Jan Leitinger
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janleitinger.bsky.social
Jan Leitinger
@janleitinger.bsky.social
360 followers 790 following 2 posts
Birds, Bugs & Benthos 🐤🐞🐚▪️Zoologist into Invertebrates, Taxonomy, Marine Ecology ... Science in general 👨‍🔬🔬🖖🧩▪️Dadof2▪️He/Him 📍Rostock, Germany

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jan_Leitinger
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Reposted by Jan Leitinger
fernway.bsky.social
sad news - Duke University decided to dump their herbarium, which has over 800,000 plant specimens, one of the largest among in America, and includes many type specimens of Lady Gaga ferns. What a shame. Please stop Duke admins for making this horrible mistake!!
February 14, 2024 at 4:40 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
iandmedeiros.bsky.social
The university is taking advantage of pending renovations to the biological sciences building and the impending retirements of several faculty to eliminate the herbarium. Curators have been given "2-3 years" to find new homes for the collections.
February 14, 2024 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
jopabinia.bsky.social
The closest known relative of insects is WEIRD! Remipedes live in marine caves (you have to cave dive) and are venomous. Their names are fun: Godzillius & Morlockia.

How did insects go from a common ancestor with these guys onto land? Here's one idea (but no fossils so we don't know)!

#Crustmas 🧪🦑
Remipedes of the Turks and Caicos Islands. They are all slender, eyeless crustaceans with about 20-40 pairs of trunk limbs. A) Godzillius robustus; B) Kaloketos pilosus; C) Lasionectes entrichoma; D) Micropacter yagerae; E) Morlockia sp. nov. All photos by Jørgen Olesen. Images not to scale. Gonzalez et al 2020 https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/ijs/vol49/iss2/1/ Diagram showing the phylogeny of pancrustaceans in the ocean, leading to Cephalocarida in benthic marine habitats, Branchiopoda in ephemeral freshwater habitats, and then branching separately to Remipedia in anchialine caves and the hexapod groups steadily going onto land. von Reumont B, Edgecombe GD. 2020. Crustaceans and insect origins. In: Poore GCB, Thiel M, editors. Evolution and biogeog­raphy. Vol. 8. Nat hist Crustacea. Oxford: Oxford Univ Press.
December 24, 2023 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
jopabinia.bsky.social
The sister group of all amphipods is the recently established order Ingolfiellida. Unlike amphipods, they lack epimera (side flappys along the body), and their pleopods/uropods (posterior swimming limbs) are fairly reduced. Weirdos #Crustmas 🧪🦑
An elongate peracarid crustacean, Ingolfiella britannica. It has robust antennae and 2 pairs of maxillipeds (in the form of gnathopods, like those of amphipods). The website this image is from is cool: https://www.aphotomarine.com/ingolfiellida_ingolfiella_britannica.html
December 10, 2023 at 4:01 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
gregpriest.bsky.social
I honestly can’t believe that we’ve all missed the obvious name for the current geological epoch: the AssHolocene.

#philsci #histsci ⚒️ 🌎 🧪
The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era
There is something paradoxical about pinning a name on an age characterized by extreme uncertainty. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
www.newyorker.com
December 7, 2023 at 5:25 PM
janleitinger.bsky.social
Awesome idea!
birdhistory.bsky.social Robert Francis @birdhistory.bsky.social · Dec 10
I'd never thought of using Google Ngram as a tool to track changes in bird names over time - it's amazing to see once-common names replaced by "official" bird names, including some recent changes I wasn't aware of (Marsh Hawk ➡️ Northern Harrier; Louisiana Heron ➡️ Tricolored Heron) 🗃️🪶
December 10, 2023 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
jopabinia.bsky.social
An (ecto)parasitic #Crustmas. This is Dolops (above), which swims around and attaches to fishes (below), but unlike its relative Argulus, which has suckers, it has hooks to hold on. Also, is bizarrely cute!
🧪🦑
Top: Dolops striata (Bouvier, 1899), preserved young (INPA 2277) removed from freshwater stingray Potamotrygon leopoldi (ANSP 197001, 440 mm maximum disk width) collected in rio Xingu ca. 54 km southeast of Altamira, 3°33'10.7"S, 51°51'22.2"W, 10 Mar 2014. Bottom: Dolops discoidalis (Bouvier, 1899), live specimens (INPA 2274) attached to large redtail catfish, Phractocephalus hemiliopterus (ANSP 198243) collected in rio Xingu channel, 3°24'54.3"S, 51°42'42.1"W, 8 Nov 2014. Photos by M. Sabaj. https://bioone.org/journals/proceedings-of-the-academy-of-natural-sciences-of-philadelphia/volume-166/issue-1/053.166.0105/Annotated-checklist-of-parasitic-and-decapod-crustaceans-from-the-middle/10.1635/053.166.0105.short
December 8, 2023 at 3:42 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
danielmmoore.bsky.social
We've been working hard on the logistics for our Ocean Census mobile laboratories - they should be arriving in the next 24 hours and we are so excited!
www.ecomagazine.com/news/researc...
Mobile Laboratories Set to Revolutionize Ocean Species Discovery | Research | News
Tenerife's Radazul Port welcomed two state-of-the-art mobile shipping container laboratories, a pivotal component of an innovative toolkit being developed by Ocean Census and OpenCell.
www.ecomagazine.com
December 1, 2023 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
jeffday.bsky.social
y’all - think a lot of us watching got to cross an item off the bucket list today. schmidt ocean came across a stygiomedusa (giant phantom jelly) on the way up today. i am so goddamn stoked. 🦑🧪

www.youtube.com/live/DlgTKD8...
a large, dark red jellyfish with four curtain-like oral arms trailing the bell, which is facing downward dark red jellyfish, bell facing left of frame, with oral arms billowing above it, like translucent dark red fabric in a breeze shot of only the oral arms trailing above the jellyfish. they are flattened out relative to our angle and look like sheer dark red fabric, hanging loosely from an object we can’t see
December 6, 2023 at 5:47 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
sarahmackattack.bsky.social
Scientists 🧪 were like "Hey, you know how we can get DNA into our experimental organisms using electricity? You think...we could use electric eels for that?". h

They did the experiment, and the answer was hell yeah we can.

WILD new paper from Shintaro Sakaki et al
peerj.com/articles/165...
A Figure 1: EOD exposure from electric eel to zebrafish larvae. (A) This illustration depicts the experimental tank used to expose the recipient organism to the electric eel’s electric organ discharge (EOD). Within the tank, three carbon rod electrodes are placed: two inputs (colored black and red) and a ground electrode (colored green). (B) An EOD is induced by the electric eel during its predatory behavior when it feeds on a goldfish. The cuvette containing zebrafish larvae and a DNA solution is positioned in close proximity to the high-voltage pulses generated by the electric eel. The magenta curve illustrates the electric field produced by the electric eel. (C) This illustration indicates the construction of the GFP expression plasmid driven by the Oryzias latipes actb promoter. (D) The photograph displays 7-day post-fertilization (dpf) Danio rerio (zebrafish) larvae that were subjected to microinjection with the indicator plasmid at the one-to-eight cell stages. The plasmid has re
December 8, 2023 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by Jan Leitinger
biologizing.bsky.social
I couldn't figure out what to post about for World Ocean Day so this is just going to be a bryozoan appreciation post and you should definitely go look for some the next time you visit the ocean 🧪
A brown rock with an encrusting creature growing on it in repeating white shell-like pouches, each of which is protected by large spines coming out over the opening. A pale orange and white tower-like organism made up of repeating tubes that coil up to form the tower, opening out the sides. A white organism that looks skeleton-like and tree-like, which each section of branch-like tubes connecting to the next with something that looks like a joint. A papery white rim rising up around a dome-shaped organism that is filled with holes, attached firmly to a dark rock.
June 8, 2023 at 10:41 PM