#life is an scp

[o-craven-canto]

Which of these three animals would you say has the worst childbirth: kiwis, spotted hyenas or humans?

IMO hyenas, absolutely. Humans ended up with a very unfortunate combination of large head and narrow pelves, but having to give birth through what is effectively a penis, which inevitably tears open, and which over *half* of cubs can't even get through alive? The kiwi's giant egg certainly puts huge stress on the female, but I don't think it causes as much damage on the way out, to either party.

[prokopetz]

While I was going through my old school papers today, I found one of those trick quizzes that high school teachers who think they're terribly clever like to hand out – you know, the ones with a long, complicated series of instructions where the first instruction is "read all instructions in full before following any instruction other than this one", and the final instruction is "disregard all instructions other than first instruction and this one", and you lose a point for each preceding instruction you actually carried out – and now I desperately need to come up with an in-universe rationale for an SCP Foundation containment procedure article to be structured that way.

[eat-applez]

Fictional universe: And there was this COMPANY,,,,

Me: Oh they did some messed up shit didn’t they

EDIT: anyone who says “also in real life!!” or smth like that just know it’s been done 700 times.

[n1ghtw1ng-scp]

[o-craven-canto]

Petrels and fulmars (high-latitude seabirds) turn digested fish into a dense stomach oil that they can spray as a defense against predators

So we all know that pretty much all cephalopods can shoot ink as a self defense method, but are there any other sea critters that practice "defensive secretion"? I know there are some sea hares that do it, and obviously most animals on earth produce some form of fluid, but I was wondering if there are any other creatures that do it at the same levels as cephalopods. Googling this question is very hard.

Besides hagfish making huge clouds of slime that suffocates predators, there's a bunch of deep sea creatures that release luminescent clouds! The best known is a shrimp:

There's also sea cucumbers that can release a cloud of toxic slime and likely quite a few others. There's also at least one case of an *offensive* chemical cloud; some cone snails release a cloud of insulin to paralyze nearby fish. It's invisible but works almost instantly, sending them into shock. Then the snail can take all the time it needs to swallow them in its big giant stretchy mouth:

[gladosluver]

they should set their differences aside and work together. imagine the horrors they could create

[o-craven-canto]

Taxonomy rant

I’m sympathetic to claims that Linnean binominal nomenclature -- you know, the Homo sapiens Felis catus Quercus robur thing -- is inadequate to describe species as they exist in nature. But the problem is not with Linnean names, it’s with names period.

We interact with the world by imagining it’s made up of “things”, of discrete objects that belong to categories, have properties, and interact with each other; and to these “things“ we give “names”, which allow us to think and talk about them. Which is fine, as I don’t think we’d be able to interact productively with the world if it wasn’t for this level of naive abstraction. Imagine if we had to re-deduce the physical properties of each individual chair from its constituent molecules, instead of imagining the category “chair” and a standard protocol to make use of its members.

But then we fall back in the misconception that “species” are discrete, bounded categories built on variation around a central ideal type -- the Platonic essentialism that Richard Dawkins rightly considered the single greatest obstacle to most people in understanding biology and evolution. In reality, there is no “species” beyond the sum of all the individuals that make it up, which form smooth continua of variation and blur at the edges into related species.

We made a brave attempt at defining “species” as a group of individuals capable of interbreeding. This patently fails with bacteria and most protists, which reproduce asexually, and only engage in transfer of genes independently from reproduction. (And bacteria will happily accept DNA from different phyla and kingdoms, as if we could get pregnant from tree pollen.) It also raises the thorny question of what counts as interbreeding. Can two species interbreed if they bear viable but infertile offspring? What if the offspring is fertile, but sicklier than non-hybrids? What if they can interbreed just fine, but just choose not to because they have different mating signals? Even if you choose arbitrarily one step of the ladder of noninterfecundity as your criterion, populations that are not constantly mixed will drift away from each other over time as they accumulate new mutations.

What of ring species, which show that the ability to interbreed is not transitive, so that A can breed with B, and B can breed with C, but C cannot breed with A? In any given moment of time these are fairly rare, but if you pry open time and look at life diachronically, you will see that every single living population is like that. There is an uniterrupted chain of parents and children in which each ring obviously belonged to the “same species” of the previous and the next (or the previous hundred and the next hundred), but the first ring of the chain is a lancelet-like worm-fish thing, and the last is a turtle or a hummingbird or a cheetah.

You can choose to measure genetic distance between populations and set an arbitrary maximum as your species threshold, but distance is again not transitive, and again you run against bacteria -- a population of bacteria, allegedly all of the same species, can have quite different genomes from cell to cell, between environmental pickup of DNA, quasi-sexual transfer, and viral infections.

Shall we then treat individuals as unit of analysis, rather than species? (With a trillion billion billion bacteria living on Earth at any given time? Good luck) But then we run in the same issue -- where are the borders of the individual? Meiosis and fertilization at least create a clean enough break between generations in sexually reproducing species, but what of those parthenogenetic aphids and rotifera in which each individual is just a clone grown from a cell of their mother? What of budding hydrae, and clonal colonies of polyps and trees, in which an “individual” simply grows out of another as if they were but a limb?

For that matter, consider our gut bacteria, which outnumber by far our genetically human cells, and yet are a necessary part of our body no less than our own tonsils or gall bladder, despite being more unlike us than ferns. Consider mitochondria, of which there are a thousand in each eukaryotic cells, without which every oxygen breather would cease to be, and who still retain their own bacterial genome and transcription after two billion years of coexistence. Consider ERV sequences, which are but viruses that accidentally copied themselves into cells about to divide, and which make up at least 5% of the genome of every single human cell (parts of the genes for the mammalian placenta may come from there).

There are no species; there are no individuals either. Even cells and genes are on thin ice. There is just Life, a seething, shoggothy four-dimensional mass rooted in some Archean hydrothermal vent and stretching cancerous tendrils across the aeons, of which species and individuals are merely local clusters and sub-clusters that we point out and give a name to because, much like with constellations, it’s convenient for certain purposes. (Including making sense of Life and Its history as best as we can.)

Enough with that “did you know that sharks are not really fish?” nonsense. Embrace taxonomic nihilism. It is an objective fact about the physical world that the lineage of sharks diverged from the lineage of tunas before the lineage of tunas diverged from ours. It is not a fact that sharks “are” or “aren’t” fish, because categories are phantoms and nothing actually “is” except wave functions and the void. (It is also a fact that sharks are not Osteichthyes, but only because the word “Osteichthyes”, unlike the word “fish”, was defined in a specific way that excludes sharks.)

In sum, I support keeping Linnean nomenclature around on the grounds that

We need to give names to things anyway, and

I have a fetish for Greek and Latin roots. Dicopomorpha echmepterygis. Hrngh.

[scientistyaoi]

losing my mind because i accidentally softlocked myself and i didn't save at all and i lost 2 new miis i made :( (sophia and iceberg) but anyways here's my scp foundation tomodachi life thing :33

[o-craven-canto]

Also neat: it's universally conserved across all life.

With exceptions! Because that's how much evolution hates us being able to make general statements, apparently.

There are some bacteria, intracellular parasites of aphids and scalebugs, which have shed most of their genes (they have the smallest genomes of any cellular organism on Earth) and some of them even lost their ATP synthase, producing ATP through substrate-level phosphorylation [1] [2]; Chlamydiae and Rickettsiales, other intracellular bacteria, directly steal pre-made ATP molecules from their hosts, arguably the ultimate form of parasitism! [3] Though I'm not sure if they have actually lost ATP synthase too, or if they're just that lazy.

Hey, look at ATP synthase with me for a second. It's literally a molecular rotary motor with a crank shaft, embedded in a membrane holding a proton reservoir.

(In eukaryotes like us, that membrane is the inner mitochondrial membrane; in prokaryotes it's usually the inner membrane of the cell. Either way its job is to turn ADP into ATP, which will turn back to ADP after it does work in the cell.)

There are pumps elsewhere on the membrane that force protons (H+) in. When they come out, they come out through the ATP synthase, turning the turny bit. When 10 protons go through, the head makes a complete turn, minting 3 ATP molecules.

This thing is 10-20 nanometers long!

Also neat: it's universally conserved across all life. Not in the exact same form, but recognizably the same thing:

Life began around 3.5 billion years ago. The oldest two domains of life – bacteria and archaea – diverged really early. "Have different cell membrane and cell wall composition" early. So ATP synthase arose around the time life itself did, and has persisted for three quarters of Earth's lifetime.

[brainrotisseriechicken]

uah...clefdraki yuri

my favorite character . lesdraki

[dumyhead]

another redraw but it’s the scp yaoi I made when I was 11

[rangertowerdefensesimulator]

i like to imagine, after escaping site-19, 049 and 035 try and live a ""normal"" life. 049 tries to go on with curing the pestilence while 035 clings onto them like a parasite :-) (and 049 enjoys it.) (atleast to some capacity)

[o-craven-canto]

What's the line between very simple organism, and very complicated chemical?

It’s possible that at least some viruses evolved from parasitic single celled organisms that gradually stripped away every structure and gene not absolutely necessary for replication until only a minimal genome and possibly a protein coat was left. What’s even crazier is that there are viruses that went even further—losing even most of their genes necessary for reproduction in a host cell, such that they can only reproduce in the presence of a helper virus. Viruses of viruses, exploiting their already-diminished kin.

It’s a strange kind of optimization trap for genes to fall into! Hard to say whether they have fundamentally failed at evolution, becoming something nonliving and only vaguely related to actual life, or whether they have succeeded beyond any other creature—pure genes, who need exert no metabolic effort of their own to reproduce.

[cielcreations]

SCP-5C4R

Item #: SCP-5C4R

Site: H3RM1T5

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-5C4R is to be given standard foundation living quarters as well as appropriate meals when asked. SCP-5C4R is allowed to cook or bake in the commonplace kitchen. He is also allowed to freely roam and interact on the Safe Sites of the foundation. He is not permitted near the Euclid Sites and especially not permitted near the Keter Sites. There is no need for special containment procedures, just the standard rules and regulations (he is to be given no weapons, no information, etc). SCP-5C4R-1 is also permitted anywhere SCP-5C4R is. Be careful not to let her in to dangerous sites; she is fast, she can and will run between foundation members legs to get somewhere.

Addendum SCP-5C4R-1: If you encounter SCP-5C4R-1, please do not feed her any treats. SCP-5C4R gives her enough treats. She has already had to go on a diet, which SCP-5C4R was very upset about.

Yes, foundation members are permitted to pet SCP-5C4R-1. She is just as safe as SCP-5C4R.

Description: SCP-5C4R appears to be a twenty six (26) year old Caucasian man of American decent, approximately two (2) meters in height. He has brown hair with green eyes and wears any of the clothes the foundation provides to him. He doesn't seem to have a preference in clothing and often changes his style. Sometimes, he will allow his hair to grow long. Other times, he will keep his hair short. Because SCP-5C4R interacts with the foundation members often, there is no need to put a restriction on this.

SCP-5C4R is very kind and cooperative with the foundation members. He doesn't seem to mind the foundation, nor does he seem to care about the questions we ask. He answers them very honestly, even cracking a few jokes, or he explains how uncomfortable he is and doesn't answer.

SCP-5C4R seems to be a normal man, however, he is completely immune to everything. With permission, we have tested the following objects to see if it would hurt him.

Knife: Used to create lacerations on forearm

Sword: Used to attempt to remove arm

Acid: Used on hands

Gun: Used to shoot

Nothing hurt SCP-5C4R. He only complained about the acid, saying it merely "felt uncomfortable." Along with being unharmed, anytime a wound was afflicted on SCP-5C4R, a scar appeared on his body. The scars are not permanent, they only stay on SCP-5C4R's body for six (6) months, which is the only indication that he has been harmed.

Along with SCP-5C4R, there is SCP-5C4R-1. She is an American Shorthair cat. She is SCP-5C4R's pet and follows him almost everywhere. She, like SCP-5C4R, is also immune to everything. We have not tested any objects on her, she has just gotten in the crossfire of incidents, but was left unharmed. SCP-5C4R has also confirmed that SCP-5C4R-1 is immune to everything like him.

[monkeef]

im feelin down past few days so here’s old random head i coloured for no reason.

[o-craven-canto]

This is the kind of things that come out when your biosphere runs on random mutations + locally-optimizing selection. You know those weird glitches in which an AI trained to drive as fast as possible through a simulated environment starts vibrating against the ground instead because this counts as moving fast and the AI just wants Number to Go Up and doesn’t know or care what the developers actually wanted? All life on Earth is like that, with Number being the amount of surviving offspring you leave behind.

Bonus:

Surprised I have not see this featured in more fetish content