#AND CAPTIVATING

[ghosts-and-blue-sweaters]

It is just me and my complicated relationship with c!Phil against the world.

[vapor-phenomena]

[mischievous-thunder]

What was considered peak masculinity back in the 2000s is now considered as little meow meow energy in 2024

This clearly shows how far we've progressed and become even more improved versions of ourselves.

As for this godly man, he's still as fiery and yet so sweet even two decades later, if not more, as he was all those years ago.

[trekkiesagainstchastity]

It doesn't matter if that fic has been in your drafts for years and is now self-indulgent to the point of parody. If Steven Moffatt is allowed to do it professionally, you are allowed to do it for fun.

[imnotsorryanymore5]

I can’t hold it in any longer.

HES 32???

And he definitely isn’t little.

[brainrotcharacters]

That's that shit eating grin that practically screams "Harder! HARDER!" except the homoerotic subtext is a tripwire they're crash landing through

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

tis the season to remember Medjed aka The Smiter, an invisible egyptian deity with laser eyes and nonbinary swagger:

rotating them gently in my mind as they do a spiffy little dance number

[the-whole-shebang]

I don't care what anyone says, I just KNOW Viktor clocked this man's pathetic, neglected shelter dog rizz the second they met and immediately fell head over heels for him. Argue with the wall.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I promised you some lions! Let's talk about manes, males, and management.

This is Tandie, the current male lion at the Woodland Park Zoo.

Notice anything odd about him? He's got one of those hilarious awkward teenager manes. Except... this cat is nine years old.

I was, of course, immediately curious.

Manes serve a lot of purposes for male lions, including being an indicator of health and fitness - it's actually a sexually selected trait and a social signal. Mane texture / hair quality / length is dependent on nutrition and the body having energy to grow (and carry around!) that much hair! The color is also a signal: males with darker manes have been found to have higher testosterone levels.

In one research report, wild males were much more likely to avoid a lion decoy when it had a longer or darker mane - but the girls really loved a dark mane. It's thought this is because a long, dark mane is an indicator of mate quality. Males with longer, darker manes have higher testosterone and were pretty healthy: meaning they had more energy for fighting, had a better chance of recovering if they got injured, and generally had a higher rate of offspring survival. Manes matter!

So, back to Tandie. He was actually born at the Woodland Park Zoo in 2014 alongside two brothers, to dad Xerxes and mother Adia.

This was Xerxes (rip).

Obviously, a very large, dark, lush mane on Xerxes here. So where did these blond muttonchops come from on his son?

I asked the zoo docents and got an answer that didn't make a lot of sense. They told me that after the three cubs grew into adolescents, they were moved to the Oakland Zoo together. But living together suppressed his testosterone, and he never grew a mane.

Hmmmm.

Here's a photo from 2016, when the brothers debuted at Oakland. They're a year and a half old in this photo.

(Photo Credit: Oakland Zoo)

And here's from an announcement for their third birthday.

(Photo credit: Oakland Zoo)

Okay, so these dudes obviously all were growing manes as of 2017. I think Tandie is the one on the left in the first photo, and laying down in the middle on the second. What happened?

I was just in the Bay Area for a zoo road trip, of course I went to Oakland and tracked down a docent to ask some questions.

It turns out that shortly after the brothers turned three, they started acting like adult male lions: they started scuffling regularly. It's a normal social thing for male lions to live in groups, called coalitions, but according to my lion experts there's generally a baseline level of some social jostling within them. It wasn't quite clear from what the docent said if they couldn't manage the boys together, or if they just wanted to avoid the scratches and small wounds that result from normal lion behavior. Regardless, they put all three of the boys on testosterone blockers in order to be able to keep them together as a social group.

Now, I don't know a lot about the use of hormone alteration as a form of captive animal management, except in the case of birth control. I don't think it's something that's unethical - there was just a webinar on it that I saw go by - but I don't think it's commonly done with big cats. Lions have kind of complicated reproductive cycles, and for instance, we've been learning that female lions can take much longer to come into estrus again than expected after coming off hormonal birth control.

In males, testosterone blockers (or being neutered) means they lose their manes. This is why a lot of rescues will do a vasectomy on their males instead of a neuter - it allows them to keep their mane and the social signals that accompany it.

Tandie returned home to Woodland Park Zoo after Xerxes passed in early 2022, and the docent told me all of the lions had been off their blockers "for while." I'd guess those things happened around the same time, since bringing the trio down to a duo at Oakland would reduce some of the social tensions.

Hormones are such interesting things, though. One of Tandie's brothers has a full mane again, and the other is still totally mane-less.

As for Tandie, his mane is growing back in, and it looks like he might rival his dad for length and coloration.

He started here, in February:

Yesterday:

What a difference four months (and maybe proximity to a girl) makes!

[bathylychnops]

ithiunk i hauve covid..

[thelostmoongazer]

more figuring out how i wanna draw the Lamb :3

[hope-for-the-planet]

I need you all to appreciate how crazy it is to have watched the scimitar horned oryx go from a poster child for "it only exists in zoos" to merely endangered (not even critically endangered!) over my lifetime.

So many heroic people contributed ridiculous amounts of time and effort to make this captive breeding and reintroduction effort a success.

[sufrimientilia]

incapacitation

content warning

drugs that make a character woozy and disoriented. slurring words and falling slack, everything too heavy and confusing and muffled

blown pupils, wandering eyes, breathing too much or too little. sweating, shaking, puking, so limp and pale it’s almost like they’re dead

fevers so high a character's mind just turns to mush. glossy eyes tracking the ceiling, listless and unaware until eventually there's sweat sticking all over the sheets and they start mumbling some vague responses to caretaker's questions

tranquilizer dart that brings a character down all at once. one sudden jerk or look of confusion, not enough time to glance at it much less pull it out before eyes are rolling back and they collapse into the dirt

tranquilizer dart that comes on slowly. pulling it out and running and running until each step becomes too uncoordinated, stumbling or getting dragged along by a teammate until even their begging to stay awake, let's go, becomes hazy and distant

struck so hard that everything rings in one ugly roar. staggering or falling, told to sit down, just stay down. so confused and lost, repeating the same questions and forgetting the answer over and over and over again

character so messed up they struggle to follow any part of the conversation. everything too heavy and confusing and muffled, just useless and incoherent and completely oblivious to the situation

nervous prodding or pleading by caretaker, begging them to just stay awake or focus

jostled around by captor, told to get the fuck up and follow orders, easily manhandled and restrained

mumbling nonsense and spilling secrets. stoic characters without any masks, so confused and broken and vulnerable, slipping and powerless in every sort of way

"you're okay, i promise you're okay"

“ah, shit. you’re a mess—”

“I guess you won’t remember this anyways…”

gaze drifting and blank, too faraway to track anything caretaker/captor is saying. nudged and prodded and pleaded at to no avail, just incoherent and out of it

too weak to move. beaten absolutely senseless or bleeding all over the place, a character just hurting and spent beyond means sprawled flat against the ground

getting dragged along or stepped on, pinned down as if they're in any state to go anywhere

hypnotized and stunned into mindlessness. repeated mantras and rewired thoughts, a character made pliable and blank and used like a puppet

paralyzed but fully aware, left slack and useless and desperate with limp muscles and depressed breathing. assumed dead and abandoned, grieved over or dumped aside like a corpse, forced to watch and unable to do anything

poisoned and just getting worse and worse. teammates desperately looking for a cure while character deteriorates, puking and passing out and getting high fevers, hallucinating and begging for relief

characters taken out of commission when they're otherwise the strongest one. exposed to a weakness, given magical restraints or cuffs with neural suppressors to keep them docile, targeted and taken out

vertigo taking a character side to side, brought down and useless

[peachesobviously]

Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat

[mischievous-thunder]

You wish, Wade, you wish!