Wandering and wondering

Chicago Tribune, Illinois, April 26, 1935

thanks man good to know

This guy raised an abandoned moose calf with his Horses, and believe it or not, he has trained it for lumber removal and other hauling tasks. Given the 2,000 pounds of robust muscle, and the splayed, grippy hooves, he claims it is the best work animal he has. He says the secret to keeping the moose around is a sweet salt lick, although, during the rut he disappears for a couple of weeks, but always comes home…. Impressive !! MINNESOTA CLYDESDALE

why are moose so terrifyingly large

Because they’re pretty much legit surviving Ice Age megafauna and almost everything was bigger back then

his moose leaves for a few weeks to Fuck

This is great because a bunch of people are trying to be slick by tagging it as "color of the sky," accidentally outing themselves as not having used this site since 2019.

Gather round, children, and lay me tell you the tale of the sturddlefish. In the year 2019 in the mythical land of Hungary’s Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture, some scientists were trying to save some endangered fish. The Russian sturgeon and American paddlefish are distantly related species that are both endangered. The scientists were trying to induce gynogenesis in the sturgeon. 

This is a type of parthenogenesis (single parent reproduction) where sperm triggers the embryo growth, but doesn’t contribute genetic material. In any type of parthenogenesis, the offspring is basically a clone of the mother. 

The scientists needed to have sperm interact with the eggs without inseminating them. So they used paddlefish sperm. Since paddlefish diverged from sturgeons 184 million years ago, the scientists figured that there was no chance of insemination. 

Much to their surprise, the paddlefish sperm did fertilize the sturgeon eggs, creating the hybrid sturddlefish. This was not expected at all due to his distantly related the parent species are. There were two sturddlefish populations from the same breeding. One that was 50% sturgeon and paddlefish and one that had twice as much sturgeon due to chromosome doubling. Only about 2/3 of the sturddlefish survived longer than a month and only about 100 survived past a year. Hybrids often have health problems that limit their lifespans. Given how long-lived the parent species are, a healthy sturddlefish could live for a long time. 

The sturddlefish will live out their lives in the research institute and the scientists have no plans of making more. I don’t know if any of them are still alive. For a brief time, a new lifeform will have come into existence by sheer accident and will soon be extinct. May they Rest In Peace 

Image from a to d: Russian sturgeon, mostly sturgeon hybrid, even hybrid, American paddlefish

Voting as Fire Extinguishter (poem by Kyle Tran Myhre)

When the haunted house catches fire:

a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones,

and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels

that overwhelming dread, the evil

that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

Youtube has everything

everyone cease your fears and anxieties and look at the growth of the cambrian trilobite

Here’s some of my personal favourite cards from my now complete paleo tarot deck! 

You can see the full list of Major Arcana and buy a set here!

sometimes I forget orchids grow on trees and I’m like. oh.

They do what now?

in the wild, most orchids grow on tree bark, a fact which will never not bring me a profound sense of delight

interestingly, orchids aren’t parasites–they are just harmless squatters hanging out with their arboreal buddies. it’s a form of commensalism–one organism benefits, the other neither benefits nor is harmed.

OK but orchids ARE parasites. They just aren’t parasites on trees. All orchids have this very bizzare lifecycle where they begin life as parasites on fungi. Here’s the rough strategy:

1. There’s a tradeoff between how much nutrients can be in a single seed and how many seeds you can make. On one end is the double coconut, the largest seed in the world weighing as much as a small child but each double coconut palm tree makes relatively few seeds per individual per season. OR. Make a fuckton of seed that individually cost very little to make. A lot of your small nonwoody plants chose this option, grasses, dandelions, any little weeds usually.

2. But there’s a limit to how far you can push this.

3. And by god orchids crossed it.

4. Orchid seeds are so fucking small they don’t have the energy stores to fucking germinate.

5. Orchid seeds are so small that they only consist of a few cells that haven’t decided who’s going to be roots or leaves yet.

6. And this is great! If you preferred habitat is in trees where the ability to disperse from one treetop to the next and find the right little spot on that tree to survive as a seedling for a few years is really hard. Lots of seed that can float on the wind and find just that spot is great for that.

7. But shit for actually, you know, being alive.

8. But orchids are crafty bastards.

9. Most plants try very hard not to be colonized by fungi, thats usually not good.

10. But orchid seeds just let fungi in.

11. And how the turn tables.

12. Because they just start eating the fungi back.

13. And this is where it gets weird.

14. Orchids are easily in the running for most diverse plant family at nearly 30,000 different species

15. And every single fucking one of them is like this.

16. And worse than that most of them are dependent on a single species of fungus to do this for them, so they produce millions of seeds just so that one might find the one right fungus.

17. And then after that anything can happen.

18. Some orchids are nice and start paying back their hosts onve they get big enough to phtotosynthesize with nice sugars.

19. Some orchids move on to as many as 30 other fungal species throughout their lives.

20. Some complete bastards keep being parasites after they are big enough to photosynthesize on their own. That’s right, a plant that can make its own food is stealing from something that lives on dead leaves.

21. Some orchids just never grow out of it, orchids have turned into permanent parasites more often than any other group of plants because they’re all parasites so becoming a full parasite is nbd.

22. And worse, most of these actually parasitize fungi that are symbiotic with forest trees that supply sugar to the fungi in return for better access to mineral nutrients, effectively making the orchids both parasites on the fungi and the trees, in a sense the whole ecosystem.

23. This leads to one more weird phenomenon. Mutant albino orchids unable to photosynthesize, of species that normally can photosynthesize, are often recorded as being able to reach maturity and flower without issue. because they just keep being parasites instead. Orchids can just. become parasites at will.

In conclusion orchids are just the weirdest fucking plants in the world. Technically all the above applies to this obscure group of ferns called the Ophioglossum family too. Same fucked up start out life as parasites and become independent (or not) later thing.

Alot of people seem to miss these two additional details:

When Jack died, he was killed by the Kraken, summoned by Davy Jones.

When Sao Feng died, was by the damage from the canons of the Dutchman

When Norrington died, it was by Bootstrap Bill, a member of it’s crew.

And when Will died, it was directly by the hands of Davy Jones.

One more thing that has struck me as odd is when she interracts with Davy Jones, he acts as if he’s seen her somewhere before. When the Empress crew point her out as the captain he has a sort of “wtf, you, you are their captain?” reaction, now you could just shake that of as Davy Jones being a misogynistic but i don’t doubt he’s seen female pirate captains before, given how long he’s lived. And when they come face to face on the Dutchman, it feels like a meeting between sworn long time enemies (at least to me).

Elizabeth, what the hell are you even and what exactly is your connection to the Dutchman.

Well…

If the Dutchman and Davy Jones are the canonical undertaker of all sailors, then Elizabeth is the one who marks them. Which makes it very, very poetic that she marries the man who takes over as captain of the Flying Dutchman.

I will remind you all that at the very beginning of the trilogy, Elizabeth is the only one who can see the Black Pearl, which at that point is considered a ghost ship.

And we find out later that Davy Jones resurrected the Pearl from its place on the ocean floor in a deal with Jack.

So whatever her connection is, it long predates her adulthood.

— Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space