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If your take away from any election loss to conservatives is "the other party should shift more to the right" then you are actually just an idiot who has never learned anything from elections or history.

Modern society is built off the back of left wing reforms so popular that even the right couldn't destroy them after years of trying so get your head out of your ass and vote for the most left wing candidate you can to drag us out of hell and back into a real functioning society that gives a shit about other human beings.

Centrism loses to the right because it's not inspiring or distinct enough from the right to offer any meaningful change and saying "we should move more conservative" is just conservative propaganda to undermine any attempts to actually elect governments that care about people.

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Superb Fairywren (Malurus cyaneus), male displaying, family Maluridae, order Passeriformes, SA, Australia

photograph by Greg Wisnia

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Round 2 - Chordata - Myxini

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Myxini, commonly called “hagfish”, “slime eels”, or even “snot snakes”, is the most simple class of vertebrates. They have one order, the Myxiniformes, and 3 families.

Hagfish have a cartilaginous skull but no vertebral column, though they do have rudimentary vertebrae. They also have tooth-like structures composed of keratin. Species range from 4 cm (1.6 in) to 127 cm (4 ft 2 in) long. They have elongated, worm-like bodies, and paddle-like tails. The skin is naked and loose, attached only along the center ridge of the back and at the slime glands. They have simple eyespots which only detect light, six or eight barbels around the mouth, and a single nostril. Their jaws move horizontally rather than vertically like other vertebrates, projecting two pairs of horny, comb-shaped tooth plates that grasp food and pull it into the mouth. They are marine predators and/or scavengers.

Hagfish are most well-known for their defense mechanism: releasing copious amounts of slime from specialized mucous glands in their skin. The slime reacts to seawater, expanding to 10,000 times its original size in 0.4 seconds. This slime is flexible, more durable and retentive than the slime excreted by any other animals. If a predator is not deterred by the sudden mouthful of slime, hagfish can also tie themselves into a knot to scrape more slime off of their bodies, wiggling free from their captor while its gills are clogged. Hagfish will also use this traveling knot behavior to clean themselves of any excess mucous.

Very little is known about hagfish reproduction. They are split into males and females, with females usually outnumbering males. Depending on species, females lay from 1 to 30 tough, yolky eggs. The eggs stick together with velcro-like tufts at either end. They do not have a larval stage and hatch as miniature adults.

The oldest-known stem group hagfish are known from the Late Carboniferous, with modern forms first being recorded from the mid-Cretaceous.

Propaganda under the cut:

Hagfish thread keratin, the protein that make up their slime filaments, is under investigation as an alternative to spider silk for use in applications such as body armor.

Hagfish slime threads can also be used as ultra-strong fiber for clothing.

Hagfish skin, used in a variety of clothing accessories, is usually referred to as "eel skin". It produces a particularly durable leather used for wallets and belts.

Remember this?

In 2017, a truck carrying 7,500 pounds of live hagfish got into a road accident on U.S. Highway 101. The aggravated hagfish then released enough slime to cover the road and nearby cars. Horror movie situation tbh.

But why were several tons of hagfish being shipped in a truck? Well, they were on their way to Korea for seafood purposes. Yeah. They are eaten in Korea and Japan.

Hagfish have a sluggish metabolism and can survive months between feedings; this is likely due to the scarcity of food on the seafloor. When food is present, such as a dead whale, they can go into a feeding frenzy.

Here I am listing all these ways that humans use them, but hagfish are also an important part of the deep sea ecosystem. Plus… I think they’re cute and I too wish I could produce a bunch of slime when I don’t want people to touch me. I mean, Howl in “Howl’s Moving Castle” does it and people love him, so…

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Do you have a favorite saint? :)

Hard to choose one. I like Saint Brendan the Navigator. He gave communion to a mermaid.

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I found a bunch of pictures I took when I visited aquariums. Totally forgot I had those. Turns out a lot of them are pretty nice so I thought I'd share~

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Nudibranchs as pictured by a Japanese illustrator named Kumataro Ito, artist for the USS Albatross’ Philippine Expedition, 1907–10. More of his stunning images here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/kumataro-ito-s-illustrations-of-nudibranchs-from-the-uss-albatross-philippine-expedition-ca-1908

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perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

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Gouldian Finches (Chloebia gouldiae), family Estrildidae, order Passeriformes, Australia

Photo by Derrick Wong

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Vampire Horse 2: Vampire Horse and The Werewolf Bandit.

The adventures of Vampire Horse and the Vampire Cowboy continue…

Thanks for reading!

Read Vampire Horse.

Buy digital copies of my comics.

Toss money in my hat.

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posting it again for all the benthicheads out there

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Marinetober day 25: sea butterfly

[acrylic pens on dark paper]

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invertober day 21, strawberry squid. today was a long day

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A vampire squid ! It’s a silly name for an animal that picks marine snow out of the water around them, but they named it before they knew that !

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There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...