#animals gif

[maviyenot]

[cansu-m]

[sirswooshnoodles]

Cobra hoods are spread ribs…

Ive never really met anyone that thought of ribs as interesting… that’s such a shame. Ribs and the things they do are fascinating…. I think about them everyday.

[ak-nm]

[bogleech]

Captain bogleech do you have handy references for the faces of mosquitos, fleas, houseflies, and ticks? I'm picking at an idea of a character who is themed around disease, and is strictly a source of disease and not diseased themself so like... Worlds best spreaders. The one I'm most locked on is miss aedes aegypti because of her good taste in stripes. SO in season (I dontactually know if stripes are in season)

Yes! First its good to know how a "normal" insect mouth is set up:

In most insects, like a grasshopper or a cockroach or the majority of beetles, there's a labrum covering the top of the mouth, kind of like a duck bill! The chompy mandibles are under that, then there are the maxilla to either side of each mandible, which include the "palps" it uses like little hands to hold food. The labium is the bottom part, and also has another set of palps! @revretch has gone into lots of detail on this but they put it best by explaining that the insect mouth is like a four sided box, formed by the labrum, maxilla and labium, with the mandibles usually inside the box. It's just that lots of insects do weird things with these parts, and many have big giant mandibles that always stick out.

Mosquitoes have all these parts, but they're all long and thin, and they all fold together to form the proboscis, with some of them bending back as it drills into flesh.

Fleas have similar to mosquitoes, but shorter and more compact. And many species have that AWESOME looking "mustache" of thorns right above the mouth, used for anchoring to furry hosts while they feed :)

In the non-biting flies, the mandibles are GONE, the mouth extends on a flexible hose and the labella is modified into a big flaring two-lobed pad. Digestive enzymes flow down the labrum and into grooves on the pad, so it works like a sponge soaked with acid :)

Ticks are a lot different because they're arachnids rather than insects, and arachnids have fewer mouthparts; normally just one pair of palps and one pair of chelicerae, which are the "fangs" in spiders! Below all that is an arachnid's real mouth, usually just a tiny little hole. In ticks, the palps are fused into two flat flippers, which the tick uses to pinch the skin of its host. The chelicerae are formed into a pair of jagged "scissors," if the blades of scissors were on the outside! These dig in and widen a small hole. Then the mouth is surrounded by a long extension, the hypostome, which is thickly covered in sharp tiny toothlike blades. Look how rad it is:

I say this a lot but the entire part people think of as the "head" of a tick is really just the mouth, because ticks are related to mites, and in mites, the head is fused entirely with the body. So when ticks have eyes, they're here:

It's tragic the world sees ticks as fat blobs with tiny heads, when in fact they are just big heads with legs.

For fun here are some of my Mortasheen monsters that hybridize humans with all the above, though my mosquito is very dated and due for a big overhaul someday; I didn't bother trying to merge real mosquito mouthparts with fleshy human ones and just had the whole mouth spiral together:

I also drew the flea without its "helmet" piece first, and went on to draw several alternate helmets :)

I put the most effort into the tick as you can tell. I also incorporated the fact that they smell with their front legs. :)

[ludinusdaleth]

"Go spin the wheel, and see where it lands

Join in the circus, stay for a dance

And right when the war quiets down, strike up the band

Keep marching on, my friends

And do what you can..."

Arcane, Season Two, Act Three

[cirkinkadininutopyasi]

[heartnosekid]

jenthreat73 on ig

[steriotypicaloutlaw]

I'm going to scream!!! The girls!!!! They're adorable!!

Blues Clues was my absolute favorite show as a child and I still adore it so much. And Bluey is so good and has such great lessons. They're kindred spirits.

bluey and blue!

[pati-ka]

From Russia with Love (1963)

[oldinterneticons]

[ak-nm]

[k-marzolf]

I want himb.

hedgehog.shogun on ig

[mucseszter22-blog]

Todays mood 🫶

But at least it’s Friday yey

[ubaylukis]

massage