Most Nighthawk Most Pauraque Most Seedsnipe Most Sandpiper Most Auklet Most Tern Most Grebe Most Storm-Petrel Most Bittern Most Pygmy-Owl Most Boobook Most Honeyguide Most Flycatcher

Snail + hat = cool snail #PaperCutArt #PaperArt

One of my main snail models and what looks like one of my main spider models? On the same 17th century painting? #InverteFest (Flowers in a Glass Bottle on a Marble Plinth, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, about 1670, National Gallery, London www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/ja...)

In addition, @youn-henry.drosophila.social.ap.brid.gy also happens to be a very talented illustrator and artist (more, including lots of stuff of interest to the #InverteFest crowd, at jesuisunstegosaure.artstation.com)

In continued #InverteFest published paper catchup: Sometimes I work on inverts that are not snails or spiders! Like here, where I used my Computer Swearer-At skills to help a friend analyse an experiment with aphids attacked by parasitoid wasps, to see when aphid symbionts help protect them vs not

horSeShoe crabS!! #art #invertefest

We present: The Art of #InverteFest - August 2025 Edition A digital art book showcasing the work of 100 artists from around the world, in celebration of overlooked invertebrate fauna. Thank you to the artists who contributed to our book! Download here drive.google.com/file/d/19wfG... #Art #SciArt

I was literally explaining this to a couple of friends a few days ago, so: these upper tentacles are what the larger group making up the overwhelming majority of land snails and slugs is named after: Stylommatophora, roughly "wearing eye on stalk" #InverteFest

A tiny part of this paper was motivated by me learning a few years ago that (i) snails can get sexually-transmitted worms and (ii) that the species infecting this snail was literally described at my alma mater a few years before I was born, but had barely been studied since. #InverteFest

It's #InverteFest, so it's time to correct my forgetting to post about my latest paper from a couple months ago. It has *double* the invertebrates: snails, and their parasites! doi.org/10.1093/cz/z...

Perfect timing for #InverteFest because my second thesis paper is out! TLDR; I counted two bajillion hydrozoans and about a dozen guys of every other species combined on four different types of substrate (rock, mesh, plastic, and wood) to see if larvae have preferences! peerj.com/articles/198...

Shy jumping spider for the first day of #InverteFest

reupping my sweet-faced snailcerers for #invertefest

Greetings, chordate comrades. #InverteFest is upon us. tl;dr: Over the last 7 days every April, August, and December, we invite you to show the internet your coolest bugs & slugs. Go find critters, post your art, write wikipedia pages, do whatever you like to celebrate invertebrates with us!

Thinking about the Worms trapped in Snail Shells again (writing an application where a small part is about them)

Thank u Vanessa for this excellent photo of my proposed classification scheme for Coleoptera

Very happy with this new lens I got myself a few weeks ago, both it and the local parks keep delivering

Back from a week of fieldwork on both Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of the south of France! Highlights included: - snails! - LOADS of shiny flower beetles - using the long train trips across France to finally catch up with @msemilyedwards.bsky.social's Viviana Valentine (...)

Slug CREATED.

Paracantha fruit fly, just cranking the style slider to 100 and seeing what happens. I love it, is what happens. 💛

my incredible Squirrel Excluder continues to deliver

Now that this #InverteFest is done, here's a tree of everyone's observations in the iNaturalist project (and the subset of my own observations). I have a few updates of this code on my to-do list, but didn't find time before this session, maybe next time?

It's both #InverteFest and the City Nature Challenge right now, so I went outside to see bugs and slugs (1/2)

On display at the @uclgrantmuseum.bsky.social are some Blaschka slugs - land and ‘sea slugs’. These models of slugs crafted by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father-son team of glass artists from the late 19th century ❤️ - read more about the amazing collection 👇 blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-...

We’ve looked at snails with one shell and slugs with no shells. Now let’s have a look at a snail with two shells, because Nature laughs at our puny attempts to pigeonhole. In today’s #AtoZ – J is for Julia (Juliidae) (1/9) Pic: © uwkwaj CC BY-NC

I think I'm going to be thinking about this one at random intervals for a long long while, this is bonkers

Since I've just reached that population in my pictures:

That Cornu shell 😍! Random fact: the current name of that genus is from a description of one of these unusual "stretched out" shells, instead of one of the typical globose ones, & there was Debate about whether that's appropriate re: taxonomic rules (there had to be an official ruling in favor)

Continuing my quest to mention the Worms trapped in Snail Shells every opportunity I get

New preprint! This one took so long to get out for various Reasons I'm sure even the snails were mocking me for being slow at the end

Was hoping there was still some snow remaining in the forest from this week's snowfall, was not disappointed

Not my first bird of the year, but one of the best pictures of the first bird walk of the year (also I love goldfinches)

Now that this #InverteFest is done, here's the usual tree of the iNaturalist observations! And also the tree of just my own observations, since I can do that now (you can really see the difference in structure vs the global tree, because it's winter here and my finds were mostly what was under logs)

I'm watching a nature documentary with my aunts this morning and I'm screaming crying throwing up etc over this SNAIL-SIZED CAT

Some of the bugs and slugs seen in my #InverteFest forest walk yesterday, aka about 25% of the tree in the quoted post

With #InverteFest going on, I'm finally cleaning up the code I use to make phylogenetic trees from iNat each session. Still WIP, but now I can make trees not just from a project as before, but also from the obs by a specific user, or both at the same time (image: my own obs so far in this session)

Charge your camera, clear your memory card, we're going bugspotting SOON.

Am I specifically looking for the biology Little Guys I can find whenever I'm in a non-biology museum? You have no way to prove it unless you got into my images folders

Might interest people currently at #BES2024 (link to the iNaturalist project down Franz's thread)

Take an urban ecologist to an ecology conference, and of course they'll use a break to look for a bit of urban biodiversity right outside the venue #BES2024

I don't have the space to hoard cool critters or trinkets irl, so I spent the last 52 weeks drawing 52+ animals in 13 different styles just to have a digital cabinet of curiosities on my website. #Art #SciArt (this page is obnoxiously long and very visual, I'm sorry) franzanth.com/article/inve...

Starting InverteFest a bit early this year at #BES2024

At #BES2024 this week! If you wanna hear/read about not snails (for once*) but dune plants, coastal protection, urban ecology, and occupancy models applied to iNat data, come by my poster on Thursday *I might still talk about snails at some point, prompted or not

made me think of @gretchenmcc.bsky.social 's aphorism "linguists are not kidding when we say that your language ability enables you to understand sentences that have never before been uttered" and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible

I went long on the sack creature without an anus whose visage has haunted me since Aug. 2022

Seeing everyone posting #crustmas pictures so I went through my crustacean photos from this year, and this one I already posted is clearly my favourite, and not just because a mollusc is taking most of the space

A lot of people have had turkeys in the oven lately. My oven has been full of giant snails.

Having Snail Brain means that the first thought I thought seeing this was literally "Shell's not in the right direction*", it's a curse (* unless it's one of the species where snails coil mostly left, or one of the even rarer lefty snails in right-coiling species: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_... )

I clicked on Add To Cart so fast when this tiny cat dropped in @kness.bsky.social 's shop, and now it's here tysm I love it!!

Got a new zoom lens this week the day before a planned trip to London so went to Richmond Park to see the red deer, these famously majestic creat...