Bhawani Das Study of a Fish Impey Album Company School, Calcutta 1783

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"The world is stranger than we can imagine and surprises are inevitable in science. Thus we found, for example, that pesticides increase pests, antibiotics can create pathogens, agricultural development creates hunger, and flood control leads to flooding. But some of these surprises could have been avoided if the problems had been posed big enough to accommodate solutions in the context of the whole." 

Richard Levins

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Parasitic wasps contained within fossilized fly pupae

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Using an X-ray machine powered by a particle accelerator, researchers find ancient parasitic wasps contained within fossilized fly pupae, dating back to between 66 million and 23 million years ago— the first definitive proof of endoparasitism among wasps.

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https://gizmodo.com/stunning-fossils-show-ancient-parasitic-wasps-still-ins-1828650967/amp?__twitter_impression=true
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You are what you eat: A social media study of food identity 
Kazutoshi Sasahara

Food preferences not only originate from a person's dietary habits, but also reflect personal values and consumer awareness. This study addresses "food identity" or the relationship between food preferences and personal attributes based on the concept of "food left-wing" (e.g., vegetarians) and food "right-wing" (e.g., fast-food lovers) by analyzing social data using information entropy and word embedding methods. Results show that food identity extends beyond the domain of food: the food left-wing has a strong interest in environmental issues, while the food right- wing has a higher interest in large-scale shopping malls and politically conservative issues. Furthermore, the social networks of food left-wing and right-wing factions show segregated structures, indicating different information consumption patterns. These findings suggest that food identity may be applicable as a proxy for personal attributes and offer insights into potential buying patterns. 

 

Social networks of food left-wing and right-wing u sers. Nodes denote users with blue corresponding to the food left-wing, red correspo ndingto the food right-wing, and yellow corresponding to unknown; node size is proportio nal to the degree. Links denote retweet transmissions. 

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.08428.pdf

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Francis Day. The Fishes of India (1875-78).
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/62705?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social%20media&utm_campaign=Fishy%20Friday&utm_content=Smithsonian%20Libraries#/summary
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Chuang Tzu soñó que era una mariposa. Al despertar ignoraba si era Tzu  que había soñado que era una mariposa o si era una mariposa y estaba  soñando que era Tzu.

Antología de la Literatura Fantástica. 1965. Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo y Adolfo Bioy Casares.
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Evolution, Plant Breeding and Biodiversity by Gabriela Rodríguez on Scribd

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Photos: Peter James ‏
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https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/123969?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social%20media&utm_campaign=Botanic%20Monday&utm_content=Chicago%20Botanic#/summary
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Swirling green phytoplankton bloom in the Baltic Sea
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Cicada（Hyalessa maculaticollis）under UV light

Jupiter from the bottom

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William Sharp for John Fisk Allen, Victoria regia (1854)

Amazon Water Lilies (Victoria amazonica) are white the first night that they open, and on the second night, they turn pink

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Mathématiques / Esthétiques / Arts : Alain Badiou

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La belleza es el objetivo principal de una demostración matemática   

Aristóteles
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Nitrogen fixation in a landrace of maize is supported by a mucilage-associated diazotrophic microbiota      

Allen Van Deynze, Pablo Zamora, Pierre-Marc Delaux, Cristobal Heitmann, Dhileepkumar Jayaraman, Shanmugam Rajasekar, Danielle Graham, Junko Maeda, Donald Gibson, Kevin D. Schwartz, Alison M. Berry, Srijak Bhatnagar, Guillaume Jospin, Aaron Darling, Richard Jeannotte,     Javier Lopez, Bart C. Weimer, Jonathan A. Eisen, Howard-Yana Shapiro, Jean-Michel Ané, Alan B. Bennett

Plants are associated with a complex microbiota that contributes to nutrient acquisition, plant growth, and plant defense. Nitrogen-fixing microbial associations are efficient and well characterized in legumes but are limited in cereals, including maize. We studied an indigenous landrace of maize grown in nitrogen-depleted soils in the Sierra Mixe region of Oaxaca, Mexico. This landrace is characterized by the extensive development of aerial roots that secrete a carbohydrate-rich mucilage. Analysis of the mucilage microbiota indicated that it was enriched in taxa for which many known species are diazotrophic, was enriched for homologs of genes encoding nitrogenase subunits, and harbored active nitrogenase activity as assessed by acetylene reduction and ¹⁵N₂ incorporation assays. Field experiments in Sierra Mixe using ¹⁵N natural abundance or ¹⁵N-enrichment assessments over 5 years indicated that atmospheric nitrogen fixation contributed 29%–82% of the nitrogen nutrition of Sierra Mixe maize.

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The aerial roots of Sierra Mixe maize secrete large quantities of mucilage between 3 and 6 months after planting. The mucilage is carbohydrate rich, with the composition dominated by arabinose, fucose, and galactose.

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http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006352.

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Landscape composition, configuration, and trophic interactions shape arthropod communities in rice agroecosystems 
Christophe Dominik, Ralf Seppelt, Finbarr G. Horgan, Josef Settele, Tomáš Václavík

1. Increasing landscape heterogeneity of agroecosystems can enhance natural enemy populations and promote biological control. However, little is known about the multiscale effects of landscape heterogeneity on arthropod communities in rice agroecosystems, especially in combination with trophic interactions.
   
2. We examined for the first time how landscape heterogeneity, measured by four independent metrics of landscape composition and configuration at three spatial scales, affected species abundance and species richness of rice arthropods within four functional groups and the abundance of the most common species at 28 sites in the Philippines. We additionally examined the influence of trophic interactions among these functional groups.
   
3. We found that both the compositional and configurational landscape heterogeneity in combination with trophic interactions determined the structure of rice‐arthropod communities. Herbivore abundance decreased with increasing landscape diversity. The abundance of parasitoids and species richness of both parasitoids and predators increased with the structural connectivity of rice bunds. Fragmentation of the rice landscape had a clear negative effect on most arthropod groups, except for highly mobile predatory arthropods. Abundance of common predators and detritivore species decreased with increasing complexity in the shape of rice patches.
   
4. Trophic interactions, measured as the abundance of prey, outweighed the importance of landscape heterogeneity for predators. In contrast, parasitoids responded positively to configurational landscape heterogeneity but were unaffected by prey abundance.
   
5. Synthesis and applications. Our research shows how landscape heterogeneity and trophic interactions have different effects on different functional groups. While predator abundance was solely driven by the availability of prey, all other functional groups in the rice‐arthropod community were significantly affected by the composition and configuration of surrounding landscape features. Landscape management aiming to improve biodiversity and biological control in rice agroecosystems should promote a diversity of land uses and habitat types within 100–300 m radii to reduce the presence of pests. Management practices should also focus on maintaining smaller rice patches and the structural connectivity of rice bunds to enhance populations of the natural enemies of rice pests. Future research should focus on the temporal and spatial manipulation of rice fields to maximize the effects of biological control. 
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   https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.13226
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Past and potential future effects of habitat  fragmentation on structure and stability of   plant–pollinator and host–parasitoid networks 
Ingo Grass, Birgit Jauker, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Teja Tscharntke and Frank Jauker 

Habitat fragmentation is a primary threat to biodiversity, but how it affects the structure and stability of ecological networks  is poorly understood. Here, we studied plant–pollinator and host–parasitoid networks on 32 calcareous grassland fragments  covering a size gradient of several orders of magnitude and with amounts of additional habitat availability in the surrounding  landscape that varied independent of fragment size. We find that additive and interactive effects of habitat fragmentation  at local (fragment size) and landscape scales (1,750 m radius) directly shape species communities by altering the number of  interacting species and, indirectly, their body size composition. These, in turn, affect plant–pollinator, but not host–parasitoid,  network structure: the nestedness and modularity of plant–pollinator networks increase with pollinator body size. Moreover,  pollinator richness increases modularity. In contrast, the modularity of host–parasitoid networks decreases with host richness,  whereas neither parasitoid richness nor body size affects network structure. Simulating species coextinctions also reveals that  the structure–stability relationship depends on species’ sensitivity to coextinctions and their capacity for adaptive partner  switches, which differ between mutualistic and antagonistic interaction partners. While plant–pollinator communities may  cope with future habitat fragmentation by responding to species loss with opportunistic partner switches, past effects of frag- mentation on the current structure of host–parasitoid networks may strongly affect their robustness to coextinctions under  future habitat fragmentation.

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Map of the study area, and examples of study landscapes and associated plant–pollinator and host–parasitoid interaction networks. Interaction networks were studied on 32 calcareous grassland fragments (fragment size: 314–51,395 m2). Fragments were selected so that the amount of additional habitat in the surrounding landscape varied independent of fragment size, ranging from complex landscapes with a high proportion of semi-natural habitats to simple landscapes dominated by arable fields and forest. The example landscapes shown (calcareous grasslands in white, with a landscape buffer of 500 m radius) include: a large fragment in a complex landscape (site 2), a large fragment in a simple landscape (site 6), a small fragment in a complex landscape (site 23) and a small fragment in a simple landscape (site 28). Interaction networks are shown with plants and hosts scaled in proportion to their interactions with pollinators and parasitoids. Lines connecting trophic levels indicate pairwise interactions, with the line width proportional to the interaction frequency. Green, plants; blue, pollinators and hosts; red, parasitoids.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0631-2.epdf?shared_access_token=xr32XDnTbph79QeW5N4kudRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MRwkWDCuPA3BtIbdizpKWxiB54VWcsaBqu9xtOXw51zehvLPTrGNuwdddGpz76W4cZeUedXZ_kzIwGTWChd5iM-LTjGsnJ9raGc5QEKGOZ110IH6Ls3eHBEL1zOyYNvgw%3D

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Composite Elephant - Dawlat Khan, Agra 1600. 

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Lucille Clerc

 

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https://www.lucilleclerc.com/

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Charity Gingerich (Hopper Poetry Prize winner)

The Afterlife of Lepidoptera

The heart by definition is an agrarian tapestry
with an up-welling brook at its center,
hedges of forsythia, chickens, room for violets.
To believe otherwise is to bolt the fence
in the pasture behind you where the moonlight ends
and the farmer’s prize bull begins;
the heart dies a little every day for lack of tending.

Let’s get back to the business
of milkweed and thistle, joe-pye weed and clover;
when have you last caught a Diana fritillary,
Beloria bellona, black swallowtail or painted lady
for the sheer joy of its wings,
for the experience of learning how they work,
the webs and scales of their flying jewel bodies
in the meadows between two farms—when have you last
stood in such a place, stood still, and not
merely thought of standing there, paper doll
with her paper moon on a backdrop of imaginary
happiness.

Listen, the snow is falling. White roses
filling the air. I believe this is a reminder—
that when death comes it will be our longest moment
of suspension. The air we swim through
thick with the pieces-of-us, not as brokenness
but as an invitation to finally stop;    we’ll build a butterfly,
as if it were a house we could finally live in.

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http://www.hoppermag.org/after-june
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The herds of Europe
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http://www.maartenlambrechts.com/2018/07/31/beasts-of-europe.html.

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“A tree seen against other trees is a mere dark mass, but against the sky it has parts, has symmetry and expression.”
 

Henry David Thoreau
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Photo: Ansel Adams
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