#invertebrates — Public Fediverse posts

Amazing these otherworldly creatures inhabit the little ol' English coast. Unlike other #Devon #ctenophores we saw the Northern Comb Jelly (Beroe cucumis) lacks tentacles, instead engulfing other ctenophores with huge mouth. These ancient marine #invertebrates are largest animals to swim with cilia.

Pallid-winged grasshopper, on the stones at Oyster Bay. New blog post: https://wanderinweeta.blogspot.com/2026/08/beach-hoppers.html #VancouverIsland #Grasshoppers #Insects #Invertebrates #NaturePhotography

Found on lettuce; Western Tarnished Plant Bug. (Watch for it in your garden and your salad.) New blog post: https://wanderinweeta.blogspot.com/2026/07/polyphagous.html #VancouverIsland #Insects #GardenPests #Invertebrates #NaturePhotography

Why is #JavaScript so popular? I hate everything about it.

I'm speaking at the #Canberra Field #Naturalists meeting at #ANU next month on #Malaise trapping and the #insects and other #invertebrates that surround us without our noticing them.

I expect most of my slides to be arrays of four or six #microscope images with a header (probably a family name in most cases) and captions for each image.

I don't want to lay out all these images in #LibreOffice (or any similar presentation tool) because I'm a perfectionist and getting it all tidy will take forever.

So, I decided to try out #Slidev, #Marp and other #Markdown-based presentation tools. The Markdown part is very appealing, but they all lean hard into JavaScript. That would be fine so long as I don't have to think about that side of things.

Slidev's AppleBasic theme seemed to be the best starting point, so I started hacking it to add som extra gridded image views. Plain image grids were not too challenging, but I really want captions for each image, so I started trying to understand how the templates use the forest of underlying JS libraries and CSS artefacts to produce the displayed slides.

Frankly, the whole thing is so opaque and would take me much longer to understand than preparing multiple presentations by hand would.

Then I realised I can use #montage on the command line to produce the kind of layouts I want, and I can script #exiftool to extract and prepare the captions which will save time.

So, my new plan is to write a #Python script that processes a #YAML file listing all the slides, titles and image paths. It can generate PNG images that are close to the target 1920*1080 size (give or take a little). I'll then use LibreOffice for a couple of more text-oriented or irregular slides, export those and combine all the images into a PDF.

I'm sure this will be way faster than battling Node.js. Not sure why I felt I had to write it up.

https://fieldnatsact.com/

At 09:09 this morning I decided it was a good time to take advantage of what the #wind had done overnight. A lot of #duckweed had accumulated in one of the bays in the #lake
visible from out lounge window.

With the aid of a angler's net attached to a long pole and a rake I managed to make a good stab of removing the weed along with some sludge and twigs found on the bed of the lake. It's now in a number of piles on the bank. I'll give it a day or two to allow #invertebrates to crawl back into the water and then move the piles to the #compost bins.

At 09:09 this morning I decided it was a good time to take advantage of what the #wind had done overnight. A lot of #duckweed had accumulated in one of the bays in the #lake
visible from out lounge window.

With the aid of a angler's net attached to a long pole and a rake I managed to make a good stab of removing the weed along with some sludge and twigs found on the bed of the lake. It's now in a number of piles on the bank. I'll give it a day or two to allow #invertebrates to crawl back into the water and then move the piles to the #compost bins.

At 09:09 this morning I decided it was a good time to take advantage of what the #wind had done overnight. A lot of #duckweed had accumulated in one of the bays in the #lake
visible from out lounge window.

With the aid of a angler's net attached to a long pole and a rake I managed to make a good stab of removing the weed along with some sludge and twigs found on the bed of the lake. It's now in a number of piles on the bank. I'll give it a day or two to allow #invertebrates to crawl back into the water and then move the piles to the #compost bins.

At 09:09 this morning I decided it was a good time to take advantage of what the #wind had done overnight. A lot of #duckweed had accumulated in one of the bays in the #lake
visible from out lounge window.

With the aid of a angler's net attached to a long pole and a rake I managed to make a good stab of removing the weed along with some sludge and twigs found on the bed of the lake. It's now in a number of piles on the bank. I'll give it a day or two to allow #invertebrates to crawl back into the water and then move the piles to the #compost bins.

For #InsertAnInvert2024 worm prompt “not long, limbless” an animal that is fuchsia, indigo and yellow (that I used for the #printerSolstice split complimentary colour scheme prompt). 🧵1/2

#linocut #printmaking #sciart #invertebrates #fuchsiaFlatworm #miniPrint #printersolstice2024

For the #printerSolstice prompt split complimentary I was reminded of an animal that is fuchsia, indigo & yellow. So I made some wee little prints of a strange & beautiful creature, the fuchsia flatworm (Pseudoceros ferrugineus) from the tropical Indo-Pacific. Their gorgeous colours are aposematic - a warning to predators that they are not worth eating. So they can crawl around & feed on coral reefs without concern.

#linocut #printmaking #sciart #invertebrates #fuchsiaFlatworm #miniPrint

Working on a tiny print of a marine creature with a split complementary colour scheme for #printerSolstice (with #insertaninvert2024 in mind)

#linocut #printmaking #wip #invertebrates

Working on my next print for #printerSolstice prompt monochromatic.

Making Valentines for the malacologist/beach comber in your life. These are heart cockles! They will be in different tints of the same colour.

#printersolstice2024 #shells #sciart #heartCockle #cockle #invertebrates #linocut #printmaking #wip #carving #valentines #MastoArt