#earthpost

[themesopelagiczone]

earth fact time. this is NOT A DRILL! two great white sharks have become best friends!! their names are simon and jekyll and they've travelled together for over 4,000 miles. this is a huge discovery, because great white sharks are usually solitary creatures!

an important note is that these sharks aren't swimming side by side, and are usually a couple kilometres off from each other - but their trackers kept pinging in the same part of the ocean at the same time. scientists think they might be brothers, or following a previously unknown migratory path.

business insider | cbc

(edited 08/10/23 to fix spelling of jekyll's name)

[slowrotation]

[missxganjaxgirl]

photography by me 📷

[fixiauu]

Expansion Earth

[thisismyrocket]

[lagtim3]

Googling this led me down a brief rabbit hole and to the cursed knowledge that Coconut Crabs--

--y’know, these little leviathans? They’re terrestrial HERMIT CRABS. Not ‘descended from’ or ‘related to’, mind you. They’re true hermits. Per Wikipedia:

The shell-less hermit crab Birgus Latro (coconut crab) is the world's largest terrestrial invertebrate.

God, what a planet.

my fave thing about alligators is that evolution was just like.. “yeah that’s fine” and left them for 80 million years

[mila2010]

Earth Pics @earthposts - Perfect Reflection

[liliannorman]

Scientists “Discover” Largest Shield Volcano on Earth

Guest “How about that geology fans?” by David Middleton And it’s not Mauna Loa… UH researchers reveal largest and hottest shield volcano on EarthPosted on May 13, 2020 by Marcie Grabowski In a recently published study, researchers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology revealed the largest and hottest shield… Scientists “Discover” Largest Shield Volcano on Earth published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

[themesopelagiczone]

earth fact time. there's a play behaviour in birds that a paper calls co-lying, which is essentially where they lay side by side on the ground together. australian magpies do it, and there's been some evidence to suggest ravens do it, too.

researchgate

photos from: twitter | blogspot

[slowrotation]

[themesopelagiczone]

earth fact time. this is a blue-banded goby! a lot of marine species can change their sex, but most can only change in one direction (e.g. the blackeye goby). blue-banded gobies can change back and forth, sometimes even within days!

oceana.org | fishbase

[themesopelagiczone]

some good news! a project funded by the global environment facility and led by undp jordan is working to protect migratory bird routes along the red sea and rift valley (approximately eastern africa into western asia)! this will help over 1.5 million birds, such as the egyptian vulture and the white stork, migrate safely.

[themesopelagiczone]

meet the quoll. they're marsupials! they're carnivorous! they're super cute! and there have been 111 cases recorded of them eating human bodies and human corpses!

they used to be abundant in australia before european settlement, but now some species have seen a nearly 70% decline. one species has even disappeared completely from the australian mainland.

australian geographic | bush heritage

photos: picasa web albums | guy nœhringer | jj harrison | michael barritt & karen may

[themesopelagiczone]

devil's hole pupfish are the rarest fish on earth. they are also the most inbred fish on earth! they live in ONE place, a hole in the ground called devils hole in nevada. and the thing is they can only survive in that hole, which is 93Fº. literally no other fish can survive in those conditions.

because of their tiny environmental niche, they're critically endangered, so there's a program working to breed them. but the thing is that these guys evolved SO WELL that the conditions they live in have to be exactly like devils hole, or else they straight-up just die, so scientists have needed to replicate the devils hole environment for them to survive.

last year science hippies counted 263 fish, which is a 19-year high!

npr | national park foundation | national wildlife federation | phys.org

photos from usfws national digital library, taken by olin feuerbacher

[themesopelagiczone]

THEY FOUND HIM!!! THEY FOUND HIM AGAIN!!!! AFTER 87 YEARS SCIENCE HIPPIES FOUND THE CRITICALLY ENDANGERED DE WINTON’S GOLDEN MOLE AGAIN IN SOUTH AFRICA!

these little legends are blind, but they use super hearing powers and vibrations to swim through sand and eat little bugs n shit. they're so cool. i'm going insane.

cnn

[themesopelagiczone]

after TWO CENTURIES, seven of the world's the last wild horses have returned to kazakhstan! some horses have been reintroduced to china and mongolia, but this is the first time they are back in kazakhstan. przewalski's horses used to live in the grasslands of central asia, where horses were thought to be first domesticated. there are plans to reintroduce forty horses total in the next five years.

the guardian | bbc