darwinisbae

[darwinisbae]

he is SO annoying

[darwinisbae]

by far my favorite part of the hike was when I heard a weird noise and pulled out Merlin thinking it was a bird, but nothing came up for it and then a wet and very angry mink exploded out of the bushes in hot pursuit of another, equally wet mink

[darwinisbae]

hello fish community can someone explain the coelacanth obsession. not that i dont also love them, they are Such Guys, but there is an entire coelacanth FANDOM on this webbed site and i must know where this beautiful thing came from. i know they're really really old and pretty big and that's about it

[darwinisbae]

I just want to love you

[darwinisbae]

Insane color moth!! These are reminded me of some kind of ice cream

Oriental Orange Banded Green Geometer Moth (Eucyclodes gavissima)

[darwinisbae]

today i just found out how small snow leopards actually are and i am shook. they are TEENSY compared to a tiger

yeah leopards in general are just small animals!

both leopards and snow leopards are commonly less than 100 pounds as adults.

hell, mountain lions can be bigger than either of them!

which technically makes them the fourth largest cat in the world, if still not a big cat proper.

and I think they're happy with that, personally

[darwinisbae]

Getting thiiiiiiis close to bringing back One Drop Rules.

[darwinisbae]

MR MARK I HAVE A QUESTION: im going to british columbia for a week—what kind of critters (the cold-blooded kind, preferably) can i potentially expect to find?

The best way to find out is probably to go to iNaturalist or HerpMapper, and looking in the specific area you’re headed to. I can tell you there are some capital E Excellent salamanders in that part of the world, but BC is an enormous area, so you may or may not be in the right part to find them. But wherever you go there should be goodies to find!

[darwinisbae]

[darwinisbae]

Witness 🌙

[darwinisbae]

Ever heard of the plains viscacha (Lagostomus maximus)? Growing up to 33.9 in (86 cm) from head to tail, it inhabits grasslands and scrub in parts of South America such as Paraguay and Argentina. This highly social rodent lives in groups of up to 50 individuals, digging communal burrows known as vizcacheras. These underground homes can stretch up to 6,458.4 sq ft (600 sq m) and provide a safe haven for the viscachas to hide from predators and raise their young. 

Photo: Marcia Morris, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

[darwinisbae]

I was just thinking about carcinisation. Do you think if humans managed to not destroy the planet for long enough, we would become more crab like?

nope, because carcinisation only applies to ocean crustaceans, like lobsters!

over the past 400 million years or so, sea-dwelling crustaceans have kind of bobbled between the two main sea-bug body plans, which we’ll call Hotdog and Hamburger respectively:

the benefit of the Hotdog body plan is that it comes with a long, powerful tail that can be used for active swimming in a pinch to escape from danger! but the main drawback is that this body plan has really low maneuverability and isn’t very dexterous.

now the Hamburger body plan, on the other hand, has dexterity in spades! the lack of a tail may make it slow, but the evenly-spaced spiderlike legs of this body plan more than make up for that shortcoming by allowing quick movement in any direction as long as there’s a surface to walk on.

so there are benefits and drawbacks to both body plans, and both have appeared in the fossil record, but the overall trend is that hotdog body plans tend to become hamburger ones more often than the reverse- and this is what we call carcinisation! it just means that these crustaceans tend over time to gradually drift into a crab shape, even if they aren’t, strictly speaking, actually crabs. 

VICTORY FOR CRAB.

[darwinisbae]

amazing things that you might find outside

[darwinisbae]

cicada moments

[darwinisbae]

Opuntia humifusa

[darwinisbae]

reminding myself how silly it is to constantly compare myself to others for Make A Terrible Comic Day