graphi-horse-time

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stolen from that social media site gay millennials and grumpy boomers use

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oh i love that one.

my current top 3 are this earthworm, this sawfly, and this other sawfly

Apparently there's a tool on this website that lets you see the species you've observed from least to most observations across the entire website—currently my most common species is, obviously, Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, with over 500k observations on all of iNaturalist; while my rarest species is Myoplatypus flavicornis, a species of pinhole borer beetle with only 30 observations, scattered across a handful of locales in the American deep south!

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so i forgot that i had a ziploc w gall specimens in it in my pocket so today at work i went huh whats this and then pulled a ziploc containing multiple live wasps out of my vest

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IT'S THAT TIME OF WEEK

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T.H. White, in his 1958 retelling of the Arthurian legend in Once and Future King

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Something's in the making

Finally, the side project I was talking about. First 3 episodes of a comic. Coming very, very soon.

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if you're gonna make a post being like "this species is invasive and you should kill/destroy as much of it as possible if you see it" you should at least say where it's invasive and where it's native to.

I understand that people are trying to do good by encouraging the management of invasive species populations, but it's irresponsible to make a blanket statement about a species being invasive on a platform where that statement is likely to be seen by people around the world.

while I'd like to think people would do their research on a species native range before going out and indiscriminately killing it, I've seen enough people saying "that's invasive! you should kill it!" on photos of species in their native ranges that it seems like people just see "this is invasive" and decide the species must be entirely bad without looking any further into it

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Spotted snake millipede, Blaniulus guttulatus, Blaniulidae

Found primarily in the US and Europe

Photos 1-2 by bvcruz, 3 by cestades, 4 (featuring deceased isopod) by sus_scrofa, 5 by invertebratist, 6 by jfmantis, 7-8 by logybayer, and 9 (for scale) by angieandtheants

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remember to always be an annoying feminist killjoy bitch. do not stop.

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honestly being around people who are not uncomfortable with you having feelings and desires makes the people who were uncomfortable so much worse in retrospect

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everybody go horse crazy this summer

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looking at the isopoda wiki page and this delights me so much

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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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this is what i mean when i say "sniles so sneetly" btw

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honestly i think a huge part of getting better at creature design is gaining an appreciation for "normal boring" animals and realizing that they also have evocative character designs that are just as good to draw from as tigers or deer or vultures or piranhas or anything else on the whole have deemed more charismatic or interesting looking in some way

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Downloaded inaturalist for funsies yesterday kind of obsessed with all the fuckass pictures of birds ppl in the greater jakarta area post there.

that Mozambique tilapia is also a great pic. A shimmer