Word Of The Day Is: Sclerotisation!

Word of the day is: Sclerotisation!

Sclerotisation is the process of making the rigid shell of sclerotin in an insect's shell.

Wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sclerotization

Some fun facts about it's Wikipedia history is that the page was originally a redirect page until 26 Febeurary 2022 and only mentioned sclerotin in 11 July 2022. To clarify the page was created 31 May 2006.

The majority of edits are by user Smokefoot who seems really cool! Check out their stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Smokefoot

Stupid take.

And it's got that condescending tone of 'oh, how dare you!!! Jail for you as I'm a internet warrior!!! I know what I'm talking about!!!'. (I am aware I didn't put this in quotation marks. That's because it doesn't deserve quotation marks.)

A major can be so many things. What do you do with a film major? Sometimes you make films. Sometimes you make animated films, be a screen editor, sound producer, go onto to get a history PhD in cinematic, be a video editor, make documentaries, or even go straight back into academics as a film teacher.

Ask people about themselves! College is tough and people will love it if you ask the most basic follow up question of "What are you going to do with that?".

I'm a bio-chem major. I could go be a doctor, lawyer, or (what most people at my college think until we ask this one incredibly simple question!) drug discovery. I am doing none of those. I'm going to go work for NASA and study human genetic engineering.

(Just read the tags. Guys a poli-sci. No wonder they hate it. They have no plans and a useless* major, lol.)

*Technically not useless as it can be cool. Technically. Down there with business majors.

I really wish people understood that unless you are someone's parent, you don't need to be questioning the practicality of their life decisions. When someone tells you their major, you should say "oh, that sounds cool!" Do NOT ask them what they're "planning on doing with that." It may be an innocent question, but it comes across as super patronizing and just makes them anxious. Maybe they don't know yet. Maybe they've already planned it out extensively and don't want to go over it with you, their dentist. Maybe they don't plan their entire life around getting rich!

It's especially bad when the major in question is extremely self-explanatory. My sister majored in film and so many people asked her what she was going to "do with it." Oh, I'm going to be a doctor! OBVIOUSLY MAKE FILMS, BECKY. They didn't ask because they were curious about her plans, they asked because they wanted to know how she would make money. It was like they thought it hadn't occurred to her that it would be difficult. It's condescending as hell. I'm just so sick of random people thinking it's their right to question and judge other peoples' lives. It's not that hard to mind your own business.

When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

(Source 3)

Pretty neat how there are words for everything

Going to include that one next gamer story I write!

"i'm bad at x" -> take out a library book -> read it -> skill exp

Scientific Paper Review: Insects may or may not be sentient??

Reading this (https://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/epdf/10.3920/JIFF2022.0041?role=tab) paper about welfare when farming black soldier flies (published 2023) with the main author being Meghan Barret, who is a super duper cool female scientist that believes strongly in insect welfare (e-portfolio link here: http://meghan-barrett.com/about-me/), and I'm astonished!

Introduction starts off with a quick overview of what the paper is getting into and then dives into background history. I love reading scientific papers simply because there is so much cool stuff to learn. Animal welfare is dependent upon how the animal views how it's doing. A pampered lap dog with depression still has depression. A sad bug living in a super duper cool vivarium (which are way hard to set up) is still sad.

Insects in science may or may not be sentient. How do you define sentient? Where do you draw the line of responding to making decisions? Wild! If insects are sentient we should, of course, treat them like we are. If they aren't how do we determine welfare for something that's not sentient. This isn't about philosophy though so we're continuing on.

There is a model called the five freedoms model. The paper said it best so I'm quoting them here, "According to that influential model of animals’ interests (Brambell, 1965), animals ought to kept in ways that keep them free: (1) from hunger and thirst; (2) from discomfort; (3) from pain, injury, and disease; (4) to express normal behaviour; and (5) from fear and distress.".

From here the introduction continues to go on to explain that it's hard to tell when an insect is doing or has this stuff. If a pet cat decides to be a picky eater, is the owner a bad owner for not keeping them free from hunger and thirst or is the cat being picky? Again though! Not hear for philosophy or ethics that's been discussed a hundred times before.

What can be determined though is if something kills an insect it is bad. If it increases mortality, like a parasite would, it is bad. Good thing is that factors between farmed invertabra (aka bugs) is pretty universal. Another good news is we know a lot about the biology of the black soldier fly! They have six larva stages.

That concludes this part of the post! More coming soon.