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baby capybara named Tupi via san antonio zoo

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the fact that we’re apes is SO funny… i can calculate how many parsecs away a nebula is based upon its apparent magnitude for a fun little brain exercise. i also feel depression and existential ennui if my curtains are shut for too long because my brain has a 45000 year old creature in it who feels that darkness holds too many unknown threats 

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Otherworldly Bunnies by Annie Stegg Gerard

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just found the most fucked up plane

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you can’t have sex with someone who finds you attractive because they only want to sleep with you because of how attracted they are to you which is coercion

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fuck an "intended audience" how about we normalize engaging with new and unfamiliar art pieces on their own terms

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Snowball

mya0618

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Decided to do something a bit different. A local blue-collar worker finds a little feisty blue hedgehog and adopts him :)

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It's Friday. Can you guess what I'm in?

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Indian Ocean Friday- Coelacanths 🐟

The end of the week has arrived, and with it comes Indian Ocean Friday. The funky creature of the day is the coelacanth. If you want you can request sea creatures for me to make one of these posts about 💙

Scientific name: Latimeria chalumnae

Status: Critically endangered

Class: Actinisia

Population: less than 500

Lifespan: estimated to be 100 years

Have they been on Octonauts?: Yes

Coelacanths were thought to have gone extinct around 66 million years ago during the late Cretaceous, until they were discovered in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Due to having many fins, they are highly manoeuvrable and can move it’s body in almost any direction. They have been seen at times doing ‘headstands’. Coelacanths mainly feed on smaller fish and various kinds of cephalopods.

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For polychaete day, here's a previous annelid post but edited to only have the polychaetes, some fun facts for you! :)

Sea mouse!

This luminous polychaete worm lives several thousand meters deep on the ocean floor, and sports these extremely light-reflecting scales! Each one is hollow and lined inside with hexagonal cylinders which reflect nearly 100% of the light that hits them. The sea mouse's quill-scales create the only documented case of a "complete spectrum photonic crystal" in an organism, that is, a nanostructure that alters the light entering them and can create the whole spectrum of light. It is thought that the quill-scales are so light reflective as to deter predators or to make the sea mouse's silhouette harder to see.

Bone-eating worms!

Come on tumblr, you love whalefalls, right? These worms are an important part of the whalefall ecosystem, boring into the bones with acid to feed on them! These peculiar animals lack a stomach and a mouth, instead relying on symbiotic bacteria that break down the bone material, after which they suck up the nutrients with "roots"! The red things you see above are the female worms' gills, as the males are in fact microscopic and live inside the females. These worms are valuable in returning every bit of nutrients back into the biochemical cycle!

Pompeii worm!

This deep sea worm is an extremophile if you've ever seen one, it also inhabits hydrothermal vents. They build a tube around themselves and seemingly shield themselves from the elements inside the tube with the help of a "fluffy" coat of sulfur-eating bacteria. What makes them especially fascinating is that their tail end comes to contact with temperatures of up to 80 °C (176°F) while their gills collect oxygen from the outside water that's only 22 °C (72°F)! 60 degrees Celsius of temperature difference to an animal only 13 cm in length, that's bonkers!

Gossamer worms!

These free-swimming polychaetes produce a yellow bioluminescent glow from the appendages at the sides of their body, which is unusual among animals! Gossamer worms have a unique style of swimming from other polychaetes, as they lack many bristles at the ends of their appendages and also the mesenteries in between each body segment. Still they swim, with great flexibility, speed, and maneuverability! It turns out that they retract and extend each appendage to cause differences in drag, causing a wave to undulate through the whole body, which in turn makes their thrust power even stronger. They might serve as inspiration for aquatic robots in the future!

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I love you, George Takei.