The Book of Esther, ants, flute music, etc.

[cahn]

(Or: December 2019: the month D would say to me before bed, "What were you doing tonight, giant ants or Fritzmas?")

Traditionally I make a post here on the media I consumed for Yuletide and have a more conventional reveal post elsewhere. This year I have a more conventional reveal post as usual, and in addition because all the (two other) people who are interested are here, I also have a collaboration-detail post for Frederician RPF here :)

I don't have a lot to say about canon this year, as I said most of it in the fic, I think. I did learn some things related to Bible/Tanakh/Book of Esther and my feelings thereof, ants, and flutes. A small sampler of weird things I learned tangentially (none of this actually made it directly into any final drafts):

-Apparently I have some dreadful mixed feelings about Mordecai (which were flagged in beta, lol). (Especially the bit where Esther goes "so, I might die!" which I feel is a totally legit emotional response, and then Mordecai comes down on her. Which, I mean, I understand his viewpoint too, but I guess my sympathy is with Esther :P :) ) Though I am working through those feelings :)

-Male ants are haploid (one set of chromosomes) and female ants are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Male ants are basically walking sperm! One of the very weird things about this is that male ants can't directly have genetic sons (the haploid contribution comes solely from the mother), but they can have genetic grandsons -- they can combine their genetic information with a diploid female to make a diploid daughter, and that diploid daughter can pass some of the male's genetic information down to a son. (How weird is that?!)

-According to a general who (wikipedia says) apparently was not very reliable, the Persians won a major battle with Egypt by carrying cats, which the Egyptians regarded as sacred, and the Egyptians didn't shoot because they were afraid of hurting the cats.

-There's this guy who pours molten aluminum inside ant nests and sells them as sculptures

-Jan Dismas Zelenka, whom I have never heard of before, was a Czech Baroque composer who wrote some really cool stuff, like the secular oratorio Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis (youtube link)

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm going to be brief and not explain mechanisms, because I need to get back to gossipy sensationalism, but this should give you an idea of the diversity:

Fruit flies: ratio of X chromosomes to autosomes. "Whenever the ratio of X’s to A’s was 1.0 or greater, the fly was female, and whenever it was 0.5 or less, the fly was male. Flies with an X:A ratio between 0.5 and 1.0 developed characteristics of both sexes."

Birds, butterflies, and some reptiles: as zdenka describes.

Honeybees: diploid embryos develop from fertilized eggs and become female; haploid embryos develop from unfertilized eggs and become male.

Wasps: similar, but you can get sterile diploid males.

Some fish: females XY, males YY.

Some reptiles: it depends not on chromosomes but on the temperature at which the egg was kept.

Clown fish: start out as male. The largest and most dominant male becomes female when its reproducing time. (That's right: Marlin wants to find Nemo so Marlin can have a sex change and Nemo can fertilize his [her] eggs.)

Okay, away from giant ants and back to (post-)Fritzmas!

[cahn]

Wow! This is really cool and I'm really surprised I didn't find this out at some point in biology. (I had one decent intro high school class, one class on genetics where something like this really should have been mentioned but we spent a large part of the class making videos of paramecia instead because the teacher had just gotten cool video equipment (...now that I type that out, it sounds even more wtf than I thought at the time), and one college class which I remember fondly as quite informative but which was mostly physiology and so makes more sense that this kind of thing wasn't mentioned.) Or my own reading, although to be fair pop!bio, not to mention academic!bio, hasn't been a large part of it.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I skipped biology altogether in school, but I got super into genetics a while back, worked my way through a textbook and got an online certificate from Stanford (not as impressive as it sounds and studied some bioinformatics, hoping to see if I might want a job in same. Would love to go back to it at some point.

No guarantees on the accuracy of Wikipedia, as per usual, but it'll give you an idea of the diversity of possibilities.

The quoted bit above, I forgot to mention, is from Principles of Genetics, Snustad & Simmons.