iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

If you see this, quote post with a beach photo from your gallery. Or not. But I'd like to see what you have. When I searched "beach" in my phone, all I got was a bad video of a storm blowing in on Cayuga Lake this July. So instead, have a sunset photo from Cabo Blanco, Costa Rica back in 2012.

A very shadowy rocky beach looks out across low rocky outcrops and low water towards a pastel pink sunset and stratus clouds. The upper part of the sky is a very pale blue with a lot of swooping cirrus(?) clouds. At the upper left, the scene is framed by a couple of tree branches with big leaves.

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Yup. (Screenshot brought to you by whatever urge makes someone run to fiddle with something as soon as someone announces that it's broken.) Hopefully they fix it before Friday--I've got letters for 2 students to submit

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Nice! I thought the style looked familiar. This was given to my grandma by a friend and now I have it

A wide and short book open to the title page. It says:
FLOWER GUIDE
revised and with new illustrations
Wild Flowers East of the Rockies
by Chester A. Reed
author of North American Birds’ Eggs, Bird Guides, etc.
… blah blah publisher information blah blah…
1915

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

I just did my first little freehand embroidery of a maple leaf to cover up mending a hole at the base of the leaf! The thing that turned out to be the most helpful was doing the midvein first so I could estimate relative distances and positions

Burgundy sweater with a set of horizontal white, light pink, dark pink, and dark yellow stripes across the chest. Just above the tunic-style hem a pink and orange maple leaf and two small orange "leaves" (really just ovals) have been hand-embroidered

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Using @skypeascientist.bsky.social's Crab Facts calendar to count down to the FRI program's poster session! 18 more days to go!

A piece of cardstock with pink crab illustrations on a light green background patterned with star-like coral polyps and other sea-life textures. At the top of the page, two crab claws are holding a letter banner that says "CRAB FACTS". Below that is a piece of green lab tape that says "POSTER SESSION COUNTDOWN!!" and below that are 24 holographic silver scratch-off boxes. The first 6 have been scratched and say things like "Crabs can be left handed or right handed" and "The biggest crab is the Japanese crab. They can reach 14 feet in wingspan!"

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

I use this video in my classes too! Also this cartoon for genetic drift, which always gets some giggles. I think it also helps counter the idea that evolution is organisms deliberately working towards a goal as opposed to wandering around. 1/2

Black and white cartoon of a drunk partier walking on a slippery sidewalk to the left of a railroad track. His footprints are wandering back and forth across the sidewalk and the sidewalk appears to be getting narrower. In the top right corner is a box saying "Fixation 1" with an arrow pointing left to safety and "Loss 0" with an arrow pointing right towards the railroad track

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 07/11/2024

#ThrowbackThursday to last Thursday, which still feels like a very long time ago. About a third of my class dressed up for Halloween and I wore my praying mantis costume! See alt text for costume explanations.

A group of people wearing biology-inspired costumes in a classroom. Descriptions are followed by what the costume *is* in parentheses. From left to right, someone wearing a rose-patterned shirt and jeans (a rose bush), someone wearing a Batman mask (a bat), someone wearing a black KN95 mask and a green t-shirt with a strange mashup of a black, yellow, and white caterpillar and a cat skeleton (me). Someone wearing a lab coat and safety goggles (generic scientist), someone wearing a lab coat and safety goggles and holding a toy spider (an arachnologist and/or possibly Peter Parker), someone wearing a fake beard and holding a toy bird (Charles Darwin), someone wearing a lab coat, pipe-cleaner rodent ears, and drawn-on whiskers (lab rat). Me, wearing a complicated green costume with "compound eyes" on my head, green gloves with ridged forearms, and an insect abdomen with an extra pair of legs. Someone wearing brown pants, a tree-patterned shirt and sunglasses (camouflage) and holding a trick-or-treating pumpkin bucket that has been decorated to look like a green insect head. Someone wearing a green hoodie and brown pants, with raised arms (tree), someone wearing white overalls with a green hoodie that has small yellow leaves coming out of the hood (powdery mildew), and someone wearing a light brown field/fishing/birding vest, a long-sleeved shirt and shorts and holding a net and container (entomologist)

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

Today is absurdly warm and sunny, so after I got home I planted some bulbs! I want my yard to be mostly native plants, so I’m multitasking and planting them in my kitchen garden. The fall crocuses I planted about a month ago have already come up nicely! I still have strawberries-odd but delicious

Messy garden bed with some awkward tomatoes and basil that is mostly dead or gone to seed, but with poos of yellow from a marigold plant and purple from fall crocuses

Close-up photo. In the top right, a light purple crocus flower with a bunch of orange-yellow stigmas. At the bottom, a pale hand holding a small, light red, mostly ripe strawberry. Most of the background is strawberry leaves

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

Two cute animals! My cat Adele (enforcing work-life balance by sitting on my work laptop) and a baby snapping turtle from this spring

Very fluffy blackish cat with green eyes and big pupils sitting on a closed laptop with her tail curled in front of her

A hand-sized baby snapping turtle with a dark brown serrated shell and lighter brown forelegs and head standing on grass and dead leaves. The eyes look almost wooden and the shell has tiny little green leaves (duckweed) and a bit of a brown leaf stuck on it.

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

One year in Costa Rica, there was one(?) laughing falcon near the Palo Verde field station that would let you get right under the tree branches they were perching on! (These photos are cropped) #birds

A falcon with a white head, chest and legs, a black eye mask, and dark brown wings is perched on a branch. The falcon is looking to the left so only one side of the head is visible. There are blurry green leaves and light sky in the background

The same falcon but their head is now full frontal to the camera and you can see both eyes with the dark patches surrounding them, the point of the dark beak and light gray streaks on the white forehead. Maybe I'm imagining it, but the bird kind of seems to have a "what are YOU looking at" expression

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 01/11/2024

And even where the color is consistent, there can be differences. For example, different Danaus caterpillars (monarchs & friends) are helpful for recognition at both the genus & species level. So I did literally sketchy coloring to indicate I was showing general color patterns, not species ones

Close-up of a pencil sketch of 2 white, black, and yellow caterpillars seen from above with their heads at the top of the page. The one on the left has a pair of black tendrils at each end. The one on the right has 2 pairs of black tendrils at the top (head) end and one pair at the bottom end. Underneath is the name "Danaus"

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

If you see this, post a photo taken in the mountains. The photo on the right was taken 2 minutes later, when the mountaintop was inside the thunderstorm

A mountain top seen from a window as very dark clouds approach. The clouds and the land in the foreground are so dark that the reflections of the overhead lights and the restaurant table can be seen in the window. The window also has a few raindrops on it. In the distance, mountain slopes and ridges are still visible in bright sunlight

Very blurry photo of a wet window from the inside. The outside is a cloud, so all that really shows up is a blurry reflection of a white woman in a green shirt and a hat holding a phone up to take the photo and the inside of a restaurant with several other people

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 28/10/2024

Nice! I think this was the same window that caused the light in this picture I took when I visited in 2023!

The stone high-arched nave of a cathedral. There are chunks of reddish-orange and purplish-blue light from a stained glass window glowing on the nearby pillars, pews, and two tourists at the lower left who are admiring the window behind the camera. In the distance are two stories of stained glass windows shaped like pointed arches

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 17/10/2024

Hi, everyone who just followed me! There is a fair amount of overlap between my response to this prompt and what I post on Bsky, so I figure reposting this is a good explanation of what you've signed up for 😀

Text saying "You've been kidnapped." with a blank space and then "2 hours later you are returned because you can't stop talking about _____?"

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 09/10/2024

#BlockParty @franzanth.bsky.social @crawlieswithcri.bsky.social This account would be cool...if it was posting credited photos of organisms instead of incorrect AI-generated images

Screenshot of an account called "Nature is Amazing". The banner photo is of a group of lions, but the image in the first photo (and all the rest on the account) is a AI-generated image of an organism...in this case, a not-quite-right magnolia next to flower buds that look more like rose buds than magnolia buds

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 09/10/2024

Unfortunately, I think all these images are AI...some of the specific ones do not look like the species the text claims they are. Compare this post to a photo taken by Andrew Newmark and posted on #iNaturalist

A computer-generated image of a blue and white bird with a medium long tail. Despite being identified as a black-throated magpie-jay, there is no black on its throat or elsewhere

Photo of a blue, black, and white bird sitting on a branch. Compared to the bird in the previous image, the throat is black and the tail is longer and black and white.

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 04/10/2024

Happy #WorldAnimalDay! QRT with your animal art. And remember, it doesn't have to be amazing art 😁 #birds #bugs #plants

Simple color pencil drawings of a raptor, showing a mostly dark brown dorsal side with white patch on the rump, a ventral side with rusty red wings and body. There are eraser smears where I had trouble drawing the bird's head correctly. There is also a diagram of the bird's flight pattern as a series of dark brown and rusty red V shapes (showing which side of the bird was visible). Text reads "Northern Harrier, October 3, 2024, 1:51 PM, Tschache Pool, Montezuma NWR, Seneca Falls, NY"

Color pencil drawing of an orange and black monarch butterfly perched on a purple-pink thistle flower. It's better than the last drawing, but still pretty simple. Writing in the upper-right reads "2:03 PM, July 24, 2024, Near Lot C, Binghamton Univ., Binghamton, NY"

Mostly black and white handwritten and hand-drawn guide to caterpillars on a landscape-oriented piece of paper. The left side shows several types of bristly caterpillars, including one at the bottom that looks like a bunch of pipe cleaners stuck together. The right side shows a bunch of different spiny caterpillars, including several that have horn-like structures emerging from behind their heads. There's also one caterpillar that kind of looks like a trilobite.

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 01/10/2024

Okay, #BirdsAndBugs Monday. These are both #StickHappens and one serious #BirdBlur, but they were my attempt to document a collared aracari beating the $*!@ out of a giant katydid or similar when I was in Costa Rica in 2019. Phone camera, so I'm glad they turned out as well as they did

A red, black, and olive-green toucan-type bird is sitting on a branch with its big beak going behind the branch. Just visible between the branch and the beak are a pair of black insect wings that are a couple of inches long. The bird has just whacked the insect against the branch and its yellow eye is staring directly at the camera.

An extremely blurry photo of the black, red, and olive-green bird having drawn its head back so it can whack the insect against the branch again. The insect is a black-brown blur, but it's nearly as long as the bird's big toucan-like beak.

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 27/09/2024

This AI "slug" was on a The Conversation article for a bit before I pointed it out 😭

AI-generated image of a slug facing the viewer. The body looks pretty sluglike, but the head has a pair of eyes directly on it and a "face" that looks like a grumpy old man who left out his dentures. The "eyestalks" don't actually have eyes on them

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 12/09/2024

Newt umbrella from earlier this summer! (Eastern newts, no idea what the mushroom is)

Close-up photo of three orange newts gathered around a yellow-white mushroom next to a tree root, surrounded by moss and small plants

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 09/09/2024

Adele is basically Distinguished Baby, esp if I can substitute “yowls a hairball warning so I can get a paper towel in front of her” instead of “asks to drink from the tap”

Photo of a very fluffy dark brown cat lying on a gray blanket with her green eyes barely open

Very fluffy dark brown cat curled up on the top of a blue couch. Her head is up and she is looking just to the left of the camera with light green eyes. Her tongue is sticking out because she is licking the end of her very fluffy tail

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 02/09/2024

Very cool! I found a midge on a katydid once!

A light green katydid with leaf-like wings and an elongated pointy head. Right on top of one of the big wing veins is a midge with a light gray head and thorax and a very round yellow abdomen full of katydid hemolymph

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 31/08/2024

If you see this, quote post with a beach photo from your gallery.

A shadowed rocky beach framed by plants the foreground and the ocean silvery-gray in the dusk. The setting sun is just above the horizon on the left and the sky has crisscrossing bands of clouds. There is a little pale blue sky at the upper right corner

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 28/07/2024

I don’t have anything earthshattering, but these index cards were in a secondhand sci-fi book. I assume they were for some sort of game. I use them as bookmarks for this particular book. I guess it would have been even better if they’d been “space armor”, “blaster”, etc., but luck of the draw

A paperback of Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Diplomatic Immunity” with spaceships on the front and a $1 price sticker. Next to it are 4 index cards, all with a printed anchor and handwritten “Alex 9/25” in one corner. From the top, they read “$96,750”, “heavy pistol”, “armored vest”, and “cutlass”

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 26/07/2024

My first one of this year was on Wednesday! I usually only see them later in the fall, so I had to do something to document it 🙂

Color pencil drawing of an orange and black monarch butterfly perched on a purple-pink thistle flower

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 22/07/2024

Here is a floof in case you need one It’s my cat Adele (sorry to break the bird chain) SO MUCH FLOOF!

A very fluffy almost-black cat is curled up on the top of a turquoise blue-green sofa. She is looking at you with green eyes and is sticking her pink tongue out

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 18/07/2024

Caterpillar of the day! I tried to move “the leaf” to see what someone was trying to show me 😂 Assuming I’ve IDed it correctly, it’s a wavy-lined heterocampa (Cecrita biundata) 🐛🌎

Side view of a mostly green caterpillar. It’s pretty big: at least 2 inches long and half an inch tall. It has a light brown head with a white stripe and the back is wavy like the edge of a leaf. It is eating the edge of a leaf and blends in really well even though it has brown patches on its side

Slightly out of focus shot of the caterpillar from the front, showing the light brown head with a white stripe on each side and a pair of black bumps at the top of the head. The brown patches on the side look almost coppery in places and you can see some brighter lime green on the caterpillar’s back

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 28/05/2024

- If you want a piece of furniture that moonlights as a musical instrument, other keyboards are better at being usable furniture. Ex. a lot of melodeons (mini-organs) are table-shaped. This is the one I got from my grandparents. (I don’t know where they got it from, but they were instrument nerds😁)

Something that looks like a wooden table about 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep. It’s made of dark brown wood with carved details around the sides and curved legs. But the front half of the top is a hinged panel

The hinged top on the table-thing from the last photo has been folded up and laid flat on the back half of the top. A set of black and white keys and a sheet music stand carved out wooden curlicues have been revealed

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 14/05/2024

The bare-throated tiger heron had been messing with (working up to eating?) a dead snake before I reached the boardwalk

The big brown/gray/black-striped heron with the yellow face and throat from before, standing on the boardwalk itself and holding a snake in their long pointy beak. This photo is from further back because I took it before the close-up of the heron on the post

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 14/05/2024

Please bring out your "#bird on a fence post" photos if you've got them! Or squirrels or whoever else too! Bare-throated tiger heron (technically on a boardwalk post) Western cattle egrets (one is not like the others) All from Palo Verde National Park, Costa Rica 🌿🪶

A big (approx 2 foot tall) brown/gray/black-striped heron with bright yellow skin on their face and throat is standing on the railing post of a boardwalk. There are greenish brown grasses and wetland plants in the background

In the middle distance, five white egrets are perched on the wooden fenceposts of a barbed wire fence. There is a white horse standing in front of the next fence post where you might expect a sixth egret to be. There is grass in front of the fence and grayish green shrubs behind it

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 13/04/2024

This is like asking for someone's 1 favorite book, but if I have to pick one, I'll go with this caterpillar in the Aristotelia corallina species complex*. They use all the resources the acacias provide for ants *it's still unclear whether this is the real A. corallina or an undescribed species

A tiny red-and-white striped caterpillar stretching out of a hole in an acacia thorn and drinking out a of a little bump on a leaf base (an extrafloral nectary). The caterpillar is surrounded by a thin cobweb-like silk web

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 24/03/2024

Not a dipterist, but alula can be quite large (see photo) and can stick up when folded. Halteres look like little joysticks...even though I know they help flies pull off some of their flying tricks, I don't really understand how Fig. from Walker et al. 2011: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Close-up of a photo from a scientific paper, showing the base of a fly's wing. A large flap labeled Al for alula is outlined in black. It's wider than the rest of the wing base

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 11/02/2024

For #SuperbOwl Day, my only decent #owl photo of a ferruginous pygmy-owl (Glaucidium brasilianum) in Costa Rica. Its name is practically longer than it is! #birds 🪶

A very small and oval (dare I say almost football-shaped?) owl with a brown head and back and brown streaks on its white front, sitting on a tree branch. It has gold eyes and is staring directly at you. There are big green leaves in the background

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 08/02/2024

One of each Caterpillar at www.inaturalist.org/observations...

A fluffy brown-black cat with very green eyes sitting on someone's laptop to enforce work-life balance

A spiny greenish brown caterpillar doing a very good job of impersonating the spiny greenish brown twigs of the plant it's on

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 26/11/2023

Bicolored hawk and unidentified hummingbird studiously ignoring each other on a rainy day in Costa Rica (2018). #birds

A tree top with a white and gray hawk sitting on a branch the left and a seriously backlit and dark-looking hummingbird sitting on a twig on the right. They are facing opposite directions and seem to be studiously ignoring each other. The sky is cloudy.

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 19/09/2023

Kind of surprised I didn't get that, tbh. Possibly too much time spent reading about biology instead of hiking?

Witch/Wizard/Warlock/Mage/Sorcerer, etc, etc

Ooo, very magical! Inteligent, practical, and logical above all, you can often be found studying, writing, or just getting lost in your thoughts. You don't mind being around other people, but solitude is what you most prefer, and you don't really find yourself believing in things like "soulmates" or "destiny". You just live life the best you can, and whatever happens happens, y'know?

....continues with more personality traits, but omg, I forgot to copy the text before I closed out the window and there are 2 more paragraphs. The rest is available upon request, sorry...

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Christina Baer, Ph.D. @bugbaer.bsky.social · 08/09/2023

I saved my insistence for maintaining that this Very Dignified Cat (aka Adele) was dark brown, not black, and longhaired, not mediumhaired. (The shelter listed her are a black domestic mediumhair cat)

A very fluffy dark cat lying belly-up on the couch. Her paws are black, but most of her fur is a dark almost reddish brown

The same cat, but sitting upright and staring at you with bright green eyes. The long fur on her neck and chest is also not really black

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