hello have you ever, just been, really bothering a small amphibian all over, and they decide they have had enough of it
the unken reflex is a defensive posture that a handful of salamanders, toads and frogs do when they feel threatened, and it involves curling right up and showing off their bright underbellies ( which usually, BUT NOT ALWAYS, means the animal in question is POISONOUS and you shouldnt eat this thing !!! dont eat this !!!!! )
the above three are rough skinned newts and a california newt, but the reflex itself is named after the fire-belled toads ( whose genus is unke in german ) where it shows up a little differently
(note the covered eyes ! )
while displaying, the animal in question gulps down a bunch of air, makes themselves as still as possible, and also releases toxins from their skin if they got em – but not all amphibians with the unken reflex have poison, and some of the poison ones dont have bright underbellies, and some dont curl up all the way while theyre doing it – its a mixed bag of postures. thats how it is sometimes
Minor correction: roughly 30 clam shrimp eggs, an unknown number of seed shrimp.
They’re all nauplii at the moment, basically larvae, which is why they all swim about the same. It’s a few days more before they start to look recognizable. Will add another video when they start looking like critters instead of swimming commas. If you look reeeeeal close in person, they have tiny whiskers, but it hurts your eyes trying.
A side-to-side pan on an aquarium full of slightly dirty water, then a zoom in on the contents. Many small, white objects, which strongly resemble commas and move in twitch-twitch-twitch motions, are swimming around inside. They appear to be less than a millimeter long, and a few which seem to be the size of large dust specks are visible.
“This is a ten gallon tank into which I recently put a bag of detritus -fancy word for gunk- containing roughly 120 fairy shrimp eggs, 10 triop eggs, and 30 seed shrimp eggs. And here are results. They’re veeery small because most of them are probably less than 24 hours old, but aaaal those little dots -and there’s way more that the camera can’t even see- are critters. All the white ones are fairy shrimp, the orange ones, maybe I can find one that the phone can actually see, are triops. The seed shrimp are pretty much all way too small for the camera to pick up, there’s like 10 of them between those three big guys that aren’t showing up on here.”
Camera focuses on a roughly two-centimeter-wide section between three of the dots, a space which is seemingly empty aside from two other dots, then pans to the side to show more dots just below the surface.
“And there’s some more. That stuff on the surface (indicating what appears to be floating dirt) is what they eat, it’s mostly just leaves that have been in the water for a long time. More of it on the bottom. Those are not eggs, that’s just sand.”
Camera pans down to a patch of dirt sprinkled with white sand grains, then off to the side, showing more dots.
“More babies. Lots more babies. Lots lots lots more babies. There’s some more. Those are swimming a little bit differently (more smoothly), those might be the seed shrimp. I’m honestly not certain, at this point they’re basically impossible to tell apart, but… oh, that’s a triop, just about dead center. He’s orange, you can’t really tell in this video, but he’s orange.”
Camera indicates a slightly orange dot, then lowers to a larger, white dot, which moves quickly in front of the camera.
“I tried to put some of these in front of a microscope earlier, but they didn’t want to hold still and cooperate, so it didn’t work. Anyway, critters!”
… is that they are jumpy, squirmy, fearless creatures. All day long they were just like like this. There wasn’t a box I did that I didn’t have at least one phascogale pretending to be Jeb Corliss.
I sadly am having trouble finding the exact species but they were a type of amphipods (a diverse group of crustaceans)
I actually got to see some today at a beach in the form of sandhoppers, which are the little shrimps guys you will sometimes find in the sand that tend to hop (as the name implies)