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fuck all this bullshit honestly

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A lion cub with amazing eye lashes.

Taken in Ndutu Safari Lodge, Tanzania Photographed by Daniel Rosengren

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Today my professor picked up a garter snake, said “Ow!” five times as it bit him, set it back down, and said, “Okay. That’s one defense mechanism snakes have.”

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theyre so cute they had to name them cuddlefish

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Lesser octopus (Eledone cirrhosa)

Photo by duckinwales

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every moment of your life, from birth to death, constantly, while you aren't looking, there's some kind of weird shapes just moving around in the ocean. and the shapes are eating eachother sometimes too. and they might even dig holes. and all of this is happening during everything else that's going on. like think about the most important moment in your life. the thing that shaped you as a person. the entire time that was happening, far away, deep in the ocean, where no human has ever seen, there was some kind of wet sack with a weird protrusion flailing about in the water. maybe it even grabbed a fish. who knows. i don't. just think about that for a bit

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plants love being polyploid its one of their favorite things to be

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Referred to as “the Dusseldorf patient” to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.

Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.

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south american sea nettle (chrysaora plocamia) | jelliesfarm on ig

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"damn I'm crying over an insect" "why am I having such strong feelings over how the sky looks" "it's weird how happy this small thing made me feel" THAT'S BECAUSE YOU LIVE HERE!!!! you live on this earth. everything all the time is an experience, no matter how common or mundane. this world is unique. so are its small moments. it is good to enjoy a tiny thing. you love the world even at its smallest scale.

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This is unrelated to anything else with the silly “Dire Wolf” controversy but them putting these images in all the articles give me the weirdest uncanny valley discomfort. Like it is hard for me to take these photos seriously. Do you know why?

Wolf pups just do not look like that. Because wolves typically have their pups in underground dens, it is an evolutionary advantage for the vulnerable pups to blend in with the dark earth of the den. If they were born white, they’d be sharply contrasted and easier for predators to spot. Even arctic wolves are born dark and gain their typical white coat a little later (though not all arctic wolves are white either).

Fun fact in Game of Thrones they used domestic dogs to play the dire wolf pups; puppy Ghost is cute but he’s clearly no wolf!

Giving birth to pups that are darkly colored is a pretty basic adaptation in a lot of canids that litter underground. Red foxes and arctic foxes are also born a very nondescript shade of dirt. Exceptions exist, but this is just a thing that a lot of wild canines do. Here are various canids (red fox, Ethiopian wolf, maned wolf, and African wild dog) that do this

I don’t know if we have any proof that dire wolves had their pups in dens but it would be kind of weird if they didn’t. So even if the dire wolf had a light coat as an adult they would likely still be born with a darker color to act as camouflage.

So when I keep getting this image

blasted on all my feeds you can understand why my brain has trouble registering it even as a gray wolf pup. It’s just weird. It looks like what chat gpt would spit out if you requested an arctic wolf pup. That thing would stand out like crazy in an underground den. You can make something look like something else all you want but the evolutionary history of a species is too complicated for us to ever faithfully recreate from scratch.

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lets cross the street with mama

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Mosquitoes actually are not replaceable in any ecosystem that naturally has them and that includes replacing them with any of the non biting species because these are the traits that make them so core to food webs:

Tiny

Can use every single pool of moisture to raise generations no matter how dirty and stagnant and low in oxygen

Can fly

Males get by on just sugars

Females take protein from larger animals to manufacture thousands more eggs

All these things combined allow thst ecosystem to make huge volumes of insects from conditions barren to most other macroscopic life. You might think there are other insects that seem to make huge massive swarms out of nothing but there's really nothing that hits all the same qualities *except other insects that also suck blood.*

It's the precise combo of being able to "prey" on things millions of times larger and breed in nothing but a few drops of filthy rainwater or the moisture in a rotten log. That's the most efficient combination for anything that size to multiply that rapidly where nothing else can even survive, except of course the things that can move in because they eat them :)

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