#my brother got these for girls birthday

[nonehell]

FLAT

[satans-knitwear]

outta this world ✨

Treat me ~ Tip me ~ More of me

[xxplastic-cubexx]

Happy Birthday! Thank you for all the amazing art you share with us! Did you get your King Magnus skin? (Terrifying sentence with no context)

THANK YOU !!!!! and thank you all for supporting me throughout these past few months: THAT in of itself is truly a most wonderful gift- to be able to share my silly art and ramblings with you all and for everyone to be so wonderful bout them :']]

BUT NOOO I DIDNT GET MY SKINS YET,,,,,,, my game hasnt finished updating,,,,

[letter3lead]

legally can't be shot in the creek today there's BUSINESS afoot rn

[im-not-a-sheep]

I can't believe my brother got this retired lego bc "he likes lego" and not me, the kid who would basically only ever watch wall-e, what went through my parents mind

[tigresslanzhu]

Forgiveness

Buster: Meena, does your Bible thing say anything about forgiving Artica for playing peek-a-boo with someone’s ears?

Meena: Well, Matthew 18:22 does say that Jesus is willing to forgive seventy times seven.

[Buster pauses, trying to do the math in his head]

Meena: 490, Mr. Moon.

Buster: I feel like I’ve spent more than half that amount on Miss Crawly alone!

[akkivee]

the reason ichiro’s under the impression people just text their feelings at each other is because that’s how kuukou love mailed him all the time lmao

[scarletwitch1918]

Today was the second birthday this year of a friend that I thought I was really close with that i didn’t get invited to

[boyfeminism]

told my birth mom i loved her for the first time in like a decade and felt weird and she sent back a thumbs up and now i feel extra weird

[afaroffsong]

.

Once or twice a year I am hit by a massive wave of homesickness for America that makes me literally nauseous and almost feverish. Anyway I am metaphorically turning my heart inside out as I think about junky old Lincoln, Nebraska and a mice-infested farmhouse and living off of food stamps.

[nerdie-faerie]

The problem with both my parents coming from families with predominantly sisters, is that I grew up being told that adult brothers don't talk to their sisters and won't give them the time of day. Not the most encouraging message given I have 6 brothers. So I do get unreasonably please when my 20 year old brother decides 'you know what, I'm gonna tell my big sister about this' like really 🥹

[justalittlebluetiefling]

I am very pale and it was my niece’s birthday party yesterday and she had a pool party, so I was sitting in the sun (lathered in sunscreen obviously) for a little over an hour before I retreated to shade. But today, I have a very defined tan line from my watch and my partner doesn’t think it’s as impressive as I do.

[daydreamertrait]

i went out for brunch with my friend and she gave me a belated birthday present and part of it was this capybara that she MADE me out of clay??? im literally crying oh my god it's so cute

[killmonk]

will my birthday ever pass without me having to cry and grieve for my 14 year old mother. probably not. Unfortunately.

[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!

[muirneach]

soooo annoying how my mom is always like ‘you kids are so unappreciative to your aunt!!’ girl u hate her ass dont act like we’re in the wrong…..