When you’re sorting the tank filters and a big boye wants cuddles. 

(Source)

Looks like a grouper. Groupers tend to be confident, since they’re large enough that not much eats them- some get much bigger than that. They’re generally a fairly intelligent fish, too. I suspect it helps that they like to sit in small tunnels and lay on the ground- they’re used to contact with surfaces. They’re one of the fish most likely to approach divers. 

And this one is definitely enjoying that. It’s clearly done this before, and knows that coming up and lying there will get it petted. It’s also free to leave. 

A healthy, properly-cared-for animal of a species known to approach humans, willingly approaching a human for a reason other than being baited with food, leaning into a human for petting and free to leave. This is definitely cute. 

I always read that some rodents dig with their teeth, but how they did this actually mystified me for a long time….. Other places to see my posts: INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY / KICKSTARTER

Speaking as someone who has had to administer oral medication to a naked mole rat before, yes their little slit mouths are extremely strange looking and yes it is very, very difficult to get anything into their mouth if they don’t want you to because you have to get around their teeth.

This tiny toad is the world’s first Puerto Rican crested toad hatched from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) utilizing frozen semen collected from the wild.

Read more: https://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/2019/12/meet-olaf-the-ivf-toad.html

You will meet many disabled and mentally ill people who won’t fit into your idea of how a mentally ill or disabled person is supposed to look and act - and the solution to that is to let them expand your knowledge of what mental illness and disability can look like, not insisting that they aren’t actually disabled or mentally ill because they don’t fulfill certain stereotypes.

Fun fact! Water actually turns “blood red” when it is contaminated by sulfur creating sulfuric acid. And scientists have discovered that around the time of the plagues a volcano went off that disturbed Egypt’s environment. So the plagues are scientifically proven. The other parts of the plagues are explained by the sulfuric acid river making the animals leave the river and escaping into the human population.

WHY DIDNT ANYONE TELL ME THE PLAGUES WERE PROVEN

if anyone wants a full list heres how they happened:

basically they all stem from a massive eruption of a volcano on the island of santorini off the coast of greece. the ash then floated over to egypt which kickstarted the plagues

1) blood: the ash carried the mineral cinnabar, which has the capability of turning water red

2) frogs: the ash also had many toxic and acidic substances so naturally, all the frogs are gonna flee the river

3) lice: given what was going on insects would have burrowed into dead animals/peoples skin and laid eggs, which then hatched

4) beasts: everything is getting poisoned from the ash and toxins, causing animals to freak the fuck out/die

5) pestilence: toxins again

6) boils: the ash would have caused storms that carried acid rain which when it fell, would irritate peoples skin causing boils

7) hail: the storm again

8) locusts: again with the insects and the amount of dead bodies and such which attract more insects. a lotta insects basically.

9) darkness: the ash covered the sky, blocking out the sun

10) slaying of the first born: given that children’s bodies were found in higher numbers than others, some archeologists think they may have been sacrificed to stop all the destruction, but they aren’t 100% sure about that. this is just me but I would say another possibility is that babies/kids are a lot more susceptible to toxins and shit, so while an adult may have been fine or gotten a bit sick, it might have been very dangerous/deadly for kids or babies

the volcano would also attest for the parting of the sea weirdly enough. the red sea was in fact the ‘reed’ sea, and was very shallow, probably waist deep or so. given the amount of shit dumped into the ocean from the volcano, this wouldve caused a tsunami to head towards egypt. the water would get sucked out from the reed sea right before the tsunami hit, letting people pass it easily, then the actual tsunami would hit, fuckin up anyone who tried to follow.

another theory is that the red water was caused by algae, which would cause the frogs and stuff to jump out as well. the algae also carried substances toxic to animals so if they ingested any they’d get sick and die, so more insects. in this theory there was a sand storm coincidentally that caused the rest

some sources: X X

The volcano wasn’t ON Santorini - it WAS Santorini, then called Thera. It completely blew away the Minoan settlements on the island and was one of the largest eruptions in human history. 

this is blowing my fucking mind

Owls are silent hunters. Their soft-edged feathers hardly make a sound as the birds fly through the night in search of a meal. Given that stealth, it would make sense that owls are also well camouflaged. It’s no good to sneak up on your dinner only to have it make a quick escape because it saw you coming. But for barn owls, blending in isn’t always the advantage you might think. Having lighter feathers actually helps white owls hunt, a new study finds.

Barn owls can be found all over the world. These crow-sized birds have reddish-brown wings with patches of gray. But their faces, bellies and the undersides of their wings range from all white to all red. That’s true for both males and females. These silent hunters search out voles, mice and shrews, mainly at dusk and dawn. But when they have owlets to feed, they’ll hunt all night long to get enough food for everyone in the family.

Red and white barn owls sometimes catch different amounts of prey. Luis M. San-José works at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. As an evolutionary ecologist, he studies how species have adapted to their environments. And he wondered if an owl’s coloring had anything to do with its ability to nab dinner.

To find out, he teamed up with Alexandre Roulin, another evolutionary ecologist at the University of Lausanne. Roulin had been studying barn owls in western Switzerland since 1991. He has hundreds of nest boxes on farms in the area. Those owls use the nest boxes. That makes it easy for the scientists to find their nests, catch the birds and study their behaviors.

San-José and Roulin set up night-vision video cameras or camera traps outside 131 of the nest boxes. The pair then recorded activity for three or four nights at each nest box. By studying the video and camera images, they could tally the prey that each owl caught.

The scientists also caught each bird and measured the color of its feathers. They did this using a color key.  It rated the hue of the birds’ feathers from very red to very white. Lastly, they recorded the phase of the moon on each night of hunting. San-José says they figured the owls might be well concealed during new moon nights, when the sky is dark. During the brightness of a full moon, they expected white owls would stand out more. That might mean they’d catch fewer rodents than dark-red owls.

All of the owls hunted well during a new moon. The darkness did, in fact, make it easier for these birds to sneak up on their prey. During a full moon, it was the red owls that struggled to catch dinner. White owls had no problem — even though their white feathers reflected the light of a full moon. Further study showed that their extra meals might have had a real benefit: Those white barn owls raised more young than red owls did.

Frozen with fear?

San-José and Roulin were surprised by their findings. Why were white owls so good at hunting, even when they shone like a beacon in the moonlight? Perhaps, they thought, it had something to do with the behavior of their prey. To explore, they set up an experiment with voles. These short-tailed, mouse-size rodents make up more than half of a barn owl’s diet.

The team set up a room with three long sections separated by black cloth. At one end, San-José would place a vole. Hidden at the other end of the room were two taxidermied (stuffed) owls. One was red, the other white. Each had been prepared with its wings out, so they appeared to be flying.

The team uncovered one stuffed owl and then ran it down a zip line. This was to mimic it flying. It also brought the owl straight toward the vole, as if it were about to strike. One hour later, the vole was tested again, this time with the owl of the other color. Tests were run once while the light was low, as if it were a new moon, and again in bright light to mimic a full moon.

Most voles didn’t react differently to red or white owls when the light was low. But in bright light, they easily spotted the red owls coming and hid. More unexpectedly, when approached by a brightly-lit white owl, the voles froze. This is similar to when a deer freezes in front of a car’s headlights. In the wild, this would have given the white owls plenty of time to snatch up some dinner.

In a final experiment, the team coated the feathers of one of the white taxidermied owls with wax. That cut down how much light the feathers reflected. The researchers then ran their tests using the wax-coated owl and an untreated white owl. Voles didn’t freeze when the wax-coated owl swooped across the room. This confirmed that it was light reflecting off the white feathers that “stunned” the rodents.

The findings appeared September 2 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“This is one of the first studies to show to us how little we know about living in the dark,” says Robert Zink. He is an bird biologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who was not involved with the study. Diurnal creatures are active most often during the day. “We humans are diurnal creatures for the most part,” he points out. And as such, he says, that makes “it hard for us to understand how nocturnal animals make a living.”

San-José doesn’t know why voles respond to white owls the way they do. But he plans to find out in future studies. “Nocturnal life is far more colorful than we see with our limited vision,” he says. “Many discoveries are awaiting us out there in the dark.”

This is the Burmese Roofed Turtle. There are perhaps six of them left in the wild. There’s over a thousand in zoos. This is a very, very good thing.

There are five known females and while nobody’s seen a male in a while… well, we know there’s at least one. Habitat loss and environmental degradation have made this handsome beastie functionally extinct in the wild- but we’re not going to lose them. In fact, there’s a captive population of over 1000, including the 63 that hatched from the 110 wild eggs collected along the Upper Chindwin River in Myanmar. 

These hatchlings would not have survived in the wild. There’s too much against them.

Had they managed to hatch, they would have been at risk from predation and resource depletion. They would have been hunted- for collectors, or for food. One of the last wild adults was seen in 2007 in a Chinese market, after all. It’s not safe for this turtle anymore in the wild- but thanks to a carefully managed breeding program and six assurance colonies/reservoir populations located at Yangon Zoo, Lawkanandar Wildlife Sanctuary, Limpha Field Station, Htamanthi Wildife Sanctuary, Mandalay Zoo, and Singapore Zoo, this turtle has a future. Perhaps one day, there will be habitat for the Burmese Roofed Turtle. Perhaps one day, the water will be cleaner, the land in less demand. 

But even if it’s not, we won’t lose this species. We’ll be able to tell its story and make it clear that once these beautiful turtles swam in the wild- and they don’t anymore, but maybe one day they will again. Stuff like this is why I get so frustrated with blanket anti-zoo rhetoric. There’s literally no other way to preserve species like this in the actual world that exists today. For some species, in situ conservation is only delaying the inevitable; setting up healthy assurance colonies in zoos where the genetic diversity can be preserved and the species can be propagated is the only way forward. Without these programs, the Burmese Roofed Tortoise would go the way of the baiji or the vaquita. If you’d like to know more about the Turtle Survival Alliance and their work with the world’s critically endangered turtle species, they post a lot of cool stuff on Facebook.

My pet branch wasnt too pleased i woke her up.

Spashdown, Chen Chengguang

i love shrikes because they’re horrible little carnivores whose feeding habits are grim enough to earn then the nickname ‘butcherbird’ but they look like this

anyone who is into: reptiles, amphibians, fish, nature things, plants, spiders, insects etc. please reblog so i can find more blogs to follow and interact with!!

also the group chat feature is nice, and i dont mind making a group with some people from the communities listed above!

Inuits in the Arctic can survive perfectly on a plant based diet 😤

indigenous hunting is like, the ONE kind of hunting that shouldnt offend anyone and yet

listen, i fucking love whales. i do. i have advocated against cetacean captivity and whale hunting since i was like 13. i HATE whale hunting. but have you ever seen the prices for food in a grocery store in indigenous areas, if they even have one? 

i can guarantee no vegan has ever paid $22 usd for a bag of grapes, and you cannot farm that far north. they can forage for some foods, but its not enough to sustain themselves and get a nutritionally complete diet. this isnt just cultural or religious practices (although cultural and religious practices are significant and shouldnt be stripped from them), its literal survival. indigenous people hunt in a very sustainable way (a single bowhead whale can feed an entire community for a year), they arent out here killing a bear just to hang it on their wall. they are trying to survive. subsistence hunting by native tribes is 100% morally correct, even if (like me) the thought of animals dying makes you sad. fight against the japanese whaling fleets who kill hundreds of whales under the guise of research and then sell the meat. fight against wealthy americans who kill animals just to stuff them and put them on their wall. fight against seaworld and their disgusting cetacean captivity practices. but dont come at native people who depend on subsistence hunting to survive. fucking colonizers. 

Discourse entirely to the side, I’m here for a little girl who hears, “This is going to be dinner for us,” and just tries to take a bite out of the tail.  I mean, that’s peak toddler logic, right there.  Relatable to any parent ever.

(Also, indigenous practices are not equivalent to trophy hunting and thirty dollar bags of grapes are nothing short of fucking appalling.  But mostly cute toddler.)

Or how about we, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, subsidize the transportation of plant foods to communities that need it so that they CAN survive without killing others. At some point we should also have the technology to operate thriving greenhouses to grow plenty of food in all climates, and hopefully end the necessity of people murdering to survive.

Or how about we leave indigenous peoples' dietary choices well enough alone? Indigenous people have never been a threat to animal populations and humans have always been a part of the food chain. If you aren't indigenous you have exactly 0 room to tell them what they can and can't eat. Their cultures and their traditions have been besieged enough already, and you don't have any right to impose your morals on them.

No offense but it’s not progressive in the slightest to keep it so that it’s pretty much impossible for indigenous folks to be vegan by their own choice either... these prices are ridiculous. Especially since fruits and veggies are part of every healthy diet.

So yes, we should absolutely subsidize the transportation of plant foods.

What they said was “so they can survive without needing to kill others” not “so we force them to stop”... kinda different, even as a non-vegan, you should agree with that sentiment.

@cliteralviolence​ It’s also not “progressive” to act as though making those choices available will and should lead to veganism. No American, no human being, should have to pay $30 for 1 lb bag of grapes, but if you keep tossing around the idea that providing grocery subsidization for indigenous food deserts means that soon you’ll be able to get them to stop hunting, you are perpetuating the exact Eurocentric, colonizing rhetoric that they’ve been suffering the consequences of for generations. These aren’t just cute little rural communities. These are sovereign nations whose public health and safety issues are direct consequences of centuries of colonialist and imperialist damage. We’ve spent decades forcing harmful programs and policies on these nations under the pretense that it’s “what’s best for them”, when in reality it’s always been about whatever makes it easier for us to control them so we can take all their stuff. The religious assimilation, the boarding schools, the reservations, the medical experimentation, the forced sterilizations; none of that was actually beneficial for them, it was only for the benefit of the US government. What @drachenstochter​ said is right; no non-indigenous person has the right to tell them what they can/can’t eat, what they should/shouldn’t eat. I’m all for giving people choices, especially about food; having a wide variety of food choices can enrich your life in countless ways, physically and emotionally. But you have to understand; they have their own culture, their own lifeways, and their own understanding of what is and isn’t morally acceptable when it comes to animals. If you and people like @h-is-for-homo​ want to help the people of these nations, then you’re going to have to check your own beliefs at the fucking door. If you don’t, these tribes are going to end up thinking that you’re only trying to “help” them so you can take away yet another piece of their identity. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done that.

On an unrelated note, this tiny baby nomming on the tail fin of a whale is just too precious for words

When it comes to revealing when and how wild felines became couch kitties, the cat is starting to come out of the bag. Cats were likely first tamed in the Middle East. Later, they spread — first by land, then by sea — to the rest of the world, researchers now report.

Early farmers brought cats with them to Europe from the Middle East by 6,400 years ago. That’s the conclusion from looking at DNA from 352 ancient cats. A second wave of migration, perhaps by ship, appears to have occurred some 5,000 years later. That’s when Egyptian cats quickly colonized Europe and the Middle East.

Researchers describe how they came to these dates in a new study. It was published June 19 in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Domestication (Doh-MES-ti-kay-shun) is the long and slow process by which people have adapted wild animals or plants to be tame and useful. Wolves became dogs, for instance. Wild ox became cattle. And wildcats became house cats.

Exactly where and when this happened to cats, though, has been a matter of great debate. Researchers had only the DNA from modern cats to work with. These data showed that house cats had been tamed from African wildcats. What was not clear was when domesticated cats began to spread around the world. Now, new ways of studying ancient DNA are pointing to some answers.

Eva-Maria Geigl and Thierry Grange are behind this deepest dive yet into the genetic history of cats. They are molecular biologists. Both work at the Institute Jacques Monod in Paris, France. Mitochondria (My-tow-KON-dree-uh) are tiny energy-producing structures inside cells. They contain a bit of DNA. Only mothers, not fathers, pass mitochondria (and its DNA) to their offspring. Scientists use slightly different varieties of mitochondrial DNA, called mitotypes, to track the female side of families.

Geigl, Grange and their colleagues collected mitochondrial DNA from 352 ancient cats and 28 modern wildcats. These felines spanned 9,000 years. They came from regions stretching across Europe, Africa and Southwest Asia.

About 10,000 to 9,500 years ago, African wildcats (Felis silvestris lybica) may have tamed themselves. They would have hunted rodents and scavenged scraps from the homes of early farmers in the Middle East. People probably encouraged the cats to hang around as a way for these farmers to control mice, rats, snakes and other vermin. The arrangement would have been “mutually profitable for both sides,” explains Grange.

No one really knows how friendly people and cats were with each other at the beginning of cat domestication. Some people may have been very close to their pet cats. Indeed, one person on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, 9,500 years ago, was buried with a cat. Says Geigl, this suggests that some people, back then, already had close ties to cats.

Before early farmers started migrating from the Middle East to Europe, European wildcats (Felis silvestris silvestris) carried one mitotype. It’s called clade I. A 6,400-year-old Bulgarian cat and a 5,200-year-old Romanian cat had a different type of mitochondrial DNA. They both had mitotype IV-A*. That mitotype was previously seen only in domesticated cats from what is now Turkey.

Cats are territorial and usually don’t roam far. This suggests people must have transported cats to Europe.

Mummies (and more) tell another story

Domesticated cats in Africa — including three cat mummies from Egypt — had yet another mitotype. It’s known as IV-C. Until about 2,800 years ago, that type was found mostly in Egypt. But then it began showing up in Europe and the Middle East. And between 1,600 and 700 years ago, it spread far and fast. By then, seven of nine of the ancient European cats the researchers tested now carried this Egyptian type of DNA. Among them was a 1,300- to 1,400-year-old cat from a Viking port far to the north, on the Baltic Sea.

Thirty-two of 70 cats from Southwest Asia also had that mitotype. That rapid spread may indicate that sailors traveled with cats, some of which could have jumped ship to find a new home.

The speedy spread of the Egyptian cats’ DNA could mean that something made these animals especially attractive to people, Geigl and Grange say. House cats aren’t much different from wildcats. The big difference is that domestic cats tolerate people. And the Egyptian cats may have been particularly friendly. They may have more resembled the type of purring pet found in homes today, the researchers speculate. Earlier house cats might have been more comfortable with people than wildcats were, but still have qualified as scaredy cats.

There’s not enough evidence to say that, counters Carlos Driscoll of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Working at its Laboratory of Comparative Behavioral Genomics, he studies the genetic bases of some behavioral traits. And Driscoll now suggests another reason why Egyptian cats got popular so fast: They may have lived along shipping and trade routes. That would have made hopping a boat to some new port easy, especially if they offered to work as mousers on the ship.

Earlier cats may have been just as popular, Driscoll says, but moving them would have been harder. Those early cats, he says, would have been “dependent on somebody putting a bunch of kittens in a basket and walking across a desert with them.”

ADHD: Throws shit everywhere, room becomes messy within at least two days of cleaning it

ADHD: Now I can't focus because everything is everywhere

ADHD: I can't motivate myself to clean it up either so I guess I just live like this now

Friend: do you have an extra Bobby pin?

My ADHD ass: yea theres one by the second leg of the bed

Oh y'all put it into words

@ everyone in the notes saying they want to see the calculations...I mean google is literally free but hey I’ve got nothing better to do rn

So you’d have around $962,390,000

And yeah, while $962,390,000 is a lot, it isn’t a billion and it is also still much, much less than 1.5 billion, for those of you who are just that bad at math 🙃

So the op of the tweet is correct, you wouldn’t be a billionaire and you wouldn’t make what Jeff Bezos does in a week. I feel like this really wasn’t that hard but it’s w/e ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Eat. The. Rich.