iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

A beautiful longhorn beetle from Guyana #bugshot

Large longhorn beetle on the side of a tree. It is moss or bark colored with pleasing symmetric patterns.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Calumma sp., pimple-nosed chameleon from Madagascar #herp #photo

A tiny yellowish orange chameleon perched on the end of a leaf. It has a bump at the tip of its snout like a funny protruding nose which is characteristic of its genus

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

I love experimental fashion so much. Somerville Open Studios Artwear 2026 #fashion #somervillema

A model on a runway wearing an improbably large hooded fur coat that looks about 12 feet long. It is light blue fur with random dark blue circle.

A model with blue hair and pink leggings and matching pink heels wearing a giant cowl made of thousands of loops of VHS tapes. The interior of the cowl is decorated with the paper jacketing from blank VHS tapes of various brands.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

I got a Canon 100-500 just before my trip to Brazil in 2024, I was delighted by how fun it was to use. Here are a couple of my favorite shots, being a fish seems like a tough life. #wildlife #photography

Cormorant on the surface of a river with a pleco fish speared in its beak. The fish has squiggly dazzle camouflage patterns.

River otter in the water holding onto a catfish with its paws and happily chomping on the fish's face.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

I think of this line every time my dog dives into the snow

Duke Leto from the first Dune movie saying “Is that a worm?” followed by a brown pitbull dog diving into snow with his big chunky head

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Tess Gallagher @tessasaurus.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Excited to announce that my second manuscript, “Fossilised Melanosomes Reveal Colour Patterning in A Sauropod Dinosaur” has been published in @royalsociety.org !! Diplodocus scales are complex and diverse, and it turns out their color patterning was even more so. A 🧵🦕 1/26

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Introduce yourself with 5 animals you’ve seen in the wild: Blue-spotted salamander Maned wolf Ant-mimicking katydid Bullet ant Island scrub jay

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

My latest order from @portersqbooks.bsky.social along with a trio of biographies I picked up at the Boston Book Festival. In an era of book bans and AI slop, it sure feels nice to chat with authors and buy their books.

Penny: A Graphic Memoir by Karl Stevens
Homemade Ramen by Sho Spaeth
John Williams by Tim Greiving
Constantine Cavafy by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
Matisse at War by Christopher Gorham

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

I liked the world better when doing my hobbies was something to pursue just for the joy of it, instead of it being a brief period of escapism from the horrors of reality. Portrait of a refugee Charcoal on gouache-primed paper, 2.5 hour sitting from life

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Natee (they/them) @himmapaan.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

#Zavacephale. A very pretty new pachycephalosaur from early Cretaceous Mongolia. 🥰

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Glen Grambo 🇨🇦 @glengrambo.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Gracklepalooza continues with no signs of slowing! This male Common Grackle was heading over to the tree nearer the creek. It always amazes me how birds fly among tree branches so easily! #Birds #photography #wildlife 🪶

A male Common Grackle flys from a green spruce tree. His head and neck show its vivid blue iridescence!

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Peter Nguyen @dptbirder.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

I think I don’t have a choice by say this is my all time favorite Kingfisher photo I’ve had the chance of clicking The Queen of Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve fishing the moon 📷🌿🪶🌔

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Tapani Hopkins @tapani-hopkins.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

* Admitted, everyone always goes "canopy specialist?" whenever a forest species is rarely caught. - Laticoleus are really rare? Canopy specialists. - Only one Epirhyssa johanna ever caught? Could they be ⭐Canopy Specialists⭐? - Didn't see any elephants 🐘 today? Perhaps they're in the canopy?

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Jer Thorp @jerthorp.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

This is Costasiella kuroshimae, the sea sheep. It's not a nudibranch, it's a sacoglossan, another mollusc clade. The green color is a tip-off: sacoglossans are herbivorous where nudis are carnivores. Like nudibranchs they can eat things and then repurpose cells from them, in this case chloroplasts

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

I’m more of a dog person than a cat person, but this pair of kittens that live in a bike shop in Vietnam stole my heart. #caturday

A tiny white kitten with some black patches of fur in front of a bicycle shop

The black and white kitten sleeping next to an equally tiny orange kitten in a planter. They are absurdly cute

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Leaf cutter ants are so abundant in the tropics that it doesn't seem rare to find queens. But it's still jarring to see an ant the size of a ping pong ball. For scale comparison, the ant on the left side (probably a species of Monomorium) is what you'd call a normal sized ant. #invertebrates

A very large reddish-brown leaf cutter ant queen on a leaf. She has a big head, robust mandibles, a large pair of wings, and very large body segments filled with energy reserves for flying and laying eggs for a new colony. A small worker ant from an unrelated species happens to be next to her on the leaf, it looks puny by comparison.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

A weird looking treehopper from Costa Rica (Cladonota sp.) #invertebrates

A dark brown treehopper on a leaf. It has a large curved horn sprouting out of its head, and the ornamentation also goes along its back and sprouts up towards the tail end, so the entire insect looks horseshoe shaped.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

One of the prettiest (and most skittish) jumping spiders I've had the joy of photographing Anasaitis canalis, Costa Rica #invertebrates

A jumping spider with large round, dark eyes. Most of the spider is black, but it has a yellow furry face and iridescent blue setae on its chelicerae, palps, and legs.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

How did storks become mythical baby-deliverers? Every time I've seen one, they look like the kind of animal that would gleefully peck your eyeballs out.

Marabou stork perched on top of a dead tree. The bird has long, slender legs, black wings, a long droopy fleshy throat pouch dangling almost to its knees, a huge pointy beak, creepy beady eyes and a rough, patchy, nearly bald head.

Jabiru stork standing in a murky pond. The bird has an upright pose, huge white wings, a bloated red and black throat pouch full of water, black eyes, and a huge pointy beak.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Glup Shitto implies the existence of Glup Pisso

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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I still think about the time I delighted an English literature TA by successfully arguing Laertes from Hamlet was a great example of Robertson Davies' “Fifth Business” character trope because it was a novel approach to a character study assignment: triumphofthenow.com/2020/08/09/f...

The title of Fifth Business is explained twice in the book – once in an epigraph and, again, in a conversation towards the end of the novel.

Dunstan Ramsey, the narrator and protagonist, is “fifth business”, a character trope associated (apparently) with opera: not the hero, not the heroine, not the confidante, not the villain, but the other person – any other person – needed to make the world around these four important figures function.
From: https://triumphofthenow.com/2020/08/09/fifth-business-by-robertson-davies/

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Just like a car, you can use a bike to transport a boat. Unlike a car, you can strap the bike to the boat so you can float downstream as far as you want without having to backtrack.

A bicycle with a rolled up packraft strapped to the rear rack

View from the packraft on a river during a sunny day. The bicycle is strapped to the bow of the raft with ski straps

The packraft with bike attached pulled onto the shore of the river. The sun is getting low and the foliage above the river looks like it’s glowing

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Bronwen Scott @snailseyeview.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

We’ve looked at snails with one shell and slugs with no shells. Now let’s have a look at a snail with two shells, because Nature laughs at our puny attempts to pigeonhole. In today’s #AtoZ – J is for Julia (Juliidae) (1/9) Pic: © uwkwaj CC BY-NC

Small, perky snail with head poking out between its two shells. The snail has a pair of long, tubular tentacles. The shells are like clam shells, except they are vivid green. The hinge is at the top.

Julia exquisita: Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands. © uwkwaj CC BY-NC https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/166680082

In this photo, the snail is lying on its side with the hinge of the two shells pointing towards the camera. The shell and snail are both very bright green. The snail has white blotches on its back.

Julia exquisita: Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands. © uwkwaj CC BY-NC https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/263219540

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Common brown lemur (Eulemur fulvus), Madagascar

A lemur with a light brown furry body and a dark brown face and snout. It is clinging to a tree with its feet and right hand, and it is holding a piece of fruit to munch on in its left hand.

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Arthur Matte @arthurmatte.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

🚨 New Paper Alert! 🚨 🐜 How did ants evolve their highly specialized queens and workers? With @adriatica.bsky.social, we reveal a key evolutionary innovation: adult control over larval feeding unlocked extreme caste dimorphism and complex societies. 🧵👇 🔗 Read in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Quote post with a picture you took in a National Park. Rocky mountain elk (Cervus canadensis nelsoni) in Yellowstone National Park

An elk with a huge set of antlers lying down in a grassy field at dusk.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

One of the most beautiful spiders I've ever seen. Gasteracantha sp., Mozambique

A red and yellow orb weaver spider sitting in the middle of its web against a blue sky. The spider has robust mandibles and relatively short legs, but an extraordinary set of spines protruding from its abdomen. The largest pair of spines curves upwards like a pair of cow horns.

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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

my kingdom for an elected official who will stand up and defend the fact that the government employs people to test wastewater and send old people money and keep an eye on the bears in the park and make sue the people that scammed you

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Armando Rosario-Lebrón @rosariolebronentomology.com · 14/02/2025

Today, the USDA lost experts in Psylloidea, Thysanoptera, Cerambycidae, Hymenoptera, Pseudococcidae, and Malacology. This is a devastating loss of expertise, occuring without warning. Their union's official statement on the issue can be found here: aginspectors.org/2-14-2025-a-... #entomology 🧪

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2/14/2025: A message from the NAAE about the mass termination notices – National Association of Agriculture Employees | NAAE

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) queen, photographed in Ecuador #invertebrates

A very large reddish black ant queen who has shed her wings. She has yellow setae distributed on her legs and around her body. Her body segments are heavily sculptured and glossy. She has menacingly large eyes and robust mandibles. She is featured on an all white background, she was captive for the photograph but released afterward.

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Thomas Shahan @tshahan.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

A collection of handsome tortoise beetles (Cassidinae) 🐢🪲 1 Ischnocodia annulus "Ringed Tortoise Beetle", Belize, 2015 2 Aspidimorpha sp golden tortoise beetle, Mozambique, 2018 3 unknown metallic green tortoise beetle, Colombia, 2023 4 Deloyala guttata "Mottled Tortoise Beetle", Oklahoma, 2020

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Joshua Dysart @joshuadysart.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

I can't express how much I've seen USAID in action. Acholiland, Uganda, 2007. Iraqi Kurdistan, 2014. South Sudan, 2016. Wherever I've gone where human beings suffered, there was USAID. I'm not saying it doesn't have organizational problems, but it saves lives. It's the best of us. I'm so angry.

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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

usually when i’m learning old time songs i end up having to ‘eat around’ a lot of powerfully racist shit but sometimes they go the other way lol

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

A couple of oil portraits I’ve done lately, both 3 hour sessions from life. It took me a while to realize that skin colors can be anything in the rainbow, and sometimes you need to exaggerate the colors you perceive to get the painting to convey the vibrance of the living person.

A painting of a bald man in front of a red backdrop. He has a strong brow and an intense gaze

A portrait of a woman in front of a purple backdrop. She has glossy, luminous skin underneath a strong overhead light

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

If you see this post an archer.

A watercolor and ink sketch of an archerfish with legs spraying water at a knight.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Watching this female jaguar move around in her habitat was an absolute highlight from my trip to the Brazilian Pantanal. It's an open habitat with river access, so you can get some startlingly clear views of jaguars when they choose to be near the water. #mammals #wildlifephotography

A jaguar walking along a toppled log towards the viewer. It is raining, the log is slick and draped with dead plants.

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Kenneth Carpenter @ken1909.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

I guess this is how I will be remembered.

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WitmerLab at Ohio University @witmerlab.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

The darkest dark meat I’ve seen is from hooded seals. Their muscles are so loaded with myoglobin for their insanely deep dives that their muscles are so red they’re almost black. Amazing animals but a challenge to dissect.

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Rachel Quinlan @ FanX Salt Lake - A809 @rachelquinlan.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Goliath Beetle - watercolor, ink From my insect series. Prints:https://www.etsy.com/listing/933501341/gilded-order-goliath-beetle-print? #SciArt #invertebrate #entomology #tradtionalart #art

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Isopod Fan Account @bedupolker.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Utah's most special guy, the Coral Pink Sand Dunes tiger beetle, only occupies a 1800m x 300m area in the state park of the same name. This guy is NOT going places!

A realistic tiger beetle illustration against a beige canvas texture background. The beetle has a mostly white abdomen with a brown stripe down the middle, its thorax and head are iridescent green. It has large, jagged mandibles and fairly thin long legs, as well as fur on its underside. Text: Utah's most special guy.

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Anton Sorokin @antonsrkn.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Finally! After a few years of trying to find the right spot & time things right. I've photographed adult California tiger salamanders (Ambystoma californiense) underwater as they return to vernal ponds to breed. I believe mine are the 1st UW images of wild CA tiger sals. 🦎🌎🐸

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

A scorpion fluorescing under UV light, Anza Borrego State Park, CA. #invertebrate

A photograph of a scorpion in the desert at night. The scorpion is in the beam of a UV flashlight and is glowing bright blue-green.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Woke up to this view of my dog this morning

A dog sitting up underneath a blanket. He’s fully covered so it looks like a kid’s Halloween ghost costume

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Quick oil painting of a model named Eva from a session I hosted tonight. It amuses me that nobody gives a shit about AI in spaces where creativity really happens. Tech doesn't help me draw proportions or mix colors. There's no substitute for working with real materials and a live model.

An oil painting portrait of a woman with medium length dark brown hair. She has angular features and a serious expression.

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Carolyn Kay Smith @carolynkaysmith.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

This was an interesting commission for a client who had seen a Pileated Woodpecker on a tree in his yard, but did not get a photo. He wanted to celebrate that moment with a painting. I visited the tree so that I could paint its portrait, cracks, fungi, and all. #birds #birdart #sciart

Acrylic painting of a Pileated Woodpecker clinging to the side of an old, battered tree.

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Jason Jong @plesiomorphy.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

One of my favorite kinds of ant, an Odontomachus sp. trapjaw ant from the Ecuadorean Amazon. I was enchanted by them walking along a log and occasionally passing through a cluster of tiny mushrooms. Spent over an hour to get this shot, and it got printed in this year's ESA calendar! #insects

A shiny black trap jaw ant with its mandibles spread wide open. The ant is walking through a bunch of mushrooms that are barely larger than it. It looks like a bizarre creature in a fantasy landscape.

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