August 29, 2026 Welcome to Genetic Linkage, a series where I share updates and interesting links for the week. noctule bat eating a bird, from a 16th century painting. Hi fellow bloggers, not much to report this week. Reading: Finished The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin, a collection of scifi short stories, some of which are centered around the same universe in The Left Hand of Darkness. I am a big fan of Le Guin. I thought the title story wasn't even close to the best one in the book. Instead I preferred the story "Paradises Lost", about a human space colony that is traveling for 200 years and multiple generations before reaching their destination. It was a good short story with a bit of an abrupt ending, interesting commentary on gender and religion and purpose. Made me wish it was adapted into a full length novel. Started Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which I've never read before. For some reason I assumed this story was in the same vein as other dystopia novels like 1984 and Brave, New World, but it's actually a war novel based on WWII. It's also very funny, which I wasn't expecting, almost like a parody. I'm excited to read more. Links: Africa’s Wild Dogs Are the Most Hated Carnivores on the Continent. Here’s Why Some Conservationists Are Saving Them Anyway Long read article on wild dog conservation. They're hated mostly by farmers in the area. It's a good breakdown of the work that goes into doing research on them. Fraudulent images are rife on antibody sellers’ websites, researcher says Antibodies are listed in scientific catalogues for researchers to order for experiments. It's common to include images that prove the antibodies are what the company says they are - usually with results like gel electrophoresis bands. But most of these images are digitially edited and spliced from multiple images, which is a big no-no in science and is considered fraud. Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule bats In 1611 a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder depicts an allegory of the element Air, portrayed as a naked muse surrounded by many different bird species and some bats. Curiously one of the bats is depicted with a bird in its mouth. Research in the past decade has confirmed this to be true! - the greater noctule bat from Europe was confirmed to feed on several songbirds like robins and tits. That means Brueghel must have known about this behavior for hundreds of years before modern science confirmed it. Scientists using insect fossils have reconstructed from a Middle Jurassic soundscape may have sounded like. The data comes from cricket and katydid fossils, insects that are well-known to 'stridulate', or produce sounds by rubbing their wings together. These same sound effects were used in the Netflix documentary, The Dinosaurs. I started playing this and it made my dog freak out. Removing AI from neocities websites A guide for creating an AI.txt to suggest to AI to not scrape your Neocities website. Technically AI doesn't have to follow this so it isn't definitively stopping it, but you can at least ask nicely that they don't maybe? The visitor stats that Neocities provides me for the blog are always really high numbers that seem unreasonable, so I'm trying to prevent bots and scrapers. Monkey selfie copyright dispute I came across this while writing the Mandrillus articles. You may have seen on social media a few years ago of a photo of a macaque that was called a 'selfie', as it looks like the monkey took the photo itself. Articles at the time, and the photographer, initially described the photos as if the monkey stole the camera and took the photos accidentally themselves. Wikimedia Commons, a site that hosts public domain images, uploaded the photos and claimed they had no human author. Later, the photographer wanted them removed and admitted that the stories were embellished, and that he had set up a remote-trigger tripod that the monkeys were interacting with. Lots of legal back and forth battles ensue, with even PETA getting involved. If any of these links don't work for you, let me know and I'll send you the pdf. Email me at jakalopes {at} mailfence [.] com. Blaugust: Only three more days of Blaugust remain! I wasn't even intending to post every day, but it just happened, so now I have to finish it out! Very excited to see the award images, it's been a fun month of challenge. Stay curious, bloggers. -jakalopes