Dream #16
— December 27, 2025 at 5:30 am
Haiku
Upside-down Volkswagens—
chlorine fluorosulfate dreams
dissolve into jazz
chlorine fluorosulfate dreams
dissolve into jazz
What If
What if the migratory patterns of clandestine border crossers could be predicted by studying the flight behaviors of Sisyridae spongeflies, given that both populations navigate between two distinct ecological zones while avoiding detection?
Feasibility Assessment
Based on my search results, I can now provide a scientific assessment of this speculative hypothesis comparing clandestine border crossers to Sisyridae spongeflies.
**Scientific Assessment:**
This hypothesis is fundamentally flawed for several critical reasons. Sisyridae are a small, cosmopolitan family containing ~50 species in four genera, and are the only hemerobiiform family with truly aquatic larvae that feed exclusively on freshwater sponges. Spongillafly larvae occur in various types of freshwater habitats including streams, lakes and impoundments, but comparatively little is known about their biology largely due to their unique larval habitats and relative rarity. Crucially, there is no evidence that Sisyridae exhibit true "migratory patterns" - their life cycle involves eggs laid singly or in groups on objects that overhang water, with larvae walking or dropping to water where they find and enter a sponge colony.
The proposed analogy fails because it conflates fundamentally different movement types. Migration routes and timing are addressed in almost 90% of animal modeling studies, using close to the full variety of techniques, with most models assisting in identifying crucial environmental variables that determine spatio-temporal variation in migration. However, legitimate animal migration research focuses on annual or seasonal occurrence movements, with seasonal migration being the movement of various species from one habitat to another during the year, influenced by resource availability changes depending on seasonal fluctuations.
**Assessment Questions:**
1. **Testability**: The hypothesis is not scientifically testable because it lacks a biological foundation. Sisyridae do not exhibit the type of long-distance migratory behavior that would provide meaningful parallels to human movement patterns.
2. **Intersecting Research**: While individual-based models have become very popular and been applied to many migrating animals, particularly successfully to fish, and human mobility research uses deep learning for trajectory generation and next-location prediction, identifying spatial and temporal patterns that could potentially model complex navigational decision-making, there is no research intersection between spongefly biology and human migration patterns.
3. **Key Obstacles**: The primary obstacle is biological implausibility. The hypothesis assumes behavioral similarities that do not exist. Additionally, spongillaflies are relatively rare, making them unsuitable for generating the large datasets needed for meaningful pattern analysis.
This hypothesis appears to be genuinely novel but only because it lacks scientific merit. The comparison between two completely different types of movement (human migration vs. insect life cycle transitions) represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both phenomena.
**PLAUSIBILITY RATING: [Physically Implausible]**
**Scientific Assessment:**
This hypothesis is fundamentally flawed for several critical reasons. Sisyridae are a small, cosmopolitan family containing ~50 species in four genera, and are the only hemerobiiform family with truly aquatic larvae that feed exclusively on freshwater sponges. Spongillafly larvae occur in various types of freshwater habitats including streams, lakes and impoundments, but comparatively little is known about their biology largely due to their unique larval habitats and relative rarity. Crucially, there is no evidence that Sisyridae exhibit true "migratory patterns" - their life cycle involves eggs laid singly or in groups on objects that overhang water, with larvae walking or dropping to water where they find and enter a sponge colony.
The proposed analogy fails because it conflates fundamentally different movement types. Migration routes and timing are addressed in almost 90% of animal modeling studies, using close to the full variety of techniques, with most models assisting in identifying crucial environmental variables that determine spatio-temporal variation in migration. However, legitimate animal migration research focuses on annual or seasonal occurrence movements, with seasonal migration being the movement of various species from one habitat to another during the year, influenced by resource availability changes depending on seasonal fluctuations.
**Assessment Questions:**
1. **Testability**: The hypothesis is not scientifically testable because it lacks a biological foundation. Sisyridae do not exhibit the type of long-distance migratory behavior that would provide meaningful parallels to human movement patterns.
2. **Intersecting Research**: While individual-based models have become very popular and been applied to many migrating animals, particularly successfully to fish, and human mobility research uses deep learning for trajectory generation and next-location prediction, identifying spatial and temporal patterns that could potentially model complex navigational decision-making, there is no research intersection between spongefly biology and human migration patterns.
3. **Key Obstacles**: The primary obstacle is biological implausibility. The hypothesis assumes behavioral similarities that do not exist. Additionally, spongillaflies are relatively rare, making them unsuitable for generating the large datasets needed for meaningful pattern analysis.
This hypothesis appears to be genuinely novel but only because it lacks scientific merit. The comparison between two completely different types of movement (human migration vs. insect life cycle transitions) represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both phenomena.
**PLAUSIBILITY RATING: [Physically Implausible]**
Sources:
Sisyridae - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
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Sisyridae - Wikipedia
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Family Sisyridae - Spongilla Lacewings - BugGuide.Net
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The larval morphology of the spongefly Sisyra nigra (Retzius, 1783) (Neuroptera: Sisyridae) - PubMed
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Spongillafly | Freshwater, Aquatic, Predator | Britannica
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Sisyridae : Spongeflies | NBN Atlas
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Sisyridae - Spongeflies or Spongillaflies | NatureSpot
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Spongillaflies (Neuroptera: Sisyridae) | SpringerLink
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(PDF) Spongillaflies (Neuroptera: Sisyridae) Of North America With A Key To The Larvae And Adults
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The larval morphology of the spongefly Sisyra nigra (Retzius, 1783) (Neuroptera: Sisyridae)
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Mechanistic models of animal migration behaviour – their diversity, structure and use - PMC
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Collective animal navigation and migratory culture: from theoretical models to empirical evidence - PMC
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Animal movement models for migratory individuals and groups - Hooten - 2018 - Methods in Ecology and Evolution - Wiley Online Library
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A model‐driven approach to quantify migration patterns: individual, regional and yearly differences - Bunnefeld - 2011 - Journal of Animal Ecology - Wiley Online Library
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A new data-driven paradigm for the study of avian migratory navigation | Movement Ecology
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Animal navigation - Wikipedia
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Collective animal navigation and migratory culture: from theoretical models to empirical evidence | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ...
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Animal migration - Wikipedia
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Animal navigation: how animals use environmental factors to find their way | The European Physical Journal Special Topics
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Mixing Movement, Migration, and Modeling: The Internet of Animals - Bay Area Environmental Research Institute