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FILTER FEEDING AND TEETH. "Baleen whales, or mysticetes, include the largest vertebrates to have ever evolved. Their gigantism, evolutionary success, and ecological diversity have been linked to filter feeding. While the earliest mysticetes retained the adult, mineralized teeth present in ancestral whales, all species of living baleen whales lack teeth and instead possess baleen." https://lnkd.in/duDXgp7 View in LinkedIn

DRIVERS OF SENSORY LOSS. "Whales represent the first animal group to lack four of five primary tastes, probably driven by the marine environment with high concentration of sodium, the feeding behavior of swallowing prey whole, and the dietary switch from plants to meat in the whale ancestor." https://lnkd.in/d4b6XQ4 View in LinkedIn

HUGE CHANGES. "These findings suggest that profound changes in the chemosensory capabilities occurred in the cetacean lineage before the Odontoceti-Mysticeti split, during the period when ancestral whales migrated from land to water." https://lnkd.in/dcqHGKG View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues and concludes this weekend from last weekend on the theme of the return of the whales to the sea after their epic transition from salt walter to the land. Few transitions during evolution have been so dramatic and challenging from so many perspectives, but to have done it twice is beyond remarkable. Loosing ones wings is one thing, but living entirely in water after being land adapted once is quite another thing entirely. View in LinkedIn

Slimes, sludges and oozes, everything that you could ever wish for! View in LinkedIn

RIGOROUS APPROACH. "Since memory is a necessary pre-requisite of learning—an essential component of intelligence, we need to examine critically the previously proposed examples of intelligent behavior in plants, and for the sake of certainty discard all cases where involvement of memory cannot be safely inferred. We may even have to give up some potentially relevant phenomena to be sure: what we need are criteria for identification of cases of plant memory and learning that are beyond any doubt." https://lnkd.in/dfsCv77 View in LinkedIn

PLANT MEMORY. Intuitively, any living creature must have a type of memory in order to successfully adapt to previous experiences, and to survive. This includes plants. We now look at sone of the research in this area, much of which is quite surprising. It is possible that you will never look at a plant again in the same way. View in LinkedIn

DRUGGED POLLINATORS. "We provide evidence that plant compounds pharmacologically alter pollinator behavior by enhancing their memory of reward. Honeybees rewarded with caffeine, which occurs naturally in nectar of Coffea and Citrus species, were three times as likely to remember a learned floral scent as were honeybees rewarded with sucrose alone." https://lnkd.in/dXh9kHF View in LinkedIn

CAFFEINATED NECTAR. "A recent study in Science found that the caffeine produced by many plants may function not only as a defense chemical, as had previously been thought, but in some cases as a psychoactive drug in their nectar. The caffeine encourages bees to remember a particular plant and return to it, making them more faithful and effective pollinators." https://lnkd.in/dvFaNgd View in LinkedIn