1/24/2021: Isopod insanity 2: Project boogaloo

After a few days without snow I was beginning to feel the spring vibes creeping in, only to have that shattered with another downfall of the oppressive frozen sky fluid. It’s at these times I must double down on my resolve and recall that finishing projects and getting through the backlog is all that matters before the temptress call of fair weather drags me back outside in spring.

I’ve been busily adding extremely long-overdue isopod pages to the site, and while I’m a bit late to the party there, I have been honing my claws in secret the last few years. Plenty of fancy species and a few morphs have popped up in my absence, but many are finding these to fall apart under scrutiny. I’ll go into detail on this eventually, but some “morphs” such as “Ghost” have mounting evidence of being heterozygous phenotypes. These sort of mix ups, as I called out to some peoples’ dismay and criticism years ago, are now becoming common place.

While I will not claim to be some sort of master geneticist (my area of expertise is in detritivore ecology, especially isopods), I have made the (more than) acquaintance of a professional geneticist in the last few months, and apparently my incessant babbling about true-breeding lines and incomplete dominance has withstood the scrutiny of her expertise. In short, expect some big changes to isopod keeping as peoples’ lines of simple recessive mutations continue to not prove out, and more questions are asked as to why things are not looking the way they should.

That’s a can of worms for another day, though. For now, I must sort, prioritize, and cull 200+ project isopod bins within the next few weeks. Some things will come available (like the “Sherbert” I posted a few days ago), some things will be culled due to lack of potential or proving out, and many new projects will be split and started.

-Kyle