are sea creatures bugs ? tales from the pod

as was determined some time in the past by seasoned bugologists (we didn't ask wormologists due to a potential conflict of interest), it was determined that worms is not bugs. the deciding factor here is the lack of a spine, with the lack of legs considered a secondary piece of evidence.

this has been universally accepted at this point. however, with classification comes questions, come vagaries. it takes a spine to be a bug, and while it does not take legs to be a bug, most bugs have legs, and so there is consensus that , in the lack of proof of a spine if it cannot be determined , a set of legs (and potentially nice bugsocks) can be accepted as stand-in evidence that the entity being observed is some sort of bug. however, in the greyzone lies a plethora of thallasic and detritivoric edge-cases. while the latter is considered too niche to be discussed at this present moment, the former is one of paramount significance ,,, one whose answer the very existence of the bugzone depends on.

while one so-called bigbookofbug remained eerily silent on the role of the oceanic denizens as members of bugkind, there was another willing to speak up and ask the hard questions.

• bugs are in vogue

• sea creatures can be classed as either bugs or worms , with a good deal of them being bugs

• not all sea creatures are bugs, however, as not all have a spine - there are edge-cases

• eels, for example, are worms due to a lack of a spine. crabs are bugs because they are all-spine

• slugs, despite their squishy appearance, are in fact bugs. it was determined via rigorous science done on stream live on stream that they have a spine ,, it is just squishy

• rather than a mere exclusion of worms from the bug category ,,, worms will be wholesale rejected

wow ,,, now that's a doozy. it seems like a lot of proclamations made without any sort of basis in the science of bugology. rest assured however, there is factual evidence to back this all up. we can split the above into two parts:

• addressing the popularity of bug, and why "going bug mode" is on the rise

• the separation of sea creatures into either bug or worm

for the former of these two, we can use statistics and sociology to validate that the people do indeed "clamor to be bug". the latter, the categorical, relies on mathematics. namely, set theory.

• do you agree with the the following: "bugs are in vogue"

• do you agree with the following: "i clamor to be bug"

• if yes, why?

• are sea creatures bugs

• are worms bugs?

• are sea creatures worms ?

Breaking down the results, we get the following:

of the participants, there was a unanimous agreement that "bugs are in vogue". if this isn't enough evidence that the question of what is and isn't a bug is of great importance, we don't know what is.

however, this, at least seemingly, is contradicted with the results of the second question: do you agree with the following: "i clamor to be bug", wherein only 34% of participants answered yes. this may seem to be a rejection of bug, but thanks to insights from famous bug BugVT, we were able to glean the following information: those who are already "bug" will answer "no" to this question. for not foreseeing this limitation in the poll, we apologize.

keeping this in mind, we can note that there is some margin of error, and there is more of a 50/50 split. even if one does not desire bugness themself, however, the fact still stands that bug is to them a very good thing.

turning quickly to the question of "are worms bugs?", we see, again, an unanimous answer of "no".

regarding the questions of sea creatures, we see that there is a general agreement that some, but not all, sea creatures are worms and some, but not all, sea creatures are bugs. 50% of participants answered the "some" option on both of these questions. this is all fine and good, if not for the problem that this means 50% did not answer this. there was an even split between this other half of participants, with 25% believing that all sea creatures are worms, and 25% believing all are bugs.

we see here, then, that not only is it that bugs are in vogue, but there are many who are unsure of the status of sea creatures. given the lack of clarity here, we feel the need dive deeper into the question of sea creatures, bugs, and worms.

broadly defined, set theory is a branch of mathematics that is concerned with the study of sets, or collections of objects referred to as elements of that set. For example, given a set X, that contains elements 1 and 2, we can write the following:

X = {1,2}

To note that an item is an element of a set, we use ∈:
1 ∈ X
2 ∈ X

Using this, we can begin to create a small set of sea creatures, a set of vertebrates, and invertebrates:

sea creachures = {sea slug, eel, octopus, stingray, Joel, crab, shark, mantis shrimp, plankton}

spineless = {eel, octopus, plankton, worm, snake}

We will separate spine-ness between squishing and solid (bouba and kiki) spinetypes:
has solid spine = {Joel, crab, shark, mantis shrimp, mantis, beetle}
has squishy spine = {sea slug, stingray, slug, snail}

we take our original argument of spineless entities:
spineless = {eel, octopus, plankton, worm, snake}

and our two sets of enspined things:
has solid spine = {Joel, crab, shark, mantis shrimp, mantis, beetle}
has squishy spine = {sea slug, stingray, slug, snail}

this can be reduced like so:
enspined = solid spine ∪ squishy spine

to define sea creasher with spine:
enspined sea creatures = enspined ∩ sea creachures
  = {sea slug, stingray, Joel, crab, shark, mantis shrimp}

spineless sea creatures is just the difference between two sets:
spineless sea crshr = sea creachures/enspined sea creatures
  = {eel, octopus, plankton}

Taking this logic, and the above axioms, we can note the following:
  bug = enspined ∩ sea creachures = enspined sea creatures
  worm = sea creachures/enspined sea creatures = spineless sea crshr