Fire bushes! Buissons ardents!

Masked Booby {Sula dactylatra} by Drew Avery on Flickr.

boobies

Photos of women of color from the Victorian era are hard to come by.

Gosh, I love this.

its the cash Biden reblog in 30 seconds for money in your future

i

Rajella eisenhardti Roy’s ray

This deep-water ray was described by Academy scientists Douglas Long and John McCosker in 1999. It was collected during an expedition to the Galapagos Islands at a depth of nearly 800 meters via the Johnson-Sea-Link, a 4-person research submersible. Note the spines visible along the length of the slender tail.

(To mark the International Day of Radiology, which in turn marks the anniversary of the discovery of x-rays, we’re going to be sharing radiographs from Steinhart Aquarium’s Animal Health Department and the Department of Ichthyology. The former uses X-rays to monitor live animal health, the latter for scientific research on collection specimens.)

That time of year… 📻 (Yes, I was slightly inspired by the scary movie I watched late last night)

Oh gods this is a mood

Happy Halloween! Im Lindo the Lich, an OC playing a melodeon. Sorry for lack of good pictures I’m only one person. Complete with lights and bells!

So good!

I love this I want this this is my aesthetic

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

in the market for some weird animal facts? well, I’m happy to oblige. you look like a discerning customer with a real need for speed, so allow me to introduce you to one of Nature’s finest sports models! they’re lean, they’re mean, and they can go 0-60 in 3 seconds flat! and boy, that engine really purrs.

put the pedal to the metal, because it’s-

CHEETAH! he can really move! CHEETAH! with anxious attitude! CHEETAH! HE’S THE FASTEST THING ALIIIIIIIIVE

Cheetahs are large spotty cats built along the same lines as a Greyhound. (the dog, not the bus.) they’re found throughout sub-Saharan Africa and some parts of Asia, where they sprint around like maniacs and pose for tourists to their heart’s content. at least 75% of every Cheetah is limbs by volume, and they sport a pair of iconic black tear track markings that would make Gerard Way jealous.

you’ve probably seen them before on junk food packaging in your local grocery store, but their real claim to fame is that they’re the fastest land animal on the entire planet. vroom vroom!

the whole Dangerously Cheesy thing is just a side job. 

there’s a surprising amount of really dang fast animals on this planet, (most are mammals, but none of then are hedgehogs.) but the Cheetah has them all beat for sheer ground speed alone. other animals can run further or for longer, but none can match the Cheetah’s absolutely insane landspeed record of 61 to 70 miles per hour. (ish.)

that’s an absolutely absurd amount of speed for something that has paws instead of wheels or wings. in fact, that’s even faster than some creatures who DO have wings! (those creatures probably feel pretty bad right now, and they should.) to give some perspective: if you’re a Cheetah, it’s straight-up fucking illegal to sprint in almost all of Illinois. (good luck arresting a Cheetah though, they’re bitey!)

you have the right to OW you have the right to remain silent OW STOP BITING ME

while it’s a known fact that Cheetahs are THE fastest mammal currently in existence on our beautiful planet, exactly how fast they are is a subject of some debate and also some academic hair-pulling. (there’s a surprising amount of hair-pulling in academia, both figurative and literal.) this is because it’s actually pretty difficult to a) motivate any animal to sprint at full speed for your own personal amusement, and b) calculate exactly how fast said animal is moving once you’ve motivated it into sprint mode.

methods for clocking the speed of a sprinting Cheetah have included solutions as fancy-schmancy sciencetech as radio-tracking GPS collars, radar guns, and carefully measured artificial courses, and also solutions as straight-up mad max bullshit as driving next to the sprinting Cheetah in a rusted-out truck and just having an intern watch the speedometer, or dragging bait behind a speeding car and having a different intern watch the speedometer. these methods give some very different results, as you might imagine.

there’s a surprising amount of straight-up mad max bullshit in science, because fancy-schmany sciencetech can only get you so far.

Cheetahs can only sustain this absolutely insane burst of speed for about thirty seconds, but that’s more than long enough for their purposes. Cheetahs mostly hunt antelope, who are slower but definitely no slackers in the speed department themselves. this often leads to suspenseful high-speed chases all over the dang place like an episode of Serengeti: Cheetah Vice Squad.

once a Cheetah has located its intended victim, it uses its incredible speed to turbo boost close enough to Blue Shell the hapless antelope’s legs right out from under it, sending it tumbling and causing a tragic antelope-pileup on the Serengeti and probably ending up on the antelope evening news. and then just to add insult to injury, the Cheetah bites its neck open and eats it.

I’ve said it before, but nature is so mean. SO MEAN.

Cheetahs are the only big cat to have this particular hunting style, and it’s because there’s no other cats quite like them. they’re not even technically “big cats”, but something so weird that they have an entire genus, Acinonyx, completely to themselves. and they’re so weird because mother nature minimaxed them for Speed and dumped every other stat to do it.

Cheetahs are long, lanky, flexible, and very lightly built. this gives them the power to accelerate like a Ferrari on bath salts, but it also makes them really bad at basically anything else large cats are usually known for. Cheetahs also can’t roar, and instead they make noises usually associated with your garden-variety tabby cat. they chirp, meow, hiss, mew, and even purr! (I don’t know about you, but I’ll take a purr over a roar any day.)

literally everything about this cat is intended to fling it forward at the highest rate of giddyup possible, and I can respect that.

but this hyperspecialized body plan comes with a price: Cheetahs are relatively weak and incredibly fragile. in fact, they’re completely outmatched by just about every other predator in Africa! they get bullied, bodied, and have their kills stolen and cubs infanticided on a pretty regular basis. this is very sad and awful, and it’s why every Cheetah in existence is an anxious mess.

no seriously, Cheetahs are notoriously anxious animals, even in captivity! this is rough for the Cheetah and can be a huge problem for animals in zoos and breeding programs. but luckily there’s a solution to soothe these unlucky anxious kitties- support dogs!

enough talk about infanticide, time for PUPPIES!

some zoos have begun raising puppies and Cheetah kittens together, giving the Cheetahs a sibling with a more laissez faire outlook on life to look up to. and the weirdest part is- it’s working! Cheetahs in breeding programs that are given dog siblings are even beginning to have the cubs they were too nervous to have before, and it’s all thanks to the positive life outlook of man’s best friend!

and that’s important, because Cheetahs are currently listed as Vulnerable. their population and range is shrinking, and these captive breeding programs are vital to keeping their numbers healthy. international efforts are underway to protect the Cheetahs and their habitat, and there’s hope that these fragile nervous speedsters will continue to blitz their way into the future.

with dog, all things are possible.

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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee and support Weird Biology!

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Parade img2- Ranger Rick img3- The Daily Mail/Caters News Agency img4- Sciencing img5- National Geographic img6- National Zoo img7- BoredPanda img8- Attractions Magazine

Terry Crews came out and admitted he had been sexually assulted by someone in the film industry, and is now being blacklisted. I have been a fan of his since Idiocracy, and will continue to support all of his work.

So when you wonder why people don’t come forward with their assults, this is why.

Where are all the bitch men who ask about male sexual assault when the focus is on women but are dead silent when men are actually at the focus.  

It’s almost as if Men’s Rights Activists don’t really care about men’s rights. Hmmm….

Yep….

This misses the really powerful piece of the story: Terry Crews was the one who chose not to do the movie. One of the producers told him, essentially, that he could either do the movie and be drop the sexual assault charges, or continue with the trial and have “troubles”. Terry dropped out because he felt standing against abusers was more important than his film career.

It’s bullshit that he was threatened in the first place, of course, but his response was ballsy. I admire him for it.

Reblog to support Terry Crews and men like him.

shoutout to paris hilton for not abandoning her ‘micropig’ 

when it turned out that it was a normal piggy who grew up to be a big fat fatty piggu

Actually that’s pretty standard size for a micro pig. Pigs are ENORMOUS, dude. The average pig on a farm is 7 feet long and over 700 lbs. A normal pig would be much bigger than Hilton.

EDIT: This is a photo of the world’s smallest recognized breed of pig, the kune kune. I’m sorry cartoons lied to you all.

This is the pot bellied pig, another famous “small” breed.

This is your average adult pig.

Big ole’ pigs.

Reblogging because I feel so misinformed about pigs right now. My life is a lie.

@sherlollysmooch

WIld boar are a bit smaller than that last piggy, but being wild (okay, free-range) there’s a much higher muscle-to-fat ratio so they’re faster, more nimble and Wild in another sense - they have serious Aggression, Attitude and Anger Management issues, have great big tusks, and no compunction about using them.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, hunting boar on horseback or foot with a spear* was regarded as an acceptable training for war.

*Boar-spears had a cross-piece or a toggle (sometimes made from an actual tusk) otherwise the boar would come right up the spear-shaft and get you.

Think of all the occasions in movies (”Excalibur”, “Star Trek: Nemesis” etc.) when a stalwart opponent has done that, usually in a succession of tugs. Now imagine it happening at about 20 mph with this at the business end…

That is a BOAR, not a BEAR, but you’d have to look twice.

Some really brave (or loopy) types even used a specialist sword. Without a rigid spear-shaft - which on boar-spears was as thick as the average wrist - they had to trust to the strength of their own wrist and elbow to keep the boar at bay…

…and Cesare Borgia (yes, that one) supposedly went in after boar with a non-specialist sword, perhaps this beautiful cinquedea currently in a Rome museum…

If the story’s true, then instead of stabbing the animal his technique was to sidestep at the last instant and cut at its neck. Okay, he was a wealthy, powerful Renaissance nobleman with presumably lots of henchmen, lackeys and other backup, but that wouldn’t matter in the slightest if he fumbled and the boar got in first.

There are simpler ways to bring home the bacon.