long-haired bearded steve appreciation (✧◡✧)

this was cute until i realized the fish is probably trying to not get eaten

A fish trying not to get eaten wouldn’t slow down when the “predator” slows down. It also wouldn’t constantly swim in a circle near the edge of the tank; It’d try hiding. Also a fish in a tank in a a public place that is constantly filled with people is not likely to see people as predators.

Animals, I think people tend to forget, also enjoy playing.

yeah that fish is absolutely playing with that kid, if it really wanted to escape it would just dive into the reef in the center of the tank!

(Moorish Idols are reef fish and naturally will seek shelter in the nearest nook or cranny if they get scared.)

many people don’t realize this, but fish aren’t stupid animals! most of them are on par with mammals like mice and squirrels in terms of intelligence, and they absolutely do play.

I was at an aquarium a few years ago and decided to sketch a fish. It came up to me.

I decided to flip the book around and pressed it against the glass. Fish lost it

Swam away then came back with MORE FISH

to this day I love those little sketches and I really love how I got the fish to bring me it’s friends

Hi! Professional marine biologist and aquarist here- fish absolutely play, and not only that, can be trained.

I accidentally trained a fish once through playing.

Let me explain.

The small-time aquarium I worked at about 4 years ago had a decent sized female Sheephead. Sheephead are bright red with the males sporting a black head, and get big. I’m talking almost 1m long at full maturity (and may or may not transition from female to male depending on the number of males present). Point is, even though not fully matured, this Sheephead was a bit of a heavyweight in her kelp forest tank with a length of about 1ft making her the resident Biggest Dog In The Yard. And she absolutely knew it. She would bully her tankmates if she wanted to steal their food.

The thing about this Sheephead- let’s call her Red- is that she had one heck of a ‘tude. Red was known to splash aquarists whenever they fed the tank, and at almost a foot long with a wide tail, her splashes had quite a bit of heft and would soak you from the torso down. We were advised to bring a towel or two to protect ourselves from most of the drenching. When it was my go-around to feed Red’s tank, I was fairly new to the little facility, but I had been warned in advance of Red’s penchant for food thievery. I noticed she would follow my hand movements, so I slowly moved to drop her food in a far corner, and fed her tankmates directly from my hands or by tong if they were too deep. I always made sure Red had plenty to eat, but I didn’t want her to associate the food with bad behavior, so I treated her to a bit extra food whenever she didn’t steal food. One day, she made a beeline to the surface so fast that she did a small jump, her entire head breaching the water. She wasn’t bothering her tankmates or doing anything remotely dangerous- and full disclosure, it was cute seeing a fish jump for joy- so I laughed and gave her another piece of food.

Naturally, positive reinforcement led to her connecting the dots that jumping at the surface, even the tiny jumps she was doing, meant she got more food.

This started to become an everyday occurrence, whenever I was assigned to feed Red’s tank. She would jump, just enough for her head to pop out, then she’d wait patiently for me to give her the treat she CLEARLY earned. It even got to the point that she’d open her mouth and I’d drop the food right into those massive jaws- this was preferable to her Kenghis Khan-ing her way through a shower of chopped squid like the Tasmanian Devil, as there was less risk of her accidentally (or purposefully) biting a tankmate that got too close. Red became a polite eater for the first time.

It wasn’t until I noticed she followed me around outside of feeding time that I realized Red was playing with me.

I never got splashed by Red even once. My coworkers, however, received quite the dunking whenever it was their turn to feed the kelp tank.

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

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I had an upsetting dream last night.

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reblog Mulder’s drawing of bigfoot titties or be cursed for 12 years and 12 nights

i think some of you guys are insane 👍 it's actually possible for a 16 year old to be online friends with someone in their 20s. source: teenagers are actually people who can talk to other people about shared interests.

21 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 that 18 year old is literally your college classmate. you are the same age. You Are The Same Age

like, the moral panic about age gaps in dating is one thing but this reddit thread was literally about Being Online Friends. you can be online friends with a teenager. they are actually people you can talk to. i promise.

it's very easy to not be a creepy adult when talking to a minor. step one: don't act creepy. that's it. that's all you need to do.

When I was sixteen, I and my boyfriend (eighteen) and his little brother (fourteen) all belonged to the same gaming group, which had been started by his father's friend Steve. We played twice a week with a bunch of people twice and even three times our age, and we learned that adults weren't aliens, they were people with their own feelings and fears and they weren't always right about everything.

Those years at Steve's table were incredibly important to my development as a person. And we had something in common: the game.

Here's the truth: when you grow up, as you go through the various developmental stages, there are things which are vital to happen for proper psychological and cognitive development. For example, when you're very young it is absolutely vital that you are exposed to language. A lot of language. Of varying levels of complexity and formality. That's vital for the healthy development of the language centers of the brain and for early socializing. It must happen. If it does not, you see severe dysfunction as they get older.

This is basic psychological and cognitive development theory. It's taught in pretty basic level Psych courses. This is known science.

Socializing with adults, of various ages, both related to you and not related to you, in various social situations from social equals to authority figure, is one of those vital landmarks. And it comes up over and over and over during development. As a young child you must interact with adults, who care for you, so you can understand care and safety. And it gets more deep and more complicated as you develop.

Preteens and teens must interact with people older than them, significantly older, in various ways, up to and including casual friendly socializing as equals, or they will not develop properly. This is absolutely vital. Your ability to function in the real world socially depends on it.

We are fucking destroying our young people with this bullshit.

Source: Majored in Psychology with a focus on childhood development in university. This is what I went to school for.

I'd like to point out that those stages of development and crucial periods of interaction don't stop at some magical arbitrary definition of adulthood. Young adults, middle aged adults and senor adults, need to have interaction with children and teens and people who are younger than they are or they lose their grip on reality and ability to communicate with people who don't share their privileges and abilities. Source: can you fucking hear yourself?

as an autistic kid/teen we always clicked better with people older than us anyway, so we always had older friends and that was great - and now we're in our sixties and have a bunch of online friends of all ages, including friends in their teens and 20s

and it's just lovely to be able to encourage and affirm them, and to offer perspective that they often don't have simply because so much of their life is still "I'm experiencing this thing for the first time and have no context for processing it"

and it makes us feel connected too, we appreciate what they bring to the friendship - and we're definitely very conscious of the power gradient and try to manage it well and talk about it when necessary and do boundaries where necessary, but why tf wouldn't you (with caution) try to be friends with anyone, especially if they reach out first, or sometimes you reach out and see if they need that? or sometimes it just happens because to start with it is just you both geeking out about language or music or puns or whatever it was

like it probably helps that we're a system, so some of us are the same age as them, but we're always aware that we're the same age as their grandparents too, so we just try to be their friendly agender crone

anyway for sure exercise caution but calm down, friends of many ages is just healthy

I find perspectives like the original one here to be super disturbing. They are so alien to me and are a sort of weirdly creepy authoritarian/facist attitude, like there is so much wrapped up in this narrative:

this attitude is scary and dangerous.

i think it would be especially valuable too if we could identify where it comes from. it is puzzling to me, like i'm so old now that i feel totally disconnected from this, like when i was in college and right out of college, no one was voicing extreme views like this, but now i see a lot of people in the 16-30 demographic voicing these views. where did they originate? what prominent people have advocated for them? what social factors lead people to think they are reasonable in the first place?

it's hard to argue with something or protect yourself from something when you don't understand it and don't know where it is coming from, and this is how i feel about this attitude. it's scary, it's dangerous, but where does it come from? i have no clue, and it's not like i'm likely to get any feedback on it because who is going to interact with me now that i'm in my 40's, when it's only much younger people holding these views and these people evidently don't believe it's safe to even interact with me?

How I sometimes see my WIP…

S'mores Cookies

​WHAT THE HECK IS THE LAST ONE

Okay THIS is my favorite Tumblr post.

OH MY GOD

The End of the World // The Church on Ruby Road

REBLOG IF YOUR BLOG IS A SAFE SPACE FOR AROMANTIC PEOPLE AND IF YOU THINK THEY ARE VALID

I want to see how many people actually are willing to say this and not just act like it