iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Great thread on the "palm" of a fish's fin (and those illustrations...!)

Reposted by Seth Donoughe

Samuel Church @shchurch.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌

Physalia megalista, a cnidiran with a gas filled float, raised sail, and long blue tentacles hanging below. Image credit: Dalila Destanović

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

"given the very likely course of AI improvements over the next few years, how EXACTLY should I change my work in my field right now" is an extremely practical question. I liked this exercise by @jefftk.com to think through some specific answers for his research group's work

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Career update: About a year ago, I became the AIxBio group leader at SecureBio, a research non-profit. We study how rapidly accelerating AI is changing biology research, with a particular focus on making sure we mostly get the upsides. Check out this thread for our new paper:

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

A scanning electron micrograph zoom-in of a single wing scale from a pantry moth (Plodia interpunctella)—you know, the ones in your baking supplies. Can't wait until somebody discovers how the underlying cell takes on such a wild shape & how the ECM is laid down. Width of the image is ~8 microns.

A scanning electron micrograph of a wing scale. It is a flat structure with 8 long ridges and many tiny cross-ridges. It is also punctuated with holes.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

As insect wings develop, they form "crumpled up" in a very particular way. Unlike origami, there are no crisp folds. Then, at adulthood, the wings emerge and open up. Here is a cricket hindwing that I prepped from a juvenile, compared to an adult wing (from Turchyn & Popadić, FEVO 2024) 🧪

A fluorescent micrograph of a crumpled insect wing, with muscles and cuticle highlight in different colors. Scale bar of 200µm. The whole wing is about 1mm across.

A wild-type female hindwing from a cricket, mounted flat. The whole thing is maybe 10mm across.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Geometric order at multiple scales. This is an optical slice into the eggshell of a fruit fly. Every dot is the cross-section of a tiny pillar holding up the "roof" that is the outer surface of the egg. The black polygons are cavities left where cellular interfaces used to be. 🧪

A fluorescent image of an insect eggshell. Polygons with black edges, each of which is filled with a quasi-orderly arrangement of tiny blobs. A scale bar that is approximately the width of one polygon is labeled "20 µm"

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 04/08/2023

You know those "veins" on the wings of insects? In some species, they join together with surprisingly complex mechanical linkages. This is an electron micrograph we captured of a vein joint from a damselfly. Note how the cuticle spikes allow more flexibility in one direction than the other. 🧪

An SEM of a vein joint from a damselfly. There is an horizontal cuticle strut, with two other struts meeting it perpendicularly. Where they meet, the other struts have spikes protruding towards the horizontal one.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 02/08/2023

A larva of the "lesser house fly" Fannia canicularis, illustrated in the Manual of Nearctic Diptera. This book has astonishingly detailed and loving drawings of larvae. 🧪

A pen and ink drawing of the "lesser house fly" Fannia canicularis, illustrated in the Manual of Nearctic Diptera. The surface has detailed textural features.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 13/07/2023

~Embryo gymnastics~ In some insect species, the developing embryo does half of a backwards somersault (a movement called "katatrepsis"). Kozo Miyakawa captured this process in a dragonfly in a 1987 paper w/ tons of pen & ink illustrations. 🧪 (freely available: aesj.co-site.jp/raiejp.html)

A series of 7 stages of dragonfly embryogenesis, showing the embryo re-orient itself by doing a backwards flip.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 11/07/2023

The old descriptive embryology papers had some gems of hand-drawn illustration. These are drawings of the developing embryo of a cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae), a species that is often an unwelcome muncher of your kale and bok choy plants. by L.E.S. Eastham (Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., 1930) 🧪

Four pen and ink drawings of insect embryos. At these stages, the embryos have the shape of a blobby worm with constrictions between each body segment.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 10/07/2023

Tardigrade eggs! 🧪 Some bizarre surfaces on these things. I'm trying (and failing) to imagine the cellular processes that give rise to the branched surface structures. Any ideas? Let me know. From Vecchi et al 2021: jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/75978

SEM images of tardigrade eggs. The eggs are spherical with regularly spaced, lobed protrusions emerging from the surface.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 10/07/2023

Portrait of a two-spotted field cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus), taken with my collaborator Taro Nakamura 🧪 No need for chopsticks or fork if you have eating utensils built-in on your face.

Macro photo of a cricket, viewing the head front-on.

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Seth Donoughe @donoughe.bsky.social · 06/07/2023

Wings from a speckle-winged rangeland grasshopper (Arphia conspersa). This specimen was collected by Wayne Schennum in CO in 1973, & then I recently imaged it at the Chicago Field Museum. Wayne passed away in 2021, leaving a wealth of notes & specimens that are still giving rise to new discoveries.

A forewing and hindwing from a grasshopper (Arphia conspersa)

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