"At some point an important moment in singing: the Turoń faints, and then everyone tries to resuscitate it by massage, lighting hay as a kind of an incense, blowing wind under its tail, pouring vodka into the muzzle of effigy and undoing hexes" wikipedia.org/wiki/Turoń, via minouette.bsky.social

"I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive." - Laurie Anderson explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick

"People always ask, 'Who’s your ideal reader?' Mine is somebody who reads a few pages and then falls asleep and has a fantastic dream." —Eliot Weinberger www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8...

Tag yourself. I'm ventral turtle

#thanksfortyping, 1500s style. I'm enjoying @minouette.bsky.social's #artAdventCalendar and learning a bunch of science history I had totally missed!

"I like the way people bewilder me and I like the way the natural world gives me opportunities to express that bewilderment more or less coherently." brevity.wordpress.com/2025/12/03/e...

"Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely homework." ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I’m FABULOUS, says this polychaete (bristle worm) larva! #marineplankton 🦑

A book from the 19th century that depicts the Rhine Valley by creating an impression of three-dimensionality and spatial distance. @MasayukiTsuda2 #globalmuseum #books #travel #19thcentury

The bobtail #squid is betting that survival rates when camouflaged as midmarket real estate will prove higher than when camouflaged as downwelling moonlight." Lovely, sly story by @leeconell.bsky.social in @ecotonemagazine.bsky.social. ecotonemagazine.org/fiction/non-...

Scotoplanes globosa. The #sea #pig. That is all. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2004126... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotopl...

“Zugunruhe: the term for the innate restlessness that birds feel which eventually spurs on migration” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugunruhe

Ernst Haeckel (left) and his assistant Miclucho-Maclay (right) in 1866.

Really pleased to be a collaborator/data portal/cheerleader on this @iapetusdtp.bsky.social #PhD project, wistful that I don't get to chuck the rest of my commitments and do this PhD myself!

Very cool paper for all the #diatom nerds and primary productivity folks out there!

Happy #SeaSlugDay! Here are some of the #origami #nudibranchs that I have on display at the #Glasgow Art Club through 22 Nov. On the wall is the unfolded crease pattern for one of the designs I make on repeat (foreground of the other image, copper and tan). Working on new designs for sacoglossans!

Great PhD linking kittiwake tracking, energetics and changing oceans. Based @ukceh.bsky.social @uofglasgow.bsky.social collaborating with oceanographers at @unistrathclyde.bsky.social 🌊 Includes fieldwork, stats training and some very cool open-ended research questions. iapetus.ac.uk/studentships...

The goat https://www.wikiart.org/en/mikalojus-ciurlionis/the-goat-1904

inspired (haunted?) by a recent post by anavaldi.bsky.social, here is the 📉 #UKRI award rate (%) by research council over the last decade. Data from www.ukri.org/publications... Unfortunately this dataset doesn't let you distinguish individual funding schemes from each other.

If you need some #origami #nudibranchs and tangled marine connectivities in your life, Waterways Collective and I have an exhibition at Glasgow Art Club through 22 Nov. It's an offshoot of a beautiful Wasps Studios group show--details at glasgowartclub.co.uk/.../23rd-oct...

Allan Grant, Fire Resistant House, 1949

Which whale species did I see? Leatherwood et al. (1982, p. 10) is hard to beat...

Don't we all initially mistake for potatoes the fine 12th Dynasty heads we dig up while, as part of the punishment exercise, digging up potatoes. One might say this mistaking _is_ the punishment exercise.

Tcikets. Tcikets for the Steam Fair.

"According to our expert assessment, none of these #geoengineering ideas pass scrutiny regarding their use in the coming decades. Instead, we find that the proposed concepts would be environmentally dangerous." www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

There is a broken metaphor here. Institutions are not multitasking individuals. When a university "does fewer things really well", this doesn't mean individual researchers find their focus and manage their commitments differently; it means layoffs and department closures. "Do" is a euphemism here.

this term in university teaching ive experimented with a return to engaging with groups only through figurative painting on the walls of underground caverns, the results have been ASTOUNDING. never going back to writing systems again

grant proposal submitted.

Look! A planet! It is hiding from us. A yak-like thing lives there and dreams of the horrors.

I used to live on a continent where "canal" meant "joined-up rivers and lakes" but now live in a place where they are built and operated by Wile E Coyote. See below. (It's the same feeling when you start out on a walk along a leafy if manicured river, and then the river goes over a bridge.)

These delicate models were created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Czech artists who specialised in glasswork and ran a business spanning 300 years and nine generations.

microthread: eels beyond the "fish event horizon", which TIL there was one of.

this is an amazing hybrid of #climate #impacts #mapping and #scifi narrative. I've never seen anything like it.

"…also the fault of the papers themselves. You can't read them at a steady pace, as if you were walking. I think it's because they're too busy filling up the tiniest holes in their argument… When actually it's best to leave some open spaces, to let some air in." Yoko Tawada, Suggested in the Stars

If you're on the Black Isle on Saturday the 28th, come join waterwayscollective.org for an afternoon of beach theatre, microscopes, zine-making, and meditations on smolting. We have a new #plankton net to try out + I made an #origami mayfly nymph, which was fiddly. #sciart #wildsalmon #marinebio

How misinformation brought down a National Park. APRS Director @kat-jones writes in The Herald about the vested interests that brought down the proposed Galloway National Park and why this is a sobering lesson for all environmental campaigners. www.heraldscotland.com/politics/hol...

"But then children have always fantasized that their dolls were alive and talking."

Meeresstrand im Nebel Caspar David Friedrich. ca.1807.

First: Tom Brown and his 1200+ varieties of heritage apples. Amazing, and I am hungry. Interview at www.kcrw.com/culture/show... Second: I am totally stealing the names for NPCs in my next #troika campaign. Johnny No Core! Sheepnose Delicious! #ttrpg

How do we prepare for the unexpected? Where do we look for surprises? New paper from Omi Johnson at @bigelowlab.bsky.social attempts to map emerging feeding areas for right whales (blue areas in attached maps). Highlighting places we haven't looked in the past. online.ucpress.edu/elementa/art...

I have discovered a planet. A deer-like creature lives there and dreams of the darkness. Occasionally, there's a a friendly cracking sound.

🏳️‍⚧️🚨🏳️‍⚧️Please share! Here is the guidance from @transactualuk.bsky.social @scottishtrans.bsky.social and #Mermaids on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. Overview: transactual.org.uk/equality-act... Guidance: transactual.org.uk/equality-act... **Please excuse temporary typos!** We're on it 😅

We've got a new website to collect the ventures of the Waterways Collective (waterwayscollective.org), a group of artists and scientists who came together in 2024 to see where we'd get following wild #salmon journeys up into the Scottish #landscape and out into the #Atlantic.

How did I not know the 9-volume treatise by Georg Sars on the #crustaceans of Norway, 1901? Two vols on the copepods alone, and he was good with a pencil. If you're new to #marinebiology, or to the #Atlantic, or just need a ritual reminder of how deep #biodiversity goes, they're all on archive.org

bio #scicomm friends: when Trumpistas cut funding for NPR + PBS a few weeks ago, fully *1/6* of their list of "outrageous" news stories consisted of #queer #animals. Out of everything they're outraged by! So keep talking about (e.g.) lesbian albatrosses. It's touching a nerve, which is fascinating.

Awful circumstances but an inspiring scene. Maybe we shouldn't wait for political disaster to strike before bringing the science we do out onto the sidewalk. I wonder what is the minimum amount of context you need to have a successful #scicomm event.