I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

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Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Thanks for posting this discussion, I agree with the general consensus from the edit.

    Thumbnails are annoying to deal with, and I had trouble the few times when I tried to address it in my own posts. It’s a lot more work to pull a different thumbnail and replace the autogenerated one, especially if you’re on mobile and just want to share something quickly. Still, if someone is posting low effort spam/clickbait often, I’d agree with a mod telling them to knock it off




















  • Neat!

    The workers in Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) colonies are all hybrids, with queens needing to mate with males from a distantly related species, Messor structor, to keep the colony functioning. But researchers found that some Iberian harvester ant populations have no M. structor colonies nearby.

    “That was very, very abnormal. I mean, it was kind of a paradox,” study co-author Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montpellier, told Live Science. The team initially believed there was a sampling issue, but they went on to find 69 regions where this was the case.

    In setting out to resolve this paradox, Romiguier and his team found that queen Iberian harvester ants also lay eggs containing male M. structor ants, with these males ultimately fathering the workers. This discovery, published Sept. 3 in the journal Nature, is the first time any animal has been recorded producing offspring from another species as part of their normal life cycle.

    “In the early stages, it was kind of a joke in the team,” Romiguier said. “But the more we got results, the more it became a hypothesis and not a joke anymore.”

    […]

    The team then separated 16 queens from laboratory colonies and looked at the genetic sequences of their freshly laid eggs. They found that 9% of their eggs contained M. structor ants. They then directly observed a single queen producing males of both species by monitoring its broods weekly over an 18-month period.

    Together, all these findings show that Iberian harvester ant queens are cloning M. structor males and not passing on any of their own nuclear DNA. Researchers now need to pinpoint the exact mechanism underlying this cloning, Romiguier said, and find out at what point the maternal DNA is removed.



  • Some excerpts:

    Leonard Phiri from Zambia and Jasten Mabulesse Candunde, a citizen of Mozambique, were arrested last December after a cleaner reported hearing strange noises in a room.
    
    The two men were found in possession of a live chameleon, an unidentified white powder, a red cloth and an animal's tail, all of which they reportedly planned on using in a ritual that would cause death "within five days" as explained by Phiri, according to a magistrate.
    
    The court convicted both men under the Witchcraft Act, a law criminalising witchcraft, dating back to the colonial era under British rule.
    
    President Hichilema has increasingly been accused of using the courts to silence his opponents and more generally crack down on free speech in Zambia.
    
    Witchcraft has also played a major role in the ongoing dispute concerning the body of late president Edgar Lungu, who is currently awaiting his funeral in a morgue in South Africa as the Zambian government insists that he should be buried in Zambia despite this going against his family's wishes.
    
    Hichilema's insistence on Lungu's burial in Zambia has fuelled rumours that the president would want to use his former rival's body for "occult purposes", an accusation denied by the government.