Month: June 2023

As if this tree needed to be poisonous

Tricolor

look who is sitting on my shoulder!

I wonder why there are still no ad generators in the style of the channel where the ad is intended to be placed? After all, it’s possible to train AI on the channel’s content and embed ads within real news or analytics, making it seem as though they were authored by the channel. Plus, such a generator could operate in fully automatic mode, scanning similar channels and creating ads on the fly.

Searching online how a camera on a tree knows it’s me. Surely there’s an RFID integrated in the helmet that spills my guts.

Choosing a restaurant to eat at, and here underfoot all sorts are getting in the way

Nadia is impressed: she just ate onion jam.

I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t find a drafting triangle for sale under the word ‘triangle’

Obviously, because it’s not a triangle, but a square

Captain Obvious

For those who miss their garden and vegetable patch. Picked cherries and blueberries at the farm. Photos and details in Nadya’s post

Yesterday I posted a video of an opossum speeding past my house at night. On nextdoor, a bunch of people wrote to me that they’re beneficial because they eat about 5000 ticks a week. Being curious, I went to Google how an animal the size of a cat hunts for millimeter-sized ticks that sit somewhere in the grass.

It turns out that things aren’t quite like that, or even not like that at all. A study on Virginia opossums was conducted by the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Cary, USA, in 2009. Check out how they got to 5000 ticks a week:

The authors estimated this number by once placing a small amount (specifically, 100) of black-legged tick larvae on five captive Virginia opossums, then counted how many fell off over four days.

In the end, they discovered that on average only 3.5 tick larvae fell from each opossum, and the rest could not be found around the opossum, which led the authors to speculate that the ticks were eaten by the opossums during grooming.

Based on their assumption, that the average number of larval ticks on opossums in the northern part of New York state was 199 ± 90, the authors stated that “the overwhelming majority (96.5%) of tick larvae that encounter opossums and try to feed are apparently eaten.”

From which they inferred that during any peak week of larval activity, each opossum would need to host more than 5500 tick larvae to account for 199 successfully feeding.

Other scientists, specifically Cecilia Hennessy and Caitlin Hilde, analyzed the stomachs of 32 opossums. In the stomach contents of Virginia opossums, they found neither ticks nor their parts. They also conducted an active literature search for evidence supporting the ingestion of ticks. The search revealed 23 manuscripts, describing the analysis of the diet of Virginia opossums, 19 of which were conducted on the stomach or gastrointestinal tract content, and four of which were based on feces analysis. None of these studies found ticks in the food analysis.

It turns out, they don’t eat ticks. Kind of a big “discovery”. Everyone thought they ate them by the kilogram, labeled them as the sanitizers of the forest, and there you have it.

I checked LinkedIn for these two friends who were digging through the stomachs of 32 opossums.

Cecilia has an interesting career – she published an article in 2021, and that same month left her position as assistant professor, and a year later got a job as a biology teacher in a regular school. Since February of this year, she has been working as a DNA Analyst in the legal department of Winsconsin.

Caitlin Hilde was actually in her fifth year of college at the time of publication. Seems like she just graduated and is job searching now.