imagine sailor moon but as a cannibalistic tadpole
It’s not all new species in my head this week, though. I also learned about couch’s spadefoot, whose tadpole exhibits a form of phenotypic plasticity1 - they’re usually omnivorous, but under certain environmental conditions some of them will develop as a carnivorous morph instead.
(phenotypic plasticity: it’s not all fun, games, and Jurassic Park!)
If the default omnivore morph eats other tadpoles (or even just shrimp, with lower probability), that’s what tends to trigger it transforming into the carnivore morph instead - it grows bigger and stronger so it can more easily devour its siblings! (I keep imagining this as some sort of magical girl transformation sequence - y’know, featuring something like this Sailor Frog)
They’re less likely to eat their literal siblings, fwiw (though if they get hungry enough, all bets are off).
Tiger salamanders do the same thing. And for pretty much the same reason - “they have to complete their development before the pond dries. One way to accelerate development is to feed on a prey item that is high in protein and is sitting there right next to you in the pond.”
Here’s another fun one! There’s a multi-predator situation with dragonflies larvae as the top predator, salamander larvae as an intermediate predator (but still prey to the dragonflies), and frog tadpoles as prey to both. When the dragonflies aren’t around, both the salamanders and the tadpoles change shape.
“In the absence of dragonflies, tadpoles… produce bulgy bodies in response to the larval salamander, which is a gape-limited predator that swallows its prey. Similarly, high local tadpole density induces salamander larvae to produce a ‘predaceous phenotype’ that is characterized by a large mouth that allows the swallowing of large prey”
I highly recommend the extremely relevant Species Imperative books by Julie E. Czerneda - it’s a scifi trilogy about a biologist who studies salmon and then has to figure out aliens instead, written by an actual biologist. Fantastic writing, plus so satisfyingly reasonable - gotta love great scifi written by actual scientists.
Addenda to previous posts
apropos of nothing, “analysis of Gauguin’s teeth shows that he did not bring syphilis to Tahiti” - Sophie Roell, Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024
Also first officially noted in 2024, a spider with the scientific name Hotwheels sisyphus. Yes, really:
“The generic name refers to Hot Wheels, a collectible die-cast toy car made by Mattel, as the long, coiled embolus of this new genus resembles a Hot Wheels track…
The specific name is derived from Sisyphus, a king in Greek mythology who offended Zeus and whose punishment was to repeatedly roll a huge stone up a hill only to have it roll back down, because the circular copulatory ducts are like Sisyphus’s cyclic mission; noun in apposition.”
- Hotwheels gen. nov., a new ground spider genus (Araneae, Gnaphosidae) from southwest China
“the ability of a single genotype to produce multiple phenotypes in response to variation in the environment” (depending on how you squint this is of course boringly universal, but I really just kinda enjoy the term anyway)