The 261 species of Lactibacillus have been distributed across 26 genera, 23 of which are new. Looking at the references, this seems to be the relevant paper.
I presume no new species in that paper, but the implication is that there were plenty from the previous decade. WikiPedia pointed me at LPSN, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near complete, so my hope that we could look at the growth in species descriptions is not met.
Tomorrow, Wednesday 15th February, 2023 UCU, the University & Colleges Union, have picket lines at these establishments, including The Open University.
I will be supporting their dispute and not crossing the virtual iSpot picket line.
This is my message of support to all those at OU who work for us.
Skvarla was teaching a Zoom class on biodiversity during the Covid lockdown. As teacher and students stared down at microscopic images, they realized the specimen had been wrongly labelled.…
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And so it made the news today…
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Maybe not exactly as the headline suggests, but a Covid Plus nevertheless.
It is actually a very old story (2012?) Polystoechotes punctata - Wikipedia
How come it has not out-evolved itself? Might we assume it is a perfect design unlike the human
“Giant Silurian vertebrate becomes invasive species worldwide”. (The lacewing clade goes back to the Jurassic; the bony fish(+tetrapod) clade goes back to the Silurian. In neither case is the particular species anywhere near so old.)
Maybe it’s the pressure on university staff to get their work published in the media that produces these newspaper articles. Media editors may not be interested in details such as «that’s not exactly right…». Just as well we’re here on iSpot to interogate the info more closely.
Goodness. Their own little GPS systems are probably faulty. I do like the (media) expression ‘as far north as Scotland’ when GBIF has shown these records since 2002 in Iceland
As a dog-owner, I don’t want to be part of the decimation of our UK pollinating insects.
I talked to our local vetinary practice today - they seemed to be oblivious to the problem. I hope that some suitable alternative treatments can be found; and quickly. No one wants their pets to have ticks or fleas - but if we kill off the pollinators we’ll be the ones who suffer in the end.
Another thing that has not in there is the nicotine in smoking waste that gets thrown into storm drains now that many people smoke tobacco outside.
Smoking waste infused in water is one of the rare things that can kill vine weevil grubs in potted plants.
Birds aren’t really my thing… give me a slow moving nudibranch any day.However, following the GBIF link to the alpine swifts, to see what UK records had been made, I noted recent ones were by ebird, a Cornell Uni Citizen Science project.
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Then I watched their Intro video. The database records enable the actual migration patterns of specific bird populations to be clearly seen. Informative & there’s enough data for individual ID errors to be subsumed by the greater numbers.
I use eBird every day - it’s the best global dataset of birds. I think there are around 1 billion records now. And all sorts of spin-offs such as invaluable photos and sound IDs.
