Not just in academia. This is true for corporate life. There are happy hours left and right which are as much networking as they are excuses to have someone else buy you drinks

Now you two just had the same interaction as in the post lmao

Cheers!

Here’s what they look like full-grown:

Its an adorable isopod

Rollison. And he is a rather pleasant dude.

I love when someone tells me something fucked up and then tells me not to think too hard about it.

Birds, mostly males, get all flashy and showy to attract a mate, and bees all answer to the matriarch of the family, so it’s just like life. Obviously.

Maybe the saying came from the mirror universe..

I'm trying to square my instinct that

1. snails aren't bugs (because they're squishy without the shell) with the feeling that
2. crabs are bugs (because they'd go tap-tap if you tapped on their exoskeleton with a finger) but
3. hermit crabs aren't bugs if they're in a shell but are bugs if they're naked

yeah, i would say "a bug is something that annoys you" so a virus could maybe be perceived as a bug as well, though i also would like to point out that "annoy" does not mean "i don't like it". it's like doing sports, it can be painful but also very fun

Fish could be defined as the most recent common ancestor of tuna and herring, and all of its descendants. That would exclude sharks and lungfish, but would include most other groups that we unambiguously recognise as fish, while excluding tetrapods.

Beavers are fish

Yeah that's because that sounds funny. You should change it to something like "look, a bug. And I say that as this is a member of the order 'hemiptera', also known as 'true bugs.'"

Or perhaps it's just your face? People listen to me quite easily.

American

Very ethnocentric of you. I first heard it from Stephen Fry, so no, not literally zero people.

Also, it's literally the first definition there. That's the definition of the species in hemiptera. Just because you don't know anyone who knows orders of animals in latin doesn't mean we don't exist.

I for one always enjoyed reading taxonomy, especially because sometimes translating a species can be quite weird if you don't know the translation and have to essentially hope that the yellow-breasted warbler is the thing they also described it as in the other language. Sometimes it's another feature.

But I'm sure you'd know roughly what I mean if I refer to the order of primates. Possibly the infraorder cetacean as well. Especially if you've watched Star Trek religiously.

Stephen Fry on Insects, and the beauty of nature and Evolution

That's the wrong clip but i can't be arsed to find it

Not exactly. Humans, birds, and reptiles are all within the phylum chordata, while arachnids and insects are both within the phylum arthropoda.

Fish, interestingly, aren't a real thing in terms of formal classification. The term is similar to bug in that we apply it to whichever creatures we feel fit the description.

as far apart as you are from a reptile

That would mean...not very. Reptiles are an extremely broad and diverse group, containing everything from penguins and crocodiles to tuataras and pythons. Mammals are the most closely-related extant clade that is generally not considered "reptile", to reptiles.

Arachnids, on the other hand, are more distantly related to insects. Crustaceans form their closest relatives, followed by myriapods (centipedes & millipedes). Only then do arachnids appear.

No, because spiders are super many, tiny, and scary, exactly like insects.

Lembot_0006 is orders of magnitudes larger than most reptiles, and is one of a kind.

I expect to lose this argument, but mom didn't raise no quitter.