November 25, 2017 at 12:39AM

Today I learned: 1) Two new butterfly anatomy facts! Firstly, butterfly proboscuses don't work the way I thought. I always assumed they were like needles, and that butterflies stick them into nectar-rich flowers and suck up the nectar like a straw. I was sorely mistaken. In fact, butterfly proboscuses come in two parts, left and right, that zip together. The center of this double-proboscus structure forms a canal. The tip of the proboscus isn't just an open end -- it's actually more like a sponge, with lots of layers of tiny pores. Liquid is drawn into the pores by capillary action, eventually bleeding into the central canal. In the canal, liquid forms little tiny bridges between proboscus zipper teeth, kind of like water caught between teeth of a comb. Some fancy fluid dynamics that I don't understand draws the liquid up, aided by a bit of suction generated by an inflatable air sack in the butterfly's head. Okay, second new anatomy fact -- in addition to antannae, butterflies have a pair of antenna-like fuzzy bits that rest right up against the head, next to their eyes. A bit of googling tells me that they're called "labial palps", and that they're essentially used for smelling. Some up-close observation of a butterfly suggests to me that they're also used as windshield wipers to clean their eyes. 2) So, everyone knows that Dolly the sheep was the first cloned mammal. Some know that Dolly died early, with pretty bad arthritis and some other medical problems. That's one of the reasons scientists haven't pursued mammalian cloning very much -- it looks like cloning isn't very good for mammals, for reasons nobody could really understand. Well... now it looks like Dolly was just an outlier. There were four other sheep cloned from the same cell line as Dolly, and they all lived pretty normal, healthy lives. Moreover, it seems that arthritis is super-common in that breed of sheep, and that it isn't particularly unusual for a sheep her age to get arthritis. Now, cloning isn't *totally* healthy -- clones tend to have more difficult, dangerous births, and require more care as infants, but once they're grown they seem to do just fine. Also, I didn't realize that mammalian cloning *has* in fact been used commercially to reproduce extremely valuable breeding cows and steers. This isn't quite new news, but for some reason this has hit some popular news outlets lately. For a reputable source, I'd check out The Atlantic's article on the subject: http://ift.tt/2mXE11y 3) There are some really strange-looking lobsters out there. Today I learned about one of these -- the slipper lobster. The slipper lobster looks a bit like someone painted a small Maine lobster gray and squished it from nose to tail. It's very squat, almost pug-nosed. It has no claws, just arms ending in shell plates. It also has the unfortunate double distinction of being endangered and incredibly tasty. Facts #1 and #3 are courtesy of the Denver Butterfly Pavilion, which it turns out is a zoo of all kinds of different invertebrate species. Some highlights of mine include a glassed-in honeybee hive, some really spectacular orb weaving spiders, two foot-long isopods, and, of course, the butterfly garden.