Thinking about the early arthropods in the Cambrian seas.
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We need to bring them all back and find out.
@futurebird this seems like a bad idea. Those things were scary looking
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I am horrified at the suggestion.
But you can be the food tester.
some were probably poisonous.
@futurebird But similar to your question about their brains, would their poisons be simple and in lower doses than modern animal poisons?
Might they just be spicy instead of giving you a terrible stomach ache?
Also most Cambrian fauna was bite sized, so I doubt the dosage of poison is large enough to harm a large animal like a human.
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Consider the qualitative difference between watching a rotifer and watching an insect.
The rotifer is alive, it reacts. But it's like a little machine in the way that people THINK insects are like machines.
@futurebird I have no idea what a rotifer is, and upon looking at a diagram, I have even less of an idea what one is. Did an AI make up a bunch of random names for things?
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@futurebird I have no idea what a rotifer is, and upon looking at a diagram, I have even less of an idea what one is. Did an AI make up a bunch of random names for things?
@mikemccaffrey @futurebird Here's a good introduction from Journey to the Microcosmos (channel now defunct):
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@futurebird I have no idea what a rotifer is, and upon looking at a diagram, I have even less of an idea what one is. Did an AI make up a bunch of random names for things?
You ever put some pond or puddle or moss water under a microscope just to check out what they are doing in there?
Well this is where you will see a rotifer. That's a good diagram. They are a bit like tiny water filters. They cycle water through their mouth and eat little bits and whatnots in the pond water.
Just part of the explosion of microscopic life.
Here is a lovely video about them:
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@futurebird I have no idea what a rotifer is, and upon looking at a diagram, I have even less of an idea what one is. Did an AI make up a bunch of random names for things?
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@mikemccaffrey @futurebird Here's a good introduction from Journey to the Microcosmos (channel now defunct):
@heptapodEnthusiast @mikemccaffrey
"channel now defunct"
I'm kind of sad about that. I was a supporter for years.
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@heptapodEnthusiast @mikemccaffrey
"channel now defunct"
I'm kind of sad about that. I was a supporter for years.
@futurebird @heptapodEnthusiast I guess they finally arrived at the microcosmos.
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Thinking about the early arthropods in the Cambrian seas. We know that they had a nervous system and brains from fossil evidence.
Many modern arthropods have more complex brains, and there isn't anything exactly like these early simple brains.
So, I wonder if you were to watch these creatures feeding and hunting would it be different from watching modern arthropods?
I think it might.
Could they hide? Did they get frustrated?
@futurebird Fascinating. It seems that hunger and frustration could almost be each defined in terms of the other. There were ambush predators, right? They'd either hide or camouflage, I suppose. But the world then may have been so primitive, instincts still so simply programmed or developed, that hiding/camouflage needed be no more complicated than stasis--just not moving.
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@futurebird @mikemccaffrey This specific comment came across my feed with no context, and because I know something about your posts I felt I needed to investigate, not just ignore another foot-fetish post.
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@futurebird @mikemccaffrey This specific comment came across my feed with no context, and because I know something about your posts I felt I needed to investigate, not just ignore another foot-fetish post.
I'm going to use "rotifer toes" like other people use "twinkle toes"
As in "Listen, rotifer toes, this song and dance may fly up in Albany but we don't do that around here."
