In honor of the flatfishes...

The above image arrived in my email inbox last night from the preeminent coral reef expert and blogger extraordinaire Rick MacPherson of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice & Sunsets.

The subject line simply read "I'm just sayin..."

The pun came from his recent Carnival of the Blue #22 in which he wrote of my post on Flatfish Eyes & Recapitulation Theory :

More Weird Fish Eyes
If you still need some additional fish weirdness, Carnival of the Blue first-timer (hopefully long-timer) Daniel Brown of Biochemical Soul dredges-up memories of 9AM Developmental Biology class as he explores the evolution of flatfish eyes. This post has it all... some ontogeny, some phylogeny, some eyeball migration. Perhaps with the right encouragement we can get Daniel to focus exclusively on the ocean and change his blog title to Biochemical Sole?

Rick's wit never ceases...

Go check him out to see what I mean.

I'm actually finding myself craving fish now.

I'm quite excited to hear the lovely voices of the people behind the best marine science writing.

In addition, the Current edition of the carnival, hosted by Rick is replete with wonderful oceanic goodness. So go check it out, and be sure to stay tuned for the upcoming podcast.

In fact, he kindly included my own post on Flatfish Eyes & Recapitulation Theory. His description:

More Weird Fish Eyes
If you still need some additional fish weirdness, Carnival of the Blue first-timer (hopefully long-timer) Daniel Brown of Biochemical Soul dredges-up memories of 9AM Developmental Biology class as he explores the evolution of flatfish eyes. This post has it all... some ontogeny, some phylogeny, some eyeball migration. Perhaps with the right encouragement we can get Daniel to focus exclusively on the ocean and change his blog title to Biochemical Sole?

I considered the name change. In fact I considered changing scientific fields completely and moving into studying flatfish development - just to fit this blog into his punny joke. I decided against it...

And if you have yet to make check them out, be sure to check out Carnival of Evolution #9 at Moneduloides, and Circus of the Spineless #36 at Invertebrate Diaries.

The infamous Rick MacPherson of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice & Sunsets came up with his own little game wherein he determined a set of search terms that would result in his own blog ranking as the top hit (such as "coral reefs, conservation, queer" and "zelnio, conservation, blog, coral, drunk").

The exercise ended up being more entertaining than I anticipated. My goal was to find the most entertaining or impressive search terms.

In no particular order, here are some search terms that will give you Biochemical Soul as the #1 Google search hit (no quotes or advanced googling were used):

• andrew kevin dueling penises (that explains some of my traffic - it's totally invertebrate biology-related - I swear)
• miriam oyster orgies (also invertebrate biology-related)
• magnum p.i. blue whale
• daniel darwin beard
• timber rattlesnake camouflage
• flatfish eye adaptation
• aye-aye finger adaptation
• spaghetti monster animation
• heron catfish video
• daniel d brown ("daniel brown" doesn't pull this blog until results page 2)

Interestingly, I almost capture the the entire history of heart evolution - pretty sweet:

• worm heart evolution (2nd behind a "pet heart-worm" site)
• fly heart evolution
• fish heart evolution
• frog heart evolution
• reptile heart evolution
• bird heart evolution (#2 search result)
• mammal heart evolution
• human heart evolution (page 2 of results)

How about it Christie, Kevin, Allie, DNLee, Glendon? Care to give it a go?