Hm, in small animals my previous point of a 2D vs 3D space is also valid. Large land prey animals “only” have to look from side to side to spot predators. Small animals have to look in all 3 dimensions, like sharks

Haha, I’m not a bird person and didn’t bother to look it up. Thanks for the correction!

Although they still don’t look fully front-facing like e.g. in cats, right?

Cuuuute!!!

That’s basically correct, yes! The baby parts are the gametophytes and they then use their male and female parts to produce a new zygote, which will grow into a sporophyte. This sporophyte is what we know as a fern. It will produce and finally release many many spores, which are the “airdrop baby parts”.

They also have to orient themselves in a truely 3D landscape, unlike terrestrial predators who hunt on basically a 2D plane. Birds of prey (with the exception of owls) also don’t have front-facing eyes, probably for similar reasons* (and they’re stereoscopic vision also works a bit different I think with very different points of focus).

*see comments below

Wow! What is the lower plant? Are the upper two a lycopod and Selaginella?

Edit: oh, it’s Isoetes, isnt it? So all three lineages (Lycopodiales, Selaginellales and Isoetales) are present here, got it.

If anyone else wonders:

• Talpa is an actual genus of moles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpa_(mammal)
• defossus is latin and according to Wiktionary it means “excavated, planted or hidden”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/defossus (fossus coming from Latin fodiō meaning “to dig; to pierce; to goad”, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fossus)

There are a lot of fossilized records. You can see various examples of whole trunks or roots here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigillaria?wprov=sfla1

Alliaria petiolata is a pretty common herb in Europe (at least here in Germany) and it is related to mustard, cabbage plants and rapeseed. It does have a garlicky smell, but I wouldn’t really use it as an replacement to real garlic. Garlic plants are not related to it at all and are very different. Allium ursinum (wild garlic) on the other hand is also pretty common here and actually tastes like garlic.

To me the coolest ones are certainly any prehistoric Lycopodiopsida, like the Sigillaria shown here!

I’m not related with it, they only have a staff of about 20 people. But it is a citizen science project, so in a way everyone actively using the site is related to it.

No, I don’t know a lot about local Indian politics. But I know from other countries about how export of living organisms is often a contested subject.

Fair enough, there are a lot of things I also don’t feel as intensely about as other people :)

How is iNaturalist not open source? They’ve got their code openly published and everyone is welcome to use their dataset. You can write some code and use their API, it’s pretty easy to get started.

https://github.com/inaturalist

I don’t get what your link has got to do with an online platform like iNaturalist. Biopiracy definitely is an important issue in general, but what is the point you’re trying to make here? If you don’t want to use iNaturalist, fine. But you don’t need to come up with nonsensical excuses…

Good point that there is a distinction between the quantity of cuteness (finding most of a population cute vs only a few individuals). Although part of it might be a cultural bias because cute dogs and hot people are given much more presentation in our society. Like watching a movie and nearly everyone is conventionally attractive. There are many dogs out there that aren’t cute at all, but they aren’t usually shown in posts/videos about cute dogs.

Regarding the evolutionary adaptation you were hinting at, I think the domestication syndrome makes it so that we see animals like dogs as partly infant-like. That is, bigger eyes, round features, etc. So maybe there is some trained response in us that reacts to those infant-like features? There is definitely some positive association because otherwise the domestication syndrome wouldn’t be such an universal thing.

I’m not even trying to suggest any judgement, if anything I’m just lamenting something that for my entire lifetime I have not been able to relate to or understand in my peers, which makes me feel somehow lacking, I guess.

I get that. Like I said, I feel somewhat similar towards human babies. Although since I’m an aunt and more in contact with infants/small children, I now understand it a bit better. I think you would probably find dogs much cuter once you get to develop a relationship with one. A friend of mine has been sitting a dog for some months now (only once a week) and his behavior towards dogs has completely shifted. Before he thought they were annoying or unimportant, now he always points out cute dogs in his environment. And I think building a connection is really the magic of it all. I grew up with a dog and she was really like my sister. I felt much sadder about her death than about my grandparents’ deaths, because I was closer to her than to them.

Here is the website: https://inaturalist.org/

You can make an account and start uploading pictures of whatever organism you like, be it a plant, fungus, animal, etc. There is a pretty good computer vision model that can give you automatic suggestions. But the true value lies in other people identifying your observations and sharing their knowledge.

If you want to upload photos, please read the following tutorial first :) https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000192921-how-to-make-an-observation

So you don’t understand how it feels to find something cute? Or how people see other people as cute? Or as beautiful? Or as attractive? It’s just another human like everyone else, what’s the big deal? kind of?

Not mad about you not relating to the love for dogs, just curious. I feel the same way about human babies, but I’m aware that’s something similar to when I find something cute.

Do you know about iNaturalist? It is a wonderful community of people that are just like you asking what a certain organism is and then helping each other identify these organisms. You could upload your pictures there, too. However, you’d have to also have a rough location and also take some extra pictures of the plants. There are hundreds if not thousands of plant species that look a bit like what I can see here. So taking better pictures of different parts of a plant really helps.

Plus aroids and other trending plants, because then there is an economic value attached to it and you can compete with others who has the more valuable plant

Good idea, this actually makes more sense!

We’ve had research on research for decades if not centuries. I don’t get the meme :|