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is that lost on you?

@flaaf / flaaf.tumblr.com

mie. twenty-one. she/her. bi/grey aroace. australian.
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ampervadasz

Pink

Pink ain’t come to play wit you hoes!

This is also an excellent example of providing breed-adequate enrichment, because Border Collies are herding dogs. They were bred to run a lot and do multiple quick and sharp turns, so if you can’t provide your collie with an actual herd of animals to… well… herd, an obstacle course like this is a great alternative. That dog is having the time of her life.

Pink ain’t fucking around.

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donnamissal
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parasect

Thanks, tumblr mobile, for unintentionally making this even funnier

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po-acus

Just as I said, “is this ever going to load?” One gif loaded and honestly it answered my question perfectly.

Together they create the full set.

saw this again on my dash after reblog and…

tumblr black out poetry

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junkartie

Having ur main emotional response be crying is so embarrassing like ill be trying to explain why im mad or ill try having a serious convo abt smthn that upsets me and ill start crying like a baby and i have to like turn around and go “i am not crying 4 pity or to emotionally manipulate u im crying cuz im a little bitch, give me a sec”

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I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don't have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there's the kea, straight-up titled "clown of the mountains", that has a specific vocalization for "playtime!". Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go "great idea, disembodied voice! it's TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!" and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he's shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

It's your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.

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trixree

So there's this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or "Plexin", right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human's increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., "language learning". Super cool, right?

Humans aren't the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!

Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like... ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)

It was this funky dude right here:

THAT'S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans'.

THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS

Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop's fable test with flying colors. They're so goddamn cool, I love them so much. The kea really said: "I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time" and that's so powerful honestly

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cherriielle

a couple face studies from recent tutorials! 💫

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cherriielle

i can still smell the fire, even though it’s long died out

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cherriielle

couldn’t draw lilith and not do eda as well! ✨

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sometimes I think about how red is the first color in the visible light spectrum to be absorbed in ocean water

and how many deep-sea creatures evolved to be red as a stealth adaptation, making them near invisible when there’s little to no light present

and it makes me think. If there’s never any visible light present in these animals’ lifetimes, if no ROV shines a little flashlight in depths that would otherwise not have light, would these animals ever get the opportunity to actually be red? that might be a stupid question.

imagine being a little deep sea creature and having no idea you’re red until something comes along and shines a light on you except you still wouldn’t be able to tell because you’re probably colorblind. anyway. I don’t know where I was going with this post

Is color relative? Or inherent? Or both???

Like is color physiological and determined by the shape of whatever pigment cells that will always absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others?

or is color meaningless if there’s no light to absorb and reflect?

Is it completely relative because the way we percieve color is subjective, how even within our own species there are so many different kinds of ways people can observe color?

makes you think

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bogleech

Red light doesn’t make it to the deep ocean from the sun, but that doesn’t mean red light doesn’t exist at that depth!

The stomiidae, which include the viperfish, dragonfish, and loosejaws, are one example of a deep sea animal that evolved to perceive and produce red light because it isn’t naturally present in their environment and most other organisms never hit on that adaptation. In most of this group, tiny red lights can be switched on and off throughout their skin to communicate with their own kind in secret. More threateningly, some of them have high-powered “floodlights” of pure red just beneath their eyes; almost no other deep sea fish emit actual BEAMS of light to illuminate what they’re looking at because that’d make them a shining beacon to every larger predator in the area, but since it’s red, the only risk ends up coming from their fellow red-light hunters and those remain just uncommon enough to be worth the chance. In many members of this group, most of all the loosejaws (hence the name), almost the entire skull can naturally detach from the rest of the body on specialized stalks at lightning speed so that their long, hooked jaws can grab prey in an instant, almost the same exact motion as the arm of a preying mantis:

If you were a little fish in this scenario you would see absolutely nothing but darkness around you and possibly feel pretty safe, because maybe you’ve evolved to blend in perfectly with the surrounding void and you can’t see any blue or yellow or green lights coming to get you. You have no idea that there’s been a spotlight right on you all along until its owner’s face flies off to impale you and shove you whole into its giant throat all in less than half of a second :)

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byasuga

someone explain why deep sea creatures are so fucking scary like is there a logical reason was god like hey that’s deep and dark so I shall create absolutely terrifying creatures who will haunt humans in their dreams

Think about the predators up here on land; bigger eyes, longer teeth and bigger mouths. We know these things indicate something that can harm us, or stalk us in the dark. Now you multiply that the farther you go down the ocean. If it’s darker, then they need bigger eyes. If it’s a LOT darker, then their eyes need more and more specialized anatomy nothing could ever possibly need up here in the sun, so by necessity they do not have the kind of eyes we know:

And food is so far between, the predators need even longer teeth, to make sure those rare meals they encounter really can’t escape:

And because it’s dark AND food is scarce, they need big, expandable jaws and bodies that are almost all stomach, to guarantee they can take advantage of more meals and don’t have too much more body to have to nourish:

effervescent c:

How are these even real????

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hirosensei

Most of these look pretty reasonable imo but I’ve never heard of the loosejaw before and I gotta say, it looks like it has a puppet for a head, which is quite unsettling and seems like it shouldn’t be practical. Also, is that a second mouth behind its skull? Or does it have to reattach its head to swallow, and it’s just coincidence that the biomechanical structures behind its skull look like a mouth?

I’m glad people asked!!! The loosejaw does have extra teeth back there to help keep prey from escaping, and the head structure all folds back together:

The most surprising thing about these features, however, is that they’re already present in many of the fish people are familiar with! The loosejaw pushes it to an extreme, but you can see how these freshwater carp also “unfurl” and “throw” their jaw structure:

The loosejaw just doesn’t have a skin covering this structure, because that allows it to fling the jaw even faster through the water with no resistance! …And it’s also quite normal for all kinds of everyday fish to have additional teeth or a functional secondary set of jaws in the back of the throat:

Deep sea creatures have eyes more powerful than any Tolkien elf

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WARNING to anyone planning on LEAVING THEIR HOUSE

The outside has unfriendly people, as well as a gigantic ball of fire in the sky. In addition, you may sometimes encounter a bird or an unpleasant smell.

Posting this because THERE ARE NO POSTED WARNINGS when exiting your home.

SIGNAL BOOST THE HELL OUT OF THIS.

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