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The way some folks react to being cautioned against anthropomorphising animal behaviour, I think there’s often a misunderstanding about precisely what sort of anthropomorphism we’re talking about.

Yes, it’s true that at one time, pure behaviourism – i.e., the notion that non-human animals are basically meat robots executing simple stimulus-response programs and have no subjective experience of reality – was the norm in animal behaviour studies, and any suggestion that non-human animals have an internal life would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism.

However, in this context, “at one time” basically means “the 1970s”; if you’re operating on the assumption that pure behaviourism is still the dominant paradigm in the study of animal behaviour, your understanding of the field is literally half a century out of date, and that’s typically not what’s meant when folks talk about anthropomorphism.

Rather, when folks say you shouldn’t anthropomorphise non-human animals, they’re not talking about assuming that animals are experiencing any motivation at all for the things that they do: they’re talking about assuming that animals are experiencing exactly the same motivation that a human would under comparable circumstances. The fact that a human and a non-human animal do the same thing in response to the same circumstance doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing it for the same reason, and failing to check your assumption they are can lead to some pretty serious problems.

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i feel like its worth talking about this. this is from my dailies blog @oneweirdreptileaday where i draw an animal everyday. its paleoart based but when i went to Morecambe for a week, a place that means a lot to me, i decided to illustrate some of the bird species i saw there for fun. so these are surprisingly really fond illustrations lol and i do love these birds. so seeing these replies didnt come off as funny or amusing, it was just hurtful and annoying.

its easy to forget sometimes that art you see on the internet have people behind them. when it comes to wildlife art particularly it seems like people forget how to interact and, when its an animal they dont like? feel the need to leave a note about how they dont like this animal. its incredibly rude, selfish, and childish. if you dont like them, simply scroll on passed. they are wild animals.

leaning into the main thing here to do with animal anthropomorphism, seagulls get the short end of the stick a lot due to their behaviour. two out of the three species i drew are notorious for being lean mean food stealing machines (black-headed gulls less so, theyre much smaller birds). however, its important i bring up this is not the birds being spiteful or evil, it is entirely the fault of people they are this way. its called habituation and it is always detrimental to the animal. in this case, seagulls get fed directly, get used to associating people with food, stop seeing people as a threat. fear = respect, and if a bird the size of a cat is not afraid of you? theyll snatch things right out your hand. the frequency in this type of "aggressive" behaviour is so common in some places in the UK seagulls are culled regularly for their "aggression", all because tourists cant help themselves and have to throw some fries out for the gulls.

these birds are not capable of being evil, malicious, spiteful, or mischevious, what you see as a big mean bird stealing food right out your hand to the seagull is just them taking food from the weird mammals as if they would from another bird. im not even touching on viral videos of sesgulls eating whole pigeons, since again thats not them being evil, they are generalist predators and thats what they do. you dont have to love them like i do, just accept that they are animals in an unfair position that are trying to survive. they are definitely the crows of the coastlines, just think about how much food waste would be there if it werent for them.

TL;DR please dont leave weird fucking comments on an artists works, and get your head out your ass and stop flaunting a seething hatred for literal animals.

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Fuck you, who ever needed this bird to be part of your wedding.

I will post full detail of this necropsy when I get caught up to august 17

This bird started having seizures before we got all the way home.

It’s alive in this photo, trying one last time to eat.

Under the cut are four post mortem photo sets that everyone should look at.

One showing the age of the bird.

Two showing injuries it sustained.

And one showing the body condition under the feathers.

Fuck you if you think a pretty flash of angelic white wings at your wedding is worth this happening to the birds that helped “make your day special”

Edit: we have completed the necropsy.

This was a little boy.

And he did at least try to eat the horse grain his rescuer gave him.

It was just too late…

Continua a leggere

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Hi friend please tell me what speculative evolution/speculative biology is? I think I already know, I've just never heard those terms apply to anything. (You're great, I love both the orca avatar and your curly haired you! Drink water, get sleep, make sure to be relaxed a lil every day)

Sure! I love this topic, and I’m happy to elaborate! 

For those that are hearing these terms for the first time:

Speculative biology/speculative evolution is about the practice of making a hypothesis about the biology/evolution of animals based on real, extant or extinct earth species or sometimes fantastical animals that never actually existed.

That’s a lot of words to say: Spec bio is about sitting around thinking ‘but what if.... THIS COOL ANIMAL/ORGANISM EXISTED????’

And then consequently thinking about how its biology would fit into the environment, how it may have evolved to look the way it does, and how it could realistically be a part of the ecology - real or fake. 

Realistically, any time we write fantasy novels with fantasy creatures, we’re partially engaging in speculative biology! If you had the Dragonology book as a child, you already engaged with some speculative biology!

In fact, there is a very famous franchise that can technically be classified as speculative biology that you 100% know about already:

Now, Pokemon doesn’t actively delve into pokemon biology TOO much - it’s mainly a fantasy series aimed at kids - but at its core, pokemon are fantasy creatures and discovering their biology is a core part of the game’s goals. 

In fact, there are many people who have dedicated a lot of time to developing pokemon speculative biology into a more complex and structured thing - blogs like @prof-peach are a perfect example of this!

However, when you think of speculative biology, you may imagine something a little more realism-based, often in terms of earth evolutionary lineage. 

This topic specifically is often backed by a book called All Tomorrows which has gained cult-like status among the spec-bio enthusiasts. 

It is available here and there on the internet, and if you’re interested, you can watch a video about it. Content warning: The book itself is not safe-for-work. It has lots of material regarding mating rituals, with out-of-this-world illustrations that often dip into body horror.

There is also a book that is called All Yesterdays, which is instead a collection of speculation about how dinosaurs might have evolved had they not gone extinct, and it’s a wonderful study of creativity and inspection of various evolutionary pressures and yes, speculation!

Speculative biology also plays a huge part in videogames - especially sci-fi games! Games such as Spore or Subnautica make speculative xenobiology (alien biology) a HUGE part of their storyline and gameplay!

If all this sounds cool to you, you can also go even further into speculative xenoevolution - such as this YouTube series by Biblaridion in which he creates an entire alien PLANET, with specific ecological balances different to earth and then begins to unravel, eon by eon, how life on that planet may have evolved!

And that’s really only scratching the surface of it all! 

There are, in general, TONS of community led projects that take speculative evolution, or speculative biology to the next level - and many more books and games that I forgot to include here. 

If you have a favorite I forgot to mention, feel free to comment it down below (please don’t send me asks with your recs, I will not post them)!

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I am not policing anyone. I am saying that you have a moral responsibility (or at least you SHOULD) once you post something like that on the Internet. Warnings don't do shit. We all know that people are curious. Children are curious. No kid actually cares about the under 18 warning. They are impressionable and easily copy behaviour. I was like that, my friends were like that. I'm not saying don't post things like that. I'm just asking, are you ready to take responsibility for the aftermath?

You seem to be laboring under the misconception that I am responsible for internet teenagers’ poor choices. I’m not. Neither is any content creator. Do you spend your free time going after the adult film industry and asking whether they’re ready to “take responsibility” for teenagers that deliberately ignore the 18+ notification and click through to their weird diaper fetish porn?

I was a teenager on the internet once (I’m not going to say back in the day because I have followers that were on Usenet and that’s REALLY back in the day). We didn’t used to have any kind of content warnings at all. I say this jokingly a lot but seriously, back in my day, you could trip over xeno tentacle non-con in the middle of a fic that didn’t look like it was going in that direction, and it wasn’t labeled at all. Ever! You know what was labeled and warned for, left right and center? “This story has slash in it! That’s GAY KISSING!!!” 

Seriously though, there used to be a time when the fandom and fic-writing atmosphere was so toxic to same-sex relationships that the content was usually hidden behind a splash screen with an obnoxious warning in cyan comic sans. Sometimes there were “secret instructions” on the disclaimer page - people would hide how to get into their website (“if you read the disclaimer you’ll know to click on the ^_^ face in the bottom left corner of the page to get to the site!” and such nonsense). I grew up in a time on the internet when it was easier to find graphic torture porn and rape-as-woobifying-backstory than it was to find fluffy hand-holding fic with my gay OTP.

And all I can hear when y’all roll up all “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!” is all the people who forced slash and femslash fans out of their archives, away from their internet space, and into the loosely-organized circle of Geocities webrings that defined fandom in the early 90s. Eventually we all started to congregate on LJ, where content could be locked behind a friends-only filter and people could gather in closed communities where we could be free from harassment by homophobic morons. When the Great Purge of FF.net happened and NC-17 was officially added to their rules as banned content, guess who was most reported to the moderators and most impacted by the policy change? Slash fans. And when Strikethrough happened, it disproportionately effected slash fans. Again.

Teenagers may not be old enough to have fully developed consequence/reward centers in the frontal lobe, but the average age for being able to discern reality from fiction is five years old. It’s horrifically condescending and disingenuous to pretend that teens are so delicate and fragile that reading some smut that disturbs them or isn’t to their tastes is going to drastically upset their psyche. The most that’s going to happen is they’re going to come away from whatever smut they deliberately clicked through the warning to read knowing that people have some weird kinks when it comes to sex. And you know what? YKINMKATO. The end.

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So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us. 

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is

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“Nice Does Not Mean Good”

Happy Mother’s Day :)

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An Anchiornis huxley drawn in a more realistic style

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Its been 6 hours thats later in the week... why is the earth Juicy?? 🌎💦🌍💦🌏

GOOD QUESTION I’M GLAD YOU ASKED.

it’s true, compared to literally every other rocky planet and planetoid in our solar system, Earth is just extremely… liquidous.

(and I’m not just talking about about our extremely spicy liquid iron core, either)

stuff MOVES here, where it really has no business doing so if you compare Earth to the rest of the solar system on paper.

continents skitter their way across the surface in a billion-year-long dance, smashing together, breaking apart, smashing together again.

on the other rocky planets, tectonic plates are locked tightly in place against their neighbors, or never even existed in the first place.

so what gives? why is Earth letting gigantic sections of its outer crust bonk around unsupervised in a way that would get it shouted at in a busy supermarket?

maybe invest in a couple of these, Earth

well, like just about every other weird goddam thing on this planet, it’s because of water!

I’m sure you know about plate tectonics at this point, where the great continental plates float around on top of Earth’s mantle aimlessly and sometimes make your house fall down when they bonk into each other? well, turns out it’s a little more complicated than that!

see, they aren’t really “floating” on top of Earth’s mantle, because the mantle is a plastic solid, like a stiff putty. if enough pressure is applied to it it’ll deform, but it’s definitely nowhere NEAR liquid.

sorry to bust every single scifi planet-destruction scene ever, I guess?

so what the hell is going on with the tectonic plates? why are they so peppy and fresh? well, it’s because the entire ocean snuck down there when we weren’t looking, that’s why.

see, the places where tectonic plates meet often aren’t exactly geologically stable (as you probably know if you live anywhere near one) and they’re DEFINITELY not waterproof. which is funny, actually, because most of them are… on the seafloor…

so what’s been happening over the past, oh, 4 billion years or so, is that water has just been leaking down out of the oceans and into the mantle itself, creating a thick layer of mantle that’s been completely saturated with superheated water!

there is more water in this layer of rock than in all the surface oceans of the Earth combined.

so the tectonic plates aren’t really skidding around on top of the MANTLE, they’re hydroplaning on the water IN THE MANTLE. which explains why they hit each other so much, actually. hope Planetary Triple-A covers that.

yowch.

anyway, the moral of the story is that Planet Earth contains more than twice as much water as you thought it did, and it makes the continents go brrrrr.

surprise?

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Happy Father’s Day to Birds And Nobody Else*!

Every Father’s Day some media outlet or another releases a cutesy list of, “Top 10 Animal Dads!” I have no problem with this sort of feel-good edutainment. But these lists are always super mammal-centric (I mean, look at who writes and reads them) and inevitably always include lions, which lmao, No. I love The Lion King dearly, but real life male lions love absolutely no one except their brothers. Yeah, they protect their cubs from outside males, but you can’t convince me they care about anything beyond protecting their genetic investment.

But birds! Birds are FANTASTIC fathers! Even when they’re unfaithful partners, they’re still usually really really good dads! As far as paternal instincts go, I’d say there is no other taxon that does it better! Certainly not, lol, mammals. Good mammal dads are so far and few between that I can literally name all of them off the top of my head–most canids, beavers, prairie voles I think, and some old world monkeys. Das it. Meanwhile, the vast majority of male birds are out here at this very moment (because it’s breeding season in my hemisphere) feeding their babies, protecting them from predators and rival birds, cleaning up after them, showing them how to forage, and being good role models for sexual imprinting. And this is true across a lot of bird families! Raptors–your hawks, eagles, owls, vultures, etc–are all great dads, parrots are great dads, storks are great dads, cranes are great dads, all corvids are great dads, penguins are great dads, ostriches are exceptionally great dads, woodpeckers are great dads, warblers are great dads, blue-footed boobies are great dads, shrikes are great dads, cardinals are great dads! That seagull stealing fries on the boardwalk? He’s a great dad! That pigeon with the missing toes sleeping under the overpass? He’s a great dad! That canada goose hissing and honking at you? He’s just trying to protect his adorable fluffy children! 

I’ll end this post with a couple photos of late, great, bird dad Ezra of Cornell Hawks fame. When he died, nestcam watchers around the world shared screenshots of their favorite moments. One of the most popular was the time he shielded his mate Big Red and their chicks (who were still young enough to all fit under Mom) from the rain with his body.

RIP Ezra, and Happy Father’s Day to birds everywhere!

*and some frogs and a few fish. You all deserve honorable mentions before literally any lion.

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WHY DO I IDENTIFY WITH ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME?!!!

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🌺Send this to 10 bloggers you think are wonderful! Let's keep the game going🌺

Awww