatGPT "spider ID assistant."

Please do not use ChatGPT or any other generative 'AI' to identify spiders (or anything else for that matter). A model trained on the current quagmire of misinformation and misidentified images online cannot be effective.

<3 Happy Anniversary Guys! Love the throwback photos!

This thing is so adorable!

Douglas Boyes Fund - Royal Entomological Society The Douglas Boyes Fund has been established in honour of Douglas Boyes (1996-2021), an esteemed entomologist specialising in Lepidoptera. The Fund aims to provide young people aged 14-18 with access…

Do you know a young person with an interest in insects? 🦋

The Douglas Boyes Fund aims to provide people aged 14-18 with access to entomology equipment, fostering their passion for insects and inspiring them to engage and share their interest with other young individuals 🔽

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

Friday Reading: www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-... Excellent food for thought while preparing course syllabi.

Trumpet Creeper Leafminer (Octotoma plicatula) Trumpet Creeper Leafminer from Balls Neck Rd, Heathsville, VA, US on June 17, 2025 at 10:17 AM by Anne Parker

One of the fanciest North American leaf mines made by a beetle.

A Son, a Scientist, and the Secret of Bioluminescence | The Walrus My father spent a career decoding how fireflies make light. Now, as dementia sets in, he is grappling with life’s final mystery

There's a chemical trick fireflies perform that allows them to flash without burning.
My dad studied that trick all his life.
Now he's 92, and darkness is closing in.
For Father's Day, I did my best to illuminate his work, his life, and the fleeting wonder of it all.
thewalrus.ca/a-son-a-scie...

if you're looking to provide feedback on the google-inaturalist partnership to integrate genAI within the app, @inaturalist.bsky.social has created a portal to submit your comments here. inaturalist.typeform.com/to/hCrKAbW0?...

A bit of advice for iNaturalist. They ought to gather data on user sentiment about generative AI, and especially about their expert user sentiment, before they make large moves to deploy technology that is...let's say, *spiritually* at odds with a significant part of their community.

In a comic strip panel, person in a red shirt walks through a sunlit forest. The text says "Sometimes I go looking for a tiny part of the universe." "This part only takes up as much space as: half an apple, a salt shaker, or 2 ping pong balls." Each of these items is shown. Galaxies and stars swirl as the text says "But somehow, in an unfathomably huge universe," and then there's a complex mess of forest leaves, with one tiny Wilson's warbler in one corner, and the text says "this one tiny part" There's a close up of the warbler, blazing yellow against a sparkly yellow background, and the text says "can fill up my whole heart."

Tiny part.

(1/3) This is shared directly in the thread, too: Hi everyone, please know we’re reading every comment and having a lot of discussions on our end. We're working on a response that should answer most of the major questions people have and provide more clarity. We'll share this as soon as possible.

Some larvae I observed in the garden. These are the larvae of Hymenoptera. The larvae usually live on plants and resemble butterfly caterpillars. There are about 800 species of sawflies in Central Europe. I think the larvae’s eyes, or rather their dark outlines, give them a rather cute face.

iNaturalist is the product of community labor.
If you lose our labor, you lose site functionality.

The community is telling you this is not what we want.

Please retract this. People are not waiting for your answer to delete their accounts.

This is a brilliant idea for a feature, but carried out in such a careless AI-integrated way that does not seem consistent w/ the values of iNaturalist (and definitely this user/monthly donor). Really disappointed by this update.

“I think people should know that research that they probably would support is being canceled,” said Eden Tanner, a chemist at the University of Mississippi... "“I would like to cure brain cancer,” Dr. Tanner said. “I think that's not particularly controversial.”

A strip-pieced quilt with random lengths in various shades of green melting into a scatter of half-square triangles against a dark blue background.

A closeup of the quilt, showing the wavy quilting, which makes it look a little like an underwater scene

I’ve been watching our kelp forests decline across my lifetime and it makes me very sad because kelp is cool as hell and supports a lot of marine life so I made a quilt about it.

Our institutions were never going to save us; they’ve just expanded the demographics of who they’re failing.

I’m seeing a lot of people radicalized for the first time as the scales fall from their eyes. The key is not to become cynical, but to use that energy to liberate one another.

Heterocypris is a tiny tan colored ostracod on my fingertip

anyway the important thing is that Romano, Rossetti and Stefanini showed in 2022 that Heterocypris ostracods are capable of associative learning when exposed to colored lights correlated with either food or stress. Heterocypris look like this

Dots: at it again

This colourful bee is Andrena erythrogaster, a rather common spring species in Canada. It is a common visitor of willows (Salix), but also uses pollen from cherry (Prunus), Saskatoons (Amelanchier), and hawthorn (Crataegus). #beesofcanada #bees #macrophotography

We are watching the NHL playoffs and on every commercial break, Canadian corporations have their own championship over whose ad can be the most embarrassingly jingoistic

A small, matte black beetle in my hand, side view. He's quite round overall, and his most distinguishing feature is a projection from his thorax that reaches forward above his head.

The same beetle from the top. From this angle, you can see his scarab-y antennae, and it's clear that the projection from his thorax above his head has two points.

Teeny little dung beetle! The species is Scooped Scarab, although Scooper Scarab may be more appropriate 🌿

They blame pollution but cut the EPA and clean air and water regulations. They blame poor nutrition but cut SNAP and programs to bring local produce to schools. They blame increased screen time while destroying public infrastructure that connects people. All while they take millions off healthcare.