An unexpected bird in Honkai: Star Rail and China’s war on sparrows

Source at https://jgeekstudies.org/.In April 2023, the gacha game Honkai: Star Rail was launched, published by miHoYo/HoYoverse, a Chinese company now very famous for its hit game Genshin Impact. The game is a space opera focusing on a group of interstellar adventurers that travels across the universe to eliminate dangerous artifacts known as Stellarons. The player builds their team with a variety of anime-style characters (23 in total as of writing) earned from a brutal1 gacha mechanic

Cicadas in Japanese video games and anime

Source at https://jgeekstudies.org/.If you ever watched an anime, chances are at some point you have heard an incessant buzzing sound in the background. Those are cicadas, the sound of summer in Japan. Summer only truly arrives when the cicadas start singing (Kendall, 2014). Whenever it is summer in an anime, TV series, movie, or game, you can be almost sure to hear cicadas on the background. Their sound is an easy and straightforward way to set the atmosphere and impart the feel of a Japanese summer (McKirdy, 2019). Many people don’t pay much attention to nature, be it the real thing or in fiction, so if you think you have never heard cicadas, just go back to one of the almost-mandatory episodes in your favorite anime (summer holidays, festival/fireworks, beach trip) and check it out. They are so prominent that, as a Redditor put it, they are the best supporting character in every anime

Joining the dots: systematics and biogeography of Punctoidea land snails

Academic lecture at the conference ForBio Annual Meeting 2022, 28.11.22 - 30.11.22, Trondheim, Norway, arranged by ForBio: https://www.forbio.uio.no/</a

Phylogenetic position of African punctoid snails (Stylommatophora, Punctoidea, Trachycystinae)

The punctoid land snail family Charopidae, as currently defined, is a paraphyletic assemblage of taxa with Gondwanan distribution. It is represented in Africa largely by the pinwheels (genus Trachycystis and allies) and afrodontas (genus Afrodonta and allies), as well as a few additional genera, such as Reticulapex, Pilula, and Helenoconcha. Herein, a Bayesian inference phylogenetic analysis (using four molecular markers) is conducted to test whether these taxa belong to the Charopidae and, if so, what their position is in the phylogenetic tree. It is concluded that Reticulapex and Pilula do not belong to the Punctoidea and are thus transferred to the Acavidae and Helicarionoidea, respectively. The pinwheels and afrodontas form a monophyletic group, the most basal branch of “Charopidae”, here classified as the subfamily Trachycystinae. It possibly represents an old southern African lineage potentially dating back to the split of Gondwana, while the remaining “Charopidae” and Punctidae can be found in Zealandia and Australia, and later, in the Americas and Europe. If further studies support the present findings, the elevation of Trachycystinae to the family level might be warranted. Finally, Flammoconchinae is also identified as a New Zealand subfamily of “Charopidae”

The sea slugs of Shiroi Suna no Aquatope

Source at https://jgeekstudies.org/.Shiroi Suna no Aquatope (白い砂のアクアトープ) is a new anime by P.A. Works that started airing in the summer season of 2021 (Fig. 1). In a broad sense (to avoid spoilers), the anime focuses on the daily life of the staff working in a small aquarium in Okinawa. Its official title in English is The Aquatope on White Sand and, from this point on, we’ll refer to it as Aquatope for simplicity

A new species of Megalobulimus from the early Holocene of southeastern Brazil (Gastropoda, Strophocheilidae)

A new species of megasnail, Megalobulimus diluvianus sp. nov., is herein described based on subfossil material from limestone caves in the area of Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais state, southeastern Brazil. The specimens come from a context of archaeological strata of early Holocene age. Considering the morphological features of the shell, the new species seems closely allied to the so-called “Megalobulimus bronni complex”, whose representatives inhabit the tropical to subtropical Atlantic plateau of southeastern Brazil. Megalobulimus diluvianus sp. nov. is considered to be presently extinct (substituted by M. oblongus in the stratigraphical record)

Testing the Astolfo Effect on newly-released servants in Fate/Grand Order

Source at https://jgeekstudies.org/.Back in 2021, we wrote an article defining the Astolfo Effect. That is what happens when a pop culture representation of a character (fictional or otherwise) becomes more popular than the original. We named it after Astolfo, one of Charlemagne’s paladins and arguably an obscure character in the works that make up the Matter of France and in later literature related to it (such as Orlando Furioso, in which Astolfo plays an important role). Astolfo only achieved great popularity due to his incarnation in the light novel/manga/anime Fate/Apocrypha and the game Fate/Grand Order (henceforth FGO)

A new giant petrel (Macronectes, Aves: Procellariidae) from the Pliocene of Taranaki, New Zealand

A new species of giant petrel, Macronectes tinae sp. nov., is described from the Pliocene deposits of South Taranaki, New Zealand. The holotype is a near complete skull and the paratype a fragmentary left humerus; both come from the Tangahoe Formation, dating from the late Pliocene (Piacenzian or “Waipipian”; age estimated as ca. 3.36–3.06 Ma). The new species of giant petrel is the first fossil Macronectes ever reported. It is morphologically similar to the two present-day Macronectes spp., but it was a smaller bird. The skull is diagnosed by its overall smaller size, a proportionately longer apertura nasi ossea, and potentially by a shorter os supraocciptale. The humerus is diagnosed from both species by a proportionately less deep shaft, a more prominent medial portion of the epicondylus ventralis, and a larger and fusiform fossa medialis brachialis. The Tangahoe Formation is proving to be a remarkable source of marine vertebrate fossils and an important piece of the puzzle in understanding the evolution and biogeography of seabirds

iNaturalist as a tool in the study of tropical molluscs

Although terrestrial gastropods are remarkably diverse, our knowledge of them is still lacking, especially for species from the Global South. As such, new tools to help researchers collect data on these organisms are very welcome. With this in mind, we investigated Brazilian observations on iNaturalist to assess the feasibility of the data available on the platform as a basis for studies on the tropical terrestrial gastropod fauna. The observations on iNaturalist were filtered by country, Brazil, and higher taxa, namely Eupulmonata, Cyclophoroidea and Helicinoidea, yielding a sample of 4,983 observations. These observations were then reviewed in search of records of rare or little-known species, species found outside their previously known range, and interesting ecological interactions. Exotic species made up 35% to 39% of the sampled iNaturalist records. The most commonly observed species were Lissachatina fulica (Bowdich, 1822), Bradybaena similaris (Fe´russac, 1822), Drymaeus papyraceus (Mawe, 1823), Drymaeus interpunctus (E. von Martens, 1887), Limacus flavus (Linnaeus, 1758), Meghimatium pictum (Stoliczka, 1873), Cornu aspersum (O. F. Mu¨ller, 1774), Vaginulus taunaisii (Fe´russac, 1821), Ovachlamys fulgens (Gude, 1900), and Bulimulus tenuissimus (Fe´russac, 1832). In total, 166 observations were deemed of interest to our purposes (e.g., rare species, range extensions, ecological interactions), totalling 46 identified species and 16 observations identified at genus level. Among the selected observations, we found pictures of live specimens of species that were previously known only from their shells, such as Megalobulimus pergranulatus (Pilsbry, 1901), bringing to light their appearances in life. Two potentially new species belonging to the genera Plekocheilus Guilding, 1827 and Megalobulimus K. Miller, 1878 were revealed. Additionally, we found records of living individuals of two species that were previously presumed to be possibly extinct, Leiostracus carnavalescus Simone & Salvador, 2016, and Gonyostomus egregius (Pfeiffer, 1845). We take the opportunity to discuss individual records of interest, evaluate the quality of the data and possible improvements, as well the potential and implications of the use of the iNaturalist platform for research in Brazil and other tropical countries. While iNaturalist has its limitations, it holds great potential to help document biodiversity in the tropics

A practical implication of the Astolfo Effect: bias in AI generated images

Source at https://jgeekstudies.org/.The year of 2022 saw a huge advance in AI technology, especially Large Language Models, or LLMs. This culminated in the release of Chat GPT, an AI Chatbot assistant that, as of the time of this writing, is wowing the public with its uncanny performance. However, chatbots are not the only application of LLMs. One such application is the artificial generation of images. Although such idea is not a novel one (it dates back to the 1970s; Elgammal, 2022), the advancements on large language models allowed a new breakthrough in what these methods are able to achieve. A non-obvious application of such models is as a “probe” for bias in its learning set. Since these models are trained on public datasets collected from the Internet, they tend to reflect the inherent biases present in human generated content. As such, we see the advent of AI generated image as an opportunity to further test the ‘Astolfo Effect’ hypothesis, as first outlined by Tomotani & Salvador (2021)