THIS IS IT!!
My faith in the power of the social internet has been revived thank you

All I end up finding when I try to Google it is that one Dawkins quote

It seems like different mole species may have different strategies - the star-nosed mole has lungs that are 1.8x bigger than expected for its size, whereas eastern moles seem to have adaptations in their hemoglobin (which delivers oxygen to tissues) that help them cope with elevated CO2 levels.

Anyway, extremely fun work, much appreciation for the researchers (Yi-Fen Lin & Elizabeth Dumont) & also @jexpbiol.bsky.social.

I am such a fan of scientific shenanigans & curiosity-driven research that helps us understand the weird & wonderful world that we get to live in. 🧪

And this is the motion they used to dig through more compact substrate:

So now we have movies of how moles dig in couscous!!

Basically, they found that the moles used different motions to dig depending on the characteristics of whatever they were digging through. This is the motion they used to dig through the looser substrate:

Scientists captured some moles & brought them into the lab, where they used Xray imaging to study how they moved through "substrate." Not dirt, though. Couscous (Osem®, original plain 😂) "Couscous was selected as the experimental substrate because of the even size and radio-opacity of the granules."

Anywayyy, just a reminder to consider that science isn't always (ever?) as objective as we like to think and that the same data can be interpreted/assessed in different ways & we should consider how our worldviews shape the questions we ask & how we approach them

"Consistent with this intuition, we found that all seven status measures analysed in [2023paper] are substantially correlated with paternal wealth."

Paternal wealth!!

"only when treating wealth itself as the focal status measure. For other measures studied, the effect of familial wealth on social status is ignored. However, familial wealth can obviously influence a wide range of conditions that affect offspring...

BUT the present paper notes "we found evidence of strong confounding between genetic and non-genetic contributions to familial resemblance in the data used in [2023paper]. The paper acknowledges the inheritance of material wealth from one’s parents as an example of non-genetic transmission...

For example, regarding a 2023 (!) paper on the inheritance of social status, the author says "The data is just very consistent with a really simple model of genetic transmission where what just matters is how many genes to we have in common, that will explain how much outcome we have in common."

The study of genetics & behavior is rife with confounding factors that are difficult to control for and are often discounted. While we inherit genes from our parents, we can also inherit a LOT of other things: wealth, social networks, values, the place we live, access to education, etc.

Also note that the use of "butt" is colloquial here & just used to mean the tail end - the worms' digestive system only has one hole that serves as both entrance and exit 😬

This is pretty unusual since for most animals, body axis polarity (i.e. which end is the front and which is the back) is very stable, so it's cool that this little guy can be so flexible with their body plan.

& instead of developing a new butt, the half with the head just grows another head. Now you have a worm with heads at both ends. But perhaps most bizarrely, this isn't a dead end - if the worm gets cut in half, both sections can grow new tails, turning back into normal worms with 1 head & 1 tail.

Let me explain. These worms can asexually reproduce by splitting in half the short way. So the original head stays a head, but develops a new tail, and the original middle part develops its own head (extremely scientific diagram below). But sometimes the worm makes a mistake...