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MOUSE YAOI REAL

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animals with exoskeleton are so beautiful. little tanks. little robos. their parts fit together so neatly. ububububbu

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this tiny ass taxidermy shrew is so fuckin funny to me

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Source details and larger version.

My collection of rats and mice, some giant, some playing while the cat’s away.

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A grey male mouse, five white female mice, and their multicolored offspring By: Hansel Mieth From: Life Nature Library: The Earth 1962

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Rodent rotate

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Some of you will remember when I took a trip to Wisconsin and picked up the "wild type" birds from Bre, the president of the American coturnix breeders association. When I picked them up, I was dubious about their status as "wild type" birds. I didn't see any difference between them and my SLB birds. The girl was still kind of a kid compared to most other breeds I know (still in college, over 18 but still very young 20's, living with parents), and only had a handful of birds (maybe 15-20 tops), so on top of the birds not looking like I expected, the person was not what I expected from an experienced, long-term breeder that would know what they were talking about. At her admittance, she'd only been in this a year longer than I had, which to me is no time at all in the grand scheme of things, considering 3 years in peafowl is 'your babies just matured for the first time and you are absolutely still learning most things about peafowl.' Even though I'd been in quail for 3 years by that point, I still felt like I was very new, so the pretentiousness of claiming expertise at 4 years (which is where i am now and I am by no means an expert in quail, despite what it seems like to anyone who doesn't breed quail at all) was... interesting. Especially after the run-around she gave me at the start when discussing picking up the birds, which is a whole other drama.

Anyway, I tried picking out little differences along the way as the offspring of these birds grew out, but now that my hens from that pairing - who SHOULD be completely, totally, clean wild types with NO other genes in them, if Bre was correct and honest about her birds - are adults and laying, they REALLY do no look any different than the SLB hens. Which I have felt was weird, because from photos and what I've seen in person, I expected a difference, especially if SLB had once been used for sex linked breeding. I found a paper (scientific) article about SLB, with photos of WT and SLB compared, and they looked different there, but it was a long time ago, and breeding practices are not always stellar, so without selection to keep stark blacks, it's always possible a "clean" bird with no mutations in captivity no longer looks like the wild type birds in the wild. I clung to hope, anyway.

This is one of the babies from Bre's male, which could be SLB or could be WT (don't know the sex to know the possibilities yet), but they all look like this with little variation:

To check if I'm just inept at telling, I ordered a couple dozen wild type hatching eggs from the vice president of the association, Rebecca, someone that breeds a LOT more quail, enough to run a business around it and have a lot of mutation lines available for purchase, and someone that has a reputation to stake on being right. She JUST "released" a line of "clean" wild types ("clean" except for the fact that they carry the celadon mutation, so not really clean). They hatched a few days ago, and even at hatch, they looked different. Darker overall, with color tinging their feet a lot more than Bre's, and the stripes were thinner/crisper. Now that they're almost a week old and growing in feathers, I'm starting to see some STARK differences in them- to the point when they're laying down, I can pretty reliably pick out the purple banded birds vs the green banded birds, even when I can't see the bands at all.

Their blacks are crisp black.

The overall reddish hue in the SLB is minimal to absent.

These babies look EXACTLY like I expected "wild type" to look, AND have a clear difference from what I've seen out of SLB. Which makes me pretty goddamn certain Bre's birds were NOT wild types.

I'm looking forward to taking pics and comparing the adults, and I'm really hoping that (despite what it means regarding my efforts so far), this second group is very different than the first. Even if it means some effort has been wasted (not all, having a clean roux to start the ce project with is still progress), knowing and feeling confident about the WT status of the birds I have will be worthwhile. It would also mean I can switch my focus with bre's bloodline to making a Roux line (which by nature would be SLB free, and give me the chance to have an auto-sexing pen or two if I wanted them).

I can't do much selection right this second within the new WT group, as I have a limited number of these babies, but going forward with breeding, I know I'm definitely going to be selecting hard toward that stark black look. There are a few babies who are a little browner by comparison, and in future hatches I think I'll probably try to get rid of that so the difference would be very clear for anyone getting birds from me.

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It’s all coming together…

Found some eggs while putting their new decor in!

Excuse the nasty glass, I don’t control the snails

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baby wants smoko

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Tryna get a nice photo of kits and one just has to go and be possessed by an entity

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You might have already seen this, but there’s a Thai cattery working on a line with the white dorsal skunk stripe seen in that one manuscript.

https://www.facebook[dot]com/PPthaicattery

I find this quite exciting

Link

Oh, i've seen a photo but i didn't realize this was an entire breeding project. Honestly this is such a cool idea.

And obviously i hope they'll get to the genetics of this pattern too. Either it's a different gene/allele or a new modifier, it's very exciting.

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beautiful photo of my boy scrungle captured with a decades old film camera that had been hidden from the us-backed Vietnamese occupation during the Vietnam war to protect it from seizure

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My snails were sucking and fucking

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Mouse MD

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does anyone have that 4chan post about the guy who got like. deradicalised from being an incel because he started taking care of shrimp?