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Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, picking up pollen on their snouts as they do so – which may make them the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.

Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed wild Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) flowers. Local people in the mountains have traditionally used the nectar as a sweetener for coffee and on flat bread.

The wolves are thought to be the first large carnivore species ever to be recorded regularly feeding on nectar.

“For large carnivores, such as wolves, nectar-feeding is very unusual, due to the lack of physical adaptations, such as a long tongue or specialised snout, and because most flowers are too fragile or produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals,” says Lai.

The sturdy, nectar-rich flower heads of the poker plant make this behaviour possible, she says. “To my knowledge, no other large carnivorous predator exhibits nectar-feeding, though some omnivorous bears may opportunistically forage for nectar, albeit rarely and poorly documented.”

Some of the wolves were seen visiting as many as 30 blooms in a single trip. As they lick the nectar, the wolves’ muzzles get covered in pollen, which they could potentially be transferring from flower to flower as they feed.

“The behaviour is interesting because it shows nectar-feeding and pollination by non-flying mammals might be more widespread than currently recognised, and that the ecological significance of these lesser-known pollinators might be more important than we think,” says Lai. “It’s very exciting.”

Lai and her colleagues at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme now hope to dig deeper into the behaviour and its ramifications. “Trying to confirm actual pollination by the wolves would be ideal, but that would be quite challenging,” she says. “I’m also very interested in the social learning aspect of the behaviour. We’ve seen this year adults bringing their juveniles to the flower fields, which could indicate cultural transmission.”

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When I tell you I was pissing my pants laughing at this.

“This wallpaper is so cute, we could live here” ME IN A NUTSHELL I have ADHD (I’m medicated for it) but when I’m off it this is me 😭

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I think people need to be more comfortable with illegalism and I’m not kidding. Of course the more legal something is, the safer and easier it is to do, but the more people who disregard the law, the harder it is to enforce. There are plenty of laws on the books that people just ignore and are never or rarely policed.

Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. Additionally, it is crucial to build a wall of silence. Nobody talks everybody walks.

People who give out food without a permit, hold a march without a permit, grow a garden without a permit, are more likely to be people you could turn to to work with on preventing an eviction, or keeping people out of cop hands, or helping your friend Jane get crucial healthcare when it’s not legal in your state.

Communities comfortable with these acts won’t call the cops, and then nobody knows that it’s happening.

People have got to shift from both the idea that lawful = good/ illegal = bad, and that the illegality of something means that’s the end of it, and the only fight left is to make it legal again.

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The Kinkfession gave me insight that at least 2 of my kinks are more about finally getting to sleep deeply for a couple hours 😭😭

1. Getting fucked while im drugged, very close to passing out, and the other is doing most of the jobs but the orgasm + meds + just the movement is enough to knock me out. If it is before they cum, they keep going anyways, but I remain passed out.

2. My partner being super bossy and demanding me to make them cum, over and over again, until my body is literally too tires to care about my own, and I just fall asleep/pass out as soon as they give me the okay

And the fantasies are super hot, but thinking about them more I think I just want to fall asleep and stay asleep for a few hours and feel like I slept enough when I wake up 😭

ASDFKDJFLDKFM yeah okay sometimes I think kinks are there to tell us about a psychological need that we have and I think in your case it's entirely possible that the need that your mind is telling you about is "try melatonin"

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the full month between these two tweets

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remember when steve from blues clues was upset that people thought he died in a car crash, not because people thought he was dead but because they said he was driving a dodge charger and "that's a cop car"

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This is pretty vanilla, but reading some of these kinkfessions has made me think more about the dynamics I like with sexual partners, and I’ve realized that I really only want to receive pleasure during sex if it’s going to get my partner off—like, someone I was hooking up with earlier in the year would tell me how good it felt when I came while they were fucking me, which was just, like, brain-meltingly hot to me. Idk if it’s a submissive thing necessarily, but it’s something about being used for the other person’s pleasure. I don’t want to get eaten out because it feels good, I want to get eaten out so my partner can jerk off while doing so, y’know?

No I get that! Sometimes it's just more fun when you know the other person is getting a similar kind of enjoyment out of things

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I sentence you to thinking about dragons for 10 billion year

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petition to replace all "oh no! i'm OLD!" humor with "i survived! YIPPIE!" positivity

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I pulled up the sketchy online Old English version of Beowulf and yeah it has 3,182 lines. If you took 5 seconds per line you’d need four and a half hours to recite it (or specifically to recite the one version that got both written down and preserved for a thousand years) (only a little charred). But I mean 5 seconds per line is for chumps who don’t want to unlock the Beowulf speedrun.

Also ok for SCIENCE I timed myself and quickly reciting the first 5 lines took 16 seconds, let’s call that fifteen because I mispronounced meodosetla. At that pace (if you could keep it up consistently and I mean never cough never take a drink) you’d be looking at 2.65 hours, or 2 hours and 39 minutes (or 159 minutes). This is actually 20 minutes shorter than the theatrical run-time of Peter Jackson’s Two Towers (179 minutes).

Now, the original post was about reciting Beowulf in an hour, so 2 hours and 39 minutes is not gonna cut it, and is so far over time that even doubling your pace can’t save you. You’re gonna lose this speedrun and Æthelfl��d’s new scop poet is going to laugh at you. However, there’s a cheat to exploit here. In the period when Old English (language of Beowulf) was spoken, people often just said there were 12 hours in a day and 12 hours in a night, no longer how long or short daylight actually was. This made the concept of a daylight hour stretch in summer, when daylight lasts way longer than 12 hours. There’s a good article on this I’ll find it if anyone wants it. I don’t actually expect anyone to have read this far.

ANYWAY, the longest day in Jarrow (furthest north Old English speaking town I could think of) in 2024 (sorry this data is not calibrated for the 10th century) was of course midsummer: June 20th, at 17 modern hours 22 modern minutes and 1 modern second. This means each early medieval hour that day actually lasted 1 hour and 26 minutes. Still not nearly enough lads, but this is when it becomes a skill game. Because I wasn’t going ALL that fast. We need to squeeze 159 minutes of Beowulf (aka basically Two Towers) into 86 minutes. If you could half my pace-per-five-lines from 15 seconds to 7.5 seconds, you’d be able to do it, one day of the year, in Jarrow. Iceland is cheating. Good luck.

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I love it when the CEO is in stuff

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This is called "knowing your audience."

Nicole Coenen [ Instagram | TikTok | YouTube ]