iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 15h

Most animals change proportions as they grow. A coiled shell doesn't have to. Add one turn and the whole shell is just 2.2x bigger, same shape. Watch this one grow forever without changing at all. 🧪🐌 #HowToBuildAGiant #MarineLife

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MBARI @mbarinews.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

That moment when you spot a deep-sea cutie 😍⁠ ⁠ Deep-sea hatchetfishes in the family Sternoptychidae cleverly camouflage themselves in the dark depths of the ocean with light-producing organs along their bellies. This counterillumination allows them to hide from predators that may be lurking below.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Turns out a tusk shell is basically a snail that never got around to coiling. In Raup's model it's a tube flaring so fast it finishes only a third of a turn, set far from the axis (Right). Pull translation instead and you get a corkscrew (Left). 🧪🐚 #SciArt

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Great question, but translation alone just gives you a corkscrew. To get a tusk you crank a different dial: make the tube widen so fast it never finishes a single coil, and keep it far from the axis so it only gently bends.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Snail architecture runs on a surprisingly short list of decisions. Here's one of them: how far to slide down your own axis while you grow. Barely at all gets you a flat coil. A lot gets you a tower. 🧪🐌 #SciArt #marinelife

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There are only about 20 species of whip-lash squid. Each keeps two very long tentacles tucked in sheaths on its biggest pair of arms, then unrolls them to hover head-down and fish the seafloor like flypaper. The name comes from those whip-like tentacles. 🦑 🧪 #marinelife

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In 1962 David Raup used an IBM 7090 and a plotter to turn four numbers into snails. Turn one dial, translation, and a flat ramshorn coil becomes a planospiral snail becomes a tower shell. 🧪🐌 #MolluscMonday #SciArt

Three green-on-black wireframe shells made from Raup's coiling model. Left: a flat, planispiral coil. Middle: a typical snail with a short spire. Right: a tall, many-whorled tower shell. Only the translation parameter T differs between them.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I saw the movie Poltergeist when I was way to young. I was scared of our living room TV for months.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Feel free to use away. The more I play with it, I am thinking of potentially some short publication with the script so people can use it for whatever. Thoughts? But I kind of also want to do a paper where I re-explore Raups overall morphospace but adding body size in it.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Well there is another hour of my life. Orange are the forbidden ones!

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A Louisiana regent says UL Lafayette, Louisiana Tech, and ULM should drop to FCS football. Yes, please. UL's athletics deficit is $20 million. Meanwhile our budget crisis is threatening classes, research, and staff. Twenty million is a lot to those who care about education. 🧪 #academia

thenewsstar.com

Louisiana regent suggests Tech, ULL, ULM drop to lower football tier

University of Louisiana System President Rick Gallot says board will have 'hard decisions' to make about football at Louisiana Tech, ULL and ULM.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

More geekery tonight. Trying to make sure my code worked as intended and generating Raup's Figure 2 from his 1962 paper "Computer as Aid in Describing Form in Gastropod Shells" #marinelife #SciArt #paleobiology #MolluscMonday #paleontology

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Finally got around to making Raup's mollusk shell model work in R. Also spent too much time trying to give a retro look. #marinelife #molluscmonday

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Blue Collar | White Coat Podcast @bcwcpodcast.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Some academics are truly "elite" thanks to the real world work experience they cultivate before even applying to a program like Dr. Craig's. Episode 4 is out now! #STEM #STEMjobs

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 22/09/2026

Tyrannosaurus xkcd.com/3300/

Comic. [Person with long hair pointing to diagram with Tyrannosaurus Rex standing next to a person.] PERSON: We now believe the primary prey of Tyrannosaurus Rex was these humans who kept standing next to it for scale.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

For no particular reason at all, Ed Sheeran is on my mind. Anyway: the gulper eel is almost all mouth, unhinging its jaw to swallow prey larger than itself before deflating to a thin whip. A whole animal built around the shape of you. 🐟 🧪 #marinelife

youtu.be

Watch this eel inflate its head like a balloon

YouTube video by Science Magazine

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Some glass sponges may be the oldest animals on Earth. Individuals of Monorhaphis chuni are estimated at over 11,000 years old, and they build a single skeletal spike up to 3m long, the largest natural glass structure any animal makes. 🧪 #SpongeThursday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Talking about this paper today in my undergraduate ecology course.

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Seth Finnegan @sethf.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Everyone had their own weird way of coping with the pandemic, and mine was photographing nudibranchs on the California coast. Fun to have been able to parlay that into a PNAS cover, and to have been part of such interesting work led by @isaacpesca.bsky.social & @drcraigmc.bsky.social! #nudibranch

A close-up of an aeolid nudibranch sea slug, Phidiana hiltoni, on a piece of kelp. The slug is translucent white with orange-banded rhinophores and gray cerata with pale orange tips.

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Holly Bik @hollybik.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Never thought I’d wake up and see @echinoblog.bsky.social @noaa.gov on the front page of the celebrity gossip subreddit. But I guess we have two new #deepsea celebrities! www.reddit.com/r/popculture...

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

When your postdoc @isaacpesca.bsky.social is so awesome they give him the cover of PNAS! Excellent photo by @sethf.bsky.social! And excellent coauthors of @pedromonarrez.bsky.social @tomjwebb.bsky.social among others.

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Dr. Or M. Bialik |📚|🔬|🌊|⚒️ @obialik.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Climate change affects the physiology of animals in different ways. Many shrink, but some grow, and the change can also depend on where the animal lives. 🧪 Link: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2606099123

Change in standardized body size slopes for different invertebrates for low vs high emission scenarios

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 04/09/2026

As the climate changes, some mollusks will shrink to half their current size, while others will grow up to 15% larger, depending on lineage and location. The ecological and social consequences for marine ecosystems could be profound. In PNAS: ow.ly/iUo450ZJsTl

McDonald's dorid, a California nudibranch representing the molluscan diversity examined in this study.
CREDIT: Seth Finnegan.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"You talk most like someone from Arkansas" Nailed it.

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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 03/09/2026

[Commentary] Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, the unique and unstudied Orca Basin is threatened by corporate plans to dump organic waste for carbon storage. In this op-ed, deep-sea biologist @drcraigmc.bsky.social warns that this ancient deep-sea ecosystem is a living system, not a waste repository.

mongabay.cc

Gulf of Mexico’s unique Orca Basin shouldn’t become a carbon dump (commentary)

It’s 3 a.m. and I am standing on the deck of a research vessel, staring into water so dark it looks solid. I feel what I felt standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, watching the sun set: there are…

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Jo Wolfe, PhD @jopabinia.bsky.social · 15/05/2024

#InsertAnInvert2024 WHO ARE IN THE FALSE CRABS. The Anomura, on the right side, include: - squat lobsters (contains porcelain crabs) - more squat lobsters (contains Lomis, yeti crabs) - mole crabs - hermit crabs (contains king crabs, coconut crabs) 🦀🦑🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Gross morphology in the convergent evolution of representative true crabs (Brachyura), porcelain crabs (Porcellanidae), hairy
stone crabs (Lomisidae), and king crabs (Lithodoidea). Losses (open circles) observed in frog crabs (Raninoidea). Topology simplified from our previous papers. Body plan features are assumed to be present in the common ancestor of each marked lineage but may vary considerably within each group.
Photo credits: (A, N) Ondřej Radosta; (B, D, H, I) Tin- Yam Chan; (C, E, G, K, M) Arthur Anker; (F) Ling-Kuang Tseng; (J) Michael Marmach; (L) Darryl Felder

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

A company got EPA approval to sink 20 tons of sugarcane waste into the Gulf's Orca Basin to "store carbon." Even if they blanketed the entire basin, it would offset less than a week of human emissions, while risking one of the rarest ecosystems on Earth. I wrote for @mongabay on why. 🧪 #marinelife

news.mongabay.com

Gulf of Mexico’s unique Orca Basin shouldn't become a carbon dump (commentary)

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tomjwebb @tomjwebb.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Delighted to see this out now in PNAS - how do we expect marine mollusc body sizes to react to the coming decades of climate change? Check our Craig's thread for details…

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

A very on-theme #MolluscMonday: our new PNAS paper projects how 23,000+ mollusc species will change size as the ocean warms. Most shrink, some grow, and which happens comes down to body plan. Clams downsize. Squid may bulk up. 🦑 🧪 #MolluscMonday #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife

pnas.org

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Huge congratulations to lead author Isaac Trindade-Santos, and to coauthors Tom Webb, Noel Heim, and the team. Built on the MOBS database and OBIS. Open access, all code and data public. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant #marinelife Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

doi.org

Nonuniform resizing of marine life under climate change | PNAS

Global warming is often predicted to drive universal declines in animal body size, but empirical evidence remains equivocal. This is particularly t...

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

It matters beyond size. Shifts in the size structure of ocean life ripple into carbon storage, nutrient cycling, and the seafood billions of people depend on. And the gap between low and high emissions is enormous, so the scale of this is still ours to decide. 🧪 #marinelife

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

This is the "geography of climate change" meeting the biology of body size. The Arctic is losing oxygen fastest; the North Atlantic warming hard and losing productivity; the Southern Ocean barely changing. Each basin hands its animals a different problem. 🧪

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Why so idiosyncratic? Body plan. Shell-builders pay a steep energetic cost to calcify in warm, acidifying water, so they shrink. Cephalopods skip that cost entirely. The same climate, filtered through different bodies, gives opposite results. 🧪 #molluscmonday

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The twist: it isn't all decline. Some groups get bigger. Cephalopods and scaphopods are projected to grow in the Arctic. Squid and octopus, with high metabolisms and no heavy shell to build, may actually do well in a warming, oxygen-shifting ocean. 🦑 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Under high emissions, mean body size drops in 68% of cases (34 of 50 class-basin combinations), some clades shrinking ~16% in length. But because mass scales with length^3 that's up to a 46% loss in the mass of an average species. Small length changes, huge biomass consequences. 🧪 #HowToBuildAGiant

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Warming is often called a universal shrink ray: hotter water, smaller bodies. We tested that at global scale for the first time in a major marine group. It's not universal. Size is set by temperature, but also oxygen and food, and all three are shifting differently across the ocean. 🧪

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

New in PNAS today: we projected how climate change will reshape the body size of marine life across the entire ocean. 23,329 mollusc species, every ocean basin. The headline everyone expects is "life shrinks." The real answer is far stranger. 🧪 #marinelife www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

pnas.org

Nonuniform resizing of marine life under climate change | PNAS

Global warming is often predicted to drive universal declines in animal body size, but empirical evidence remains equivocal. This is particularly t...

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

This is correct. The heaviest record I could find for M. kaempferi was 13.6 kg with unsubstantiated claims of closer to 19kg. The record holding American Lobster may be actually bigger in terms of mass at 20.14kg

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Which is "bigger" depends entirely on how you measure size. Jaekelopterus was a much more massive and bulky animal overall (greater mass), while the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi) wins in pure width due to its exceptionally long legs.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Acadia, where the mountains run straight into the Atlantic and the forest meets granite meets cold sea. First place in the country to see the sunrise for part of the year. Worth the early alarm.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

A mile down, eighteen miles across, and almost two billion years of rock laid bare from rim to river. The Grand Canyon doesn't really photograph. It's too big for the frame and too big for the brain.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Petrified Forest. A few of my own photos. Trees that fell over 200 million years ago, turned to solid quartz, the wood grain now made of stone and every color of the rainbow. You pick up a log and you're holding a Triassic riverbank. What a place.

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Dr Craig R McClain @drcraigmc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Great Smoky Mountains. The most biodiverse park in the country...and the most visited. . These mountains are older than the Atlantic Ocean, older than the dinosaurs, worn soft by unimaginable time. The national park that feels most like home.

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