#cellularic

[midoristeashop]

otnwas ch 30 for @jjackfrost <3

Aka it’s my anniversary (ish) for reading this fic and joining the hijack community 🥰

[hunnam]

Chris Evans Cellular (2004)

[artisticicada]

i drew art @dragongirltongue 🎉🎉🎉

[jayrockin]

The avian homeplanet's plants, and worms pretending to be plants.

Plantworms tend to out-compete the true plants in wet climates with nutrient poor soil or unstable substrate (such as wetlands and rainforests) because of their opportunistic carnivory and mobility. The true plants out-compete them in arid climates (such as tundra and deserts) because they have more robust water gathering and anti-freezing mechanisms. While both can form mycorrhizal associations to aid in water and nutrient deliver through the soil, true plants have extensive root systems and are not completely reliant on rainwater and condensation in the absence of mycorrhizal partners.

Both plantworms and true plants have clades that partner with pollinator animals to reproduce, but some plantworm "flowers" are honey traps. They use their colorful genitals as a lure to snare and eat potential pollinators, and reproduce "the old fashioned way," as in, reaching over to their same species neighbors to exchange gametes.

I've posted a little about avian flora before, though this is more up-to-date.

PATREON | Runaway to the Stars

[denkilightning]

since now its word-of-god canon cole is red-green colourblind yall know what colour he can see best?? blue :))

[vedalkensamurai]

A lone knight sits in the center of the board. It gives birth to eight offspring, who each move away either two cells vertically and one horizontally, or one vertically and two horizontally, as is traditional for knights. The parent knight grows old and dies, and the young knights mature and give birth to offspring in their turn. But if two baby knights try to occupy the same cell, they compete for resources and neither survives past infancy.

[jabesa0]

⚜️wear the hat, ride the cowboy⚜️

This one has a nsfw ver. too! The link to it is on my Twitter!

[annislittleshopofhorrors]

~ Cellular (2004) ~

[ophanimgold]

ranvier, the neuron dragon

also comes with Tupperware

[kambingterhebat]

hvmd + my lesbian hvmd ocs + mostly just my lesbian medic oc LAWL (also known as milfdic)

milfdic: lyudmila, lesbian heavy: mishka

[90s-2000s-barbie]

Amurol Cellular Bubble Gum (1993)

[lotus-pear]

BIO EXAM DONE THANK GOD 💯💯💯💯 genuinely why was the entire frq cell signaling and dna transcription/translation IM GONNA KMS i knew the minute i saw the first one i was cooked 🥀🥀

[artisticicada]

meow mrow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow mew meow meow meow meow meow meow meow miaou meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow mrow

[fruitcage]

[tanadrin]

"What I think is crazy/creepy is when individual cells of a multicellular organism mutate to become essentially a free-living organism"

...

""is Tasmanian Devil facial tumor disease a chordate and a mammal despite being essentially an infectious microbe?""

Could you talk more about this? It sounds biologically and philosophically interesting but I don't think I completely understand what you mean. What's the argument that the tumor disease could be considered a chodate & mammal?

in cladistics, new members of a clade inherit membership in every clade their progenitor species is a part of. even though the original synapsid is a reptile with some mammal-like anatomical features that evolved in the late carboniferous period, humans are members of the synapsid clade because we descended from that ur-synapsid. birds are dinosaurs because they descend from members of the clade dinosauria. there are good reasons to prefer this cladistic structure in many cases to the traditional "rank" structure of species/genus/family/order/etc, bc even when new members of a clade are genuinely innovative in some ways, they still often bear traits typical of the rest of their clade. no matter how diverse chordates get, they all still have spines, you know? and sometimes members of a clade may lose important features, like flightless birds, but they will still inevitably retain others. a purely feature-based analysis of the ostrich's anatomy might erroneously lead you to conclude they lack the critical bird feature "flight" and therefore are not birds, but this would obscure the (in this case dead obvious) evolutionary relationship, and evolution is so criticial to our undertanding of biology and natural history.

sure, this cladistic perspective leads to some apparently goofy stuff: while land animals are obviously not fish, all tetrapods (which includes snakes!) do descend from members of clades like the osteichthyes (bony fish), so if you are using "fish" as a cladistic classification, then humans are a kind of fish. but the real answer is that lots of classifications of life are simply paraphyletic--"fish" as a category excludes tetrapods, which is fine. you could argue that the colloquial meaning of the term "dinosaur" is paraphyletic and excludes birds, too, bc when people say "the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago" they obviously aren't talking about chickens, which didn't exist then. this isn't a problem with cladistics, just with the fact that some common words do double duty with more specialized meaning in scientific vocabulary, you know?

but the model of clades where new clades have to be nested entirely within existing clades, genuinely does break down in a couple of places in the history of life. one example would be the emergence of eukaryotes. the eukaryote cell originates in the symbiosis of an anaerobic archaeon from the Heimdallarchaeia taxon with a member of the bacterial clade Rickettsiales. eukaryotes are not usually classified as a kind of archaeon; they are really very, very different from both their archaeal and bacterial progenitors, and two separate clades coming together to produce an offspring that inherits from both is not usually how evolution works.

HeLa cells and transmissible cancers in the wild don't violate the principles of cladistic structure in the same way, but they do raise really awkward questions. they break what are otherwise apparently a lot of one-way ratchets in evolution: single-celled to multicellular, undifferentiated tissues to more differentiated tissues, the preservation of at least some anatomical features in offshoot clades (ostriches don't fly but they still have beaks and feathers and spinal cords! they're still obviously amniotes, you know?). and yet despite being wildly, insanely different from their progenitor species, in a way not even the first eukaryotes were, the genome of these organisms is still very similar. like if you sequenced the genome of TDFTD it would be impossible to escape the conclusion that its closest living relative is the Tasmanian devil, and not some other single-celled pathogen. cladistically, it's a chordate and a mammal, if you grant it the status of organism. (and why shouldn't we? lots of organisms are obligate parasites.)

you could say, ok fine, chordate and mammal and amniote and any other classification implicated in this scenario is paraphyletic. i think that's a little unsatisfying. i think it's more honest to admit that the concept of clades and monophyletic groupings and all that just isn't well-equipped to handle some freaky biological edge cases, this one included. in the same way it's not well-equipped to deal with the emergence of eukaryotes, or whatever is going on with the evolutionary history of viruses/plasmids/retrotransposons. or for that matter the same way these concepts break down in situations of intense horizontal gene transfer, like what was probably the case with the common ancestral community of primitive cells. and much like black holes in astronomy, sometimes the most interesting stuff occurs in those contexts where very useful general models start to break down!

[violetfractal]

sierpinski gasket variant

detail B4=MOD(A3+A2+B1+C2+C3,3)