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(via Elwood Edwards, Voice of AOL’s ‘You’ve Got Mail’ Alert, Dies at 74 - The New York Times)

Elwood Edwards, an announcer who voiced the ubiquitous AOL email alert “You’ve got mail” at a time when many Americans were just beginning to learn how to navigate the internet, died on Tuesday at his home in New Bern, N.C. He was 74.

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This is the first report of sex in humpback whale, and is the first report of sexual activity between two male

Yes, the first report of sex in humpback whales is homosexual activity. Despite decades of research on humpback whales around the world, reports of penis extrusion by males are relatively rare and copulation in humpback whales has not yet been documented. 

The unprecedented event was recorded opportunistically on January 19, 2022, near the Molokini crater off the island of Maui, Hawaiʻi. Two humpback whales were seen engaged in copulation for the first time in recorded history, but after photo analyses along molecular studies, revealed both were mature males.

According to researchers, cetaceans such as humpback whales could use the genital slit or anus for same-sex copulation, to practice reproductive behaviors or nonreproductive sexual behavior such is forming social alliance or assert a sort of dominance.

Reference (Open Access): Stack et al., 2024. An observation of sexual behavior between two male humpback whales. Marine Mammal Science

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guys i just found out about this site that does a daily guessing game, it’s phylogenetic wordle- so fun!!!

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did you know that hyenas loaf like cats do? look it up there's pictures

This is the best fact I’ve ever heard thank you so much anon

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actually you know what? ryan IS my poor little meow meow. not only do i love when ryans a little fucked up and evil but i think he should do it more often actually. kind of girlboss of him

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800 Hellbenders With Large Mouths and Strong Jaws Freed into Missouri Waters, Zoo Says

More than 800 giant salamanders with mouths so big and jaws so strong that they can swallow fish whole have been released into Missouri rivers.

The endangered Ozark and eastern hellbenders were raised from eggs at the Saint Louis Zoo before they were freed this summer as part of the zoo’s hellbender conservation program, according to the zoo’s Wednesday blog post.

The selected hellbenders were “thoughtfully chosen” by experts who evaluated their age, health, sex and native river, the zoo said, with a goal of maximizing how many of the hellbenders survive and reproduce…

Read more:  https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article254261968.html

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There are two parts of this story: The first is that a coral restoration technique called Biorock (which involves running extremely low voltage electricity through metal structures that coral are attached to) is helping to grow new reefs 2-5 times faster than normal.

But the second part of the story is even more important. This new coral technique has allowed people in the small fishing village of Pemuteran to become involved in the conservation of the ecosystem that they rely on for food.

After years of dynamite fishing and cyanide poisoning, the reefs in their region had been damaged and fish stocks plummeted as a result. Once the fishermen understood the relationship between healthy reefs and healthy fish stocks, they became invested in restoring their reefs and even began reporting fishermen from other villages who were continuing to use damaging practices.

One of the workers on the coral restoration project, who was originally doubtful that it would work, said:

“We started taking care of it like a garden. And we started to love it.”

Another reminder that taking care of nature often also means taking care of people.

Thanks to @cognitiveinequality for the submission!

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Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.

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“If all stays on schedule, the river, green and clear, will be back in its original channel and free flowing again within weeks.

‘From here, it only gets better,’ Miller said, looking upstream at the sparkling river, overhung with a deep forest. The tall trees cast lush shadows on water laughing over rocks smoothed round by the current.”

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New SRKW baby sighted today!

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Cursed ant fact, go!

weaver ants make nests by sticking leaves together with silk!

it’s architecturally really impressive, especially since one leaf is to an ant what a giant chunk of corrugated steel is to you. 

so how do they do it? ants aren’t particularly known for their silk-making ability.

well, first the weaver ants form living chains to literally winch the leaves down into position...

...aaand then they rely on some good old-fashioned child labor to make things stick.

see, there’s one form of ant that IS known to make silk- their larva! baby ants normally spin cocoons for themselves when they get ready to turn into an adult ant, just like caterpillars do.

but if you happen to be a weaver ant larva, you instead donate that silk to the good of the colony by becoming a living spot-welder. they use all their silk in the production of nests, and don’t make cocoons of their own at all!

though no one will ever know their opinion on child-labor laws, because they’re ants.

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Today’s Exhibit of the Day highlights a mom like no other from our Hall of Reptile and Amphibians. Meet the Indian python (Python molurus)! Moms-to-be incubate their eggs for up to nine weeks at a time, leaving only occasionally for a drink. If the temperature of the snake and the environment drops below 91°F (32.8°C) the snake warms her eggs with metabolic heat produced by initiating strong, periodic contractions in her body, and by shifting her pose around the eggs to retain heat. Mothers can keep their eggs as much as 13°F warmer than their surroundings. Photo: © AMNH (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CAMgHOsAo5-/?igshid=1lcnirkafqz9x

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Bird QR Other places to see my posts: INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY / KICKSTARTER

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🚨 Hey Tumblr—We need your kelp! 🚨

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is here for you — and for the ocean — during the coronavirus crisis. But it’s hitting us hard in many ways and we need your help, right now, to come back strong. Please urge your congressional representatives to support emergency relief funding for us and other nonprofit aquariums, zoos and museums!

Under normal circumstances, visitor revenue makes much of what we do possible, including our exceptional day-to-day care of over 80,000 animals and plants, our rescue and rehabilitation of stranded sea otters, and our work to tackle the greatest threats to the health of our ocean planet. But our ability to continue this vital work is uncertain due to the unprecedented loss of revenue during our closure. 

We look forward to the day we can welcome you back to the Aquarium in person, and continue building the world our children—and all of us—deserve. Until then, you can help us by asking your congressional representatives to support emergency funding for nonprofit aquariums, zoos and museums in the next relief bill. Thanks for your conseaderocean! 

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SILENT NIGHT

you are a mouse.

and right now, you’re scuttling around the forest floor going about your mousey business. you have many adorable mouse children to feed, after all.

distantly, you hear a faint shriek like the sound of failing anti-lock breaks.

you pause for a moment, then resume your foraging. it was probably nothing! you are a mouse and lack creative prediction abilities. you are just thinking that maybe later you’ll engage in some traditional mouse activities and pee in a sleeping bag or two, when 

BAM

suddenly, you are now a mousey corpse being borne skyward at upwards of thirty miles per hour. you would probably marvel at this, if you weren’t just a mouse and now also dead. your sad little corpse will be swallowed whole and your children will be eaten by, I dunno, frogs or something. nature is a real bitch sometimes.

congrats, you’ve just made the brutal acquaintance of the Grim Reaper of the rodent world:

HOLY NIGHT, YIKES.

but enough dramatic bullshit! you aren’t a mouse anymore, you’re a person reading a very informative and interesting article about Barn Owls which was written by a very handsome and modest genius. ahem. anyway. compared to some of the birds I’ve featured in Weird Biology before, Barn Owls may seem pretty normal! at least on the surface. (spoiler alert: Barn Owls Are Not Normal. at all.)

Barn Owls are mediumish owls that look kind of like a toasty loaf of bread, if that loaf had a pair of pitch-black nightmare eyeballs revealing a door into eternal darkness. (IF YOU LOOK INTO A BARN OWL’S EYES, THE ABYSS DOES INDEED GAZE BACK.) they reach a little over a foot long, with a three-foot wingspan. and like all owls, Barn Owls are stupidly light, tipping the scales at a whole pound and a half at the absolute most. this might not seem that big, but if that pound and a half is strafing towards you at 60+ mph talons first, it puts a whole new perspective on the situation.

so where do Barn Owls live, anyway? well. a better question to ask would be, “where do Barn Owls NOT live, Jesus Christ.”

Antarctica. the answer is Antarctica.

Barn Owls are what we call a “cosmopolitan species”, meaning they live fucking everywhere. they can be found in farmlands, woodlands, and grasslands across EVERY MAJOR CONTINENT and MOST LARGE ISLANDS worldwide! (except Antarctica, for obvious reasons.) this, if you couldn’t tell, is completely fucking ridiculous. especially for a species of owl, which tend to be mediocre fliers and grouchy homebodies.

in fact, Barn Owls have the widest distribution of any non-seabird avian in the entire world! these stubby birds of prey may look like toasted mashmallows, but they’re tenacious fliers and extremely adaptable predators who can be active day or night and will eat anything up to and including a slice of cheese pizza. these fluffy bastards even turn up regularly in New Zealand, and god only knows how they even got over there. (there’s now a stable breeding population there, to the regret of the rats.)

maybe they just called an Uber.

but aside from their adaptable tenacity, Barn Owls are pretty standard as owls go. by which I mean they’re a shambling heap of bizarro traits barely even recognizable as a bird! where should we start? 

EYEBALLS. let’s start with eyeballs.

like all owls, Barn Owls have eyeballs that are modified for UNIMAGINABLE low-light vision. they don’t see color very well, but that’s a hell of a trade of for having basically a set of night-vision goggles for eyeballs! and to cap it all off, these lucky bastards see just fine in daylight, too.

but this amazing vision comes with a price.

it’s a really weird price, too. not like the standard “first-born child” bullshit or anything.

having excellent night and day vision is fairly rare in nature, and Barn Owls had to pull some biological strings to get it- their eyeballs are more of a modified tube than the traditional Orb. yes, that’s insane. and also yes, this means the Barn Owl can’t actually move its eyes to look around like you and I can. so what do they do instead? 

why, they’ve developed loose tendons and ligaments in their neck that allow them nearly 270 degrees of rotation, that’s what they did! a perfectly logical and sane response that give NO ONE the screaming meemies OR the heebie jeebies! for sure!

…yeah okay, that’s actually pretty adorable.

but these two biological hat tricks pale in comparison to the Barn Owls’ true source of strength, the reason for their hunting prowess! which is… the ability to hear real good. REAL GOOD. Barn Owls have hearing keen enough to pick up a mouse fart in a windstorm, but they can also peg the GPS location of that poor embarrassed mouse down to within a couple inches! impressive, right? this is because their ears are sideways.

kind of, anyway. Barn Owl ears are two holes under the feathers at the edge of their attractive facial disc, and one of them is a few centimeters higher than the other. like maybe god stuck a pencil into one of them and just yanked it off kilter, or something. but there’s a method to this madness- having off-centered ears gives the Barn Owl a true reckoning of where a sound is happening in 3d space by tracking which ear receives a sound first. they’re basically a biological sonar receiver.

but I’ve saved the last for least! let’s get into the ability that really puts the cherry on this creeptacular Barn Owl cake. 

all is calm! all is bright!

Barn Owls are utterly and completely silent fliers. (when they aren’t making noises like a demon caught in a paper shredder, anyway.) one could flap three inches in front of your face in a dark room and you would never know. this is because every feather on their wings and body is edged in soft fringes that absorb sound, basically turning Barn Owls into flying private screenings of The Quiet Place.

and this absolute silence gives them a MASSIVE edge in hunting! Barn Owls hunt by flying just above the ground at absolutely insane speeds and just kind of picking up whatever smaller creature tickles their dinnertime fancies. usually this dinner is small rodents and rabbits, but Barn Owls can and will eat anything they can get the drop on up to and including SLEEPING HAWKS. smaller owl dinners like mice get swallowed whole (aaaaaaa), and their bones and fur are regurgitated later (AAAAAAAAA).

a normal bird!

so with everything they have going for them, how are Barn Owls doing on the global stage in these difficult times? pretty fucking great, actually! Barn Owls are decreasing in some areas but increasing rapidly in others, and overall they’re ranked as Least Concern. this is likely because Barn Owls really don’t have a problem coexisting with humans!

Barn Owls love to hang out in human structures (like barns! wild, right? WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED.) and eat a lot of species that humans consider to be pests, like rats and mice. it’s a win-win for both owls and humans, and it definitely helps that Barn Owls are routinely misidentified as cryptids (*coughcoughmothmancough*) or the tortured souls of the damned! (it’s because they scream at night and kind of look like the accursed shades of the dead, doomed to forever walk the earth in torment.) here’s hoping that this silent avian predator sticks around for a long, long time to come.

SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE.

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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee and support Weird Biology!

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Birds in Backyards img2- All About Birds img3- Birders Store img4- Mother Nature Network img5- Lisa L. Kee img6- Norfolk Wildlife Trust img7- Roy Rimmer img8- Steven Boyce