#scienceramblingfromanonscientist

[oriyamiryu]

“Of Goldfish, a Bag of Oranges” whoo a new sculpture to glitter and take up all of the windows in my room… the oranges are strangely cut and folded and painted scraps of paper from the remains of cut-out paintings (it’s easier to shape them when soft with underpaint btw) and yeah they’re Oranges but they’re Also goldphish (okay perhaps Metaphysically - but I’ve got a great rant about why it’s totally true below that devolves into carps being confusing and hard to research, where are carp experts when you need them?)

Oh! And as always please really I’m Not a scientist or a carp expert, obviously, so stuff may be wrong!

So so the citrus family is actually rutaceae (hey are All plant fams ceae? Or just a lot? Oh yeah! -aceae actually! And the name has tah be based on a genus in the family - funky!) anyways citrus are modified berries since botanically berries are pulp (fleshhh) with seeds inside generally surrounded by the pulp (but not necessarily! Peppers have airy seeds) there are berries that are considered berries (blueberries, cranberries) berries Not thought of as berries (pumpkins and watermelons which are giant berries or pepos! And cucumbers and tomatoes) and then culinary berries that aren’t actually berries (strawberries - seeds on the outside, raspberries/blackberries - aggregate structures made of Several ovaries while berries are made of One) ah! No! Back to Rutaceae… so citrus are Modified berries called Hesperidium and they’re segmented too, but they’re phish cause of their peel! The outer bit of the peel, yanno the bright orange or yellow or green, bit is called the Exocarp (or the flavedo but that’s not phishy) and consists of the Epicarp Proper (who wears a bowtie and is the toughest Very outer bit, oh! A classy party bodyguard) then the squimshier Mesocarp (or the albedo…) falls after that and is the tangy white/yellowish inner rind, then that kinda opaque layer that surrounds the segments and you try not to break when peeling an orange cause otherwise you get sticky orange juice all over your hands is called the Endocarp and yeah!! See!!! (Technically it’s cause in Greek fruit is Karpós and so it’s used to denote diff participles of fruits but shhh you didn’t hear that from me oranges are Phish!!!)

And now since oranges are phish and we’ve firmly established that I can consider a bag of goldphish to be a bag of oranges interchangeably, onto Carp Carp! Liek magikarp! Except…… not…… (sadly)

But carp carp of the not sea cause actually theyre freshwater phish (they tasted the ocean and said Bleh!! Too salty, and never returned after the Great Divide… of land water and sea water or whatever went down with that, birds as carriers of eggs I think) The carp family or the minnow family or Cyprinidae is actually the Most diverse phish family (and the most diverse vertebrae family) out there (followed in phish by the wrasse’s remember!!) with 3000 species to their name! Technically a lot (approx 1,730) of Cyprinid species are actually extinct now but Details Details, they were real!!! The bones say so…

Cyprinids have a Ridiculous size range if you haven’t already realized by the fact that they’re called the carp Or the minnow family… 12mm to 3 meter is, Wao (don’t You want to be a 9 foot phish??? Or a giant grouper akdkfkf) hey Hey Why Do Cyprinids Have No Stomachs? Mcfucking NatGeo Said Subscribe Or You Cant Read About It Well I’ll Just Ask Ncbi Meanies okay so Anyways a, a Lot of phish just, did away with their stomachs? (So did platypuses?) Googles “evolution of Cyprinids being agastric” Google: “you want scholarly article?? You want Google scholar???” Anyways amongst studied agastric and gastric Teleosts (ray finned phish) there’s a relationship between stomach loss and gastric gene loss and/or with specific proton pump losses (?proton pumps move hydrogen ions from areas of low concentration to high concentration, against the flow) and the Pepsinogens (?) which are protein digestive enzymes made by gastric cells that gets converted to gastric acid….. okay okay okay so, there’s a correlation between the loss of genes relating to acid-peptic digestion, which Occurs in your stomach and the loss of a stomach organ in vertebrate species - instead the gut simplifies, as is the case with Cyprinids, whose throat connect directly to their intestines (some studies suggest that the mid intestinal area serves for fat absorption while the end absorbs proteins instead) well now that we’ve answered that vaguely in confusingly scientific jargon…

Cyprinids also don’t have teeth in their jaws (what do they have? Oranges…) though they do have pharyngeal teeth, which are… throat teeth? They don’t, look so much like teeth as they do like combs? They’re bony or cartilaginous and grow from the last gill arch in carps and the cyprinids have a specially grown bone plate above the Gill rakers that grows from the skull and so the phish can, chew between those two structure and so some species of cyprinids eat hard bait (even though most creatures with Gill rakers are filter feeders) Hm. Apparently this qualifies as teeth horror to my brain and I don’t liek it so Moving On

Oh Okay That’s neat but also dammit carps why everything I don’t liek, well it’s sorta asexual reproduction but also sorta not? anyways Cyprinids have the only known vertebrates that perform androgenesis! Because of the Squalius alburnoides (species) allopolyploid complex… Androgenesis is when all the nuclear (of the nucleus) DNA is provided originally by the males in reproduction - either the females produce eggs with no nucleus that upon fertilization form an embryo from the male gamete (the half meiosis cell that combines with another gamete to form a zygote which a Creature grows from, yanno, liek you) Or in the other kind of androgenesis a male and female gamete forms a zygote but the female genome data is eliminated……… should we be concerned that alburnoides might be sexist? I wonder…. Oh I found a research paper about it in Spanish! Cool! I can’t read most of that though… so polyploidy is when cells have more then one pair of homologous (one maternal one paternal) chromosomes, and allopolyploidy is when those extra chromosomes are gotten from one or more different taxa (diff species, genus, families, etc.,) so you have the chromosomes of the og species but then Also a set of chromosomes from Another species, yah dig? Apparently wheat is Also allopolyploid with six sets of chromosomes… so S. alburnoides is bread… as usual everything is bread

I really? Was not planning on making this super sciencey cause honestly I’m having trouble even finding decent articles for this stuff (no access! Screams the website!!! Pay us!!! Scream the publishers!!! Pay your researchers!!! I scream back) anyways final funky cyprinid fact is that unlike a lot of other freshwater phish, they like bodies of water that are heavily mineral and nutrient rich (called Eutrophic lakes) so there’s lots of nitrogen and phosphorus in the water and lots of phytoplankton (plant type plankton!) in the water, so if you see not super thick green algae bloom water cause Light (but, not Cyanobacteria water cause hey No that could be dangerous if it’s a cyanotoxin species and also bad for oxygenation and sunlight with those anyways) then there could be carp in there! Cause all the phytoplankton are tasty to zooplankton but the zooplankton in turn are tasty to cyprinids! Monch