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Lev & Yuki

Good

Find the cat

So, in our little town, a plane landed on the highway nearby because of a blizzard and all that.

A Cessna Caravan, operated by Southern Airways Express, took off for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but something went wrong and the pilot had to land wherever he could.

By the way, thanks to this incident, I now know that you can actually fly to a neighboring state for just 60 dollars from an airport that’s 10 minutes away from me. I always thought that the smaller the airplane, the more expensive the flight. Surely, the passengers of N1983X probably aren’t very happy.

What I like about our area is that we have seasons.

I don’t understand how people live in Florida, for example. It’s always summer there, almost no museums, music is okay, but it pales in comparison to the northern neighbors. Okay, there’s the ocean, but you get used to it.

Also, things can change very quickly around here — just look at the second image, a weather history for January 2020, these days. Back then, the temperature changed from minus two to plus 22 degrees in just two days.

However, a lot of snow never means “a lot of mud”. It’s probably due to the dry air, good drainage, and soil characteristics — if you don’t go into the forest, you hardly see any mud at all. I’m walking around in summer sneakers right now. If they’ve cleared the asphalt path, it’s dry the next day, and you could potentially walk on it in socks (although it would be cold).

All the photos are around our house at different times

I give Yuka a choice of three treats. He chooses the one on the right, then halfway through stops, goes to sniff the other two just in case, one by one, but ultimately sticks with his original choice and leaves with the treat in his mouth. At the staircase, he decides to return anyway, checks that the other two are still there, sniffs them again one by one, weighs the options, realizes that no, the one he chose is indeed tastier, and leaves.

After some time, having chewed on what he deemed the tastiest, he returns and is surprised to find that the other two are gone. And he’s still scratching at the pantry door. Such injustice! There were three! on the floor!

I wonder which Community Standard I am violating with this comment?

The CIA just dumped some warez here. Swarm it, there’s 150 episodes of Tom and Jerry on the Al-Qaeda leader’s laptop, no SMS and no registration, plus various other bits and pieces. Link in the comments.

Continuing to read Immense World by Ed Yong. I ordered his previous book, “I Contain Multitudes,” about the microbiota. But that’s for later. Currently, there’s an intriguing story unfolding from the pages as I read.

In previous posts, I mentioned that Catfish — those whiskered little fish — have taste receptors all over their bodies, from head to tail, numbering between 100,000 to 150,000. For comparison, humans have about 9,000, and chickens — 24. Thus, their life at the bottom in murky and muddy water is made easier as they can taste the water with their entire body.

I am now reading that in 2012, Daphne Soares, a biologist from the nearby University of Maryland, discovered something interesting about the Astroblepus Pholeter catfish from a cave in Ecuador. She found that these blind catfish evolved in the turbulent currents of the cave in such a way that their skin became covered with what she called “micro-joysticks,” but the interesting part is not just that, but that these “micro-joysticks” are essentially teeth. They don’t look like teeth, but they are indeed made from enamel and dentin, with nerves connecting to all of this. These tooth-like formations on the skin are called denticles.

There are other fish with denticles, but usually, they use them as a “tool” for “cutting,” as well as for protection, or for reducing resistance while swimming. However, cave catfish use these denticles as mechanosensors for navigation in dark and fast-flowing environments, needing more robust sensors, much like how other fish use the lateral line.

Incidentally, on Daphne Soares’ personal website, among the list of discoveries is also the previously unknown sensory organ in alligators — integumentary sensory organs (ISOs). They appear as black dots of about half a millimeter on the alligator’s face. With them, crocodilians feel water disturbances and changes in pressure (which are essentially the same thing). And they are very sensitive — able to detect water movements as small as 4 micrometers, which is less than the thickness of a human hair.

It also turns out that male alligators can produce very low sounds, which are detected by the female with these sensitive cells on the snout. It is unknown what the female then does with this information, but at least she’s now informed. Unknown what you will do with all this information, but at least you are now informed as well.

Eggplants