rookiek13

[rookiek13]

You guys realize you’re interacting with other human beings on here, right?

[rookiek13]

Remember when I told ya'll last month to be ready to start looking for a Discord alternative?

Yeah things aren't looking good for discord.

[rookiek13]

Rookiek13: 25+

Bowling ball: 2

Arts and crafts time is always better with an axe

[rookiek13]

[rookiek13]

me and the boys have a couple of chains wrapped around the sword in the stone hooked up to mikes toyota tundra gonna pull that fucker out like a tooth.

[rookiek13]

This is a quail gizzard!

This little thing contains grit used to grind up anything tough in the GI tract. Since my quail are pretty exclusively fed a processed feed, there nothing too cool in there

But clean it out and you can see the INCREDIBLY tough inner lining

It feels a little bit like wet sandpaper in there. Really cool to open up and look at.

Larger birds like chickens and turkeys that free range have gizzards full of small stones, called gastroliths. There's even a hobby some hunters have, of collecting "turkey pearls" and displaying them!

If the quail have any they are very very very small. I do wonder what the peafowl gizzards...

[rookiek13]

Arts and crafts time is always better with an axe

[rookiek13]

I'm a geneticist but I cannot wrap my head around the snake color genetics you talk about. Whenever you talk about it, I'm just like *nod nod* I hope you get the colors you want!

achievement unlocked: major dialogue trigger!

SO. Welcome to my big nerdery thing re: corn snakes!!!! Long post incoming, I am NOT SORRY!

The very *very* basics for the people who are not geneticists-

Normal henceforth refers to the basic wild-type color and/or pattern, and genetics.

Morph refers to alterations to this wild-type, be it mutation-based like recessive, incomplete dominant, and dominant genes, or selectively bred.

The vast majority of corn snake morphs are simple recessive. This means that in order to display a particular trait the animal must have two matching copies of the gene. In order to get two copies, each parent must have at least one copy to potentially pass down to offspring. Everyone remember that (actually highly inaccurate) lesson about blue eyes vs brown eyes in grade school biology? Like that.

Some corn snake morphs are incomplete dominant. These are (maybe?) red factor (likely 3+ versions btw), palmetto, masque and halo. This means that if they have one copy of the gene they look a particular way (other than normal) and if they get two copies they look another way. Palmetto is the most extreme example of this.

Some corn snake morphs are dominant. These are tessera and buf/toffee (increasing speculation these are the same thing). Dominant means that the snake only needs one copy to express the trait AND that two copies makes no difference to how that trait looks.

Some corn snake morphs are selectively bred. These are morphs like okeetee-phase, miami-phase, sunglow, candycane and.... my onyx-line charcoals. These are basically 'breeds' of corn snake and require meticulous selection (often not done by many breeders...) to maintain the appearance that makes these selectively bred morphs distinct from the parent morph or from normals. For examples, okeetee-phase snakes are *supposed* to be selectively bred for extremely thick black borders around the markings of the snakes, but many snakes sold as okeetees have borders that are barely thicker than a standard normal. These should not be sold as okeetees. They do not qualify.

Both dominant and incomplete dominant morphs are a "you either have it or you don't" type situation - If the animal is not visual, it does not carry the gene. period. A recessive gene will be 'hidden' when there's only one copy. A snake with a single recessive gene will not visually show the trait, but paired to the right mate can produce offspring that *will* show it.

Having one normal gene and one mutant gene is referred to as being 'het' for a gene/trait. Het is short for heterozygous, meaning "different pair". Having two copies is often referred to as 'homo', short for homozygous which means "same pair".

When it comes to passing down a trait, an animal that is homozygous for a trait will *always* pass one copy of that gene down to its offspring. If that baby is not a visual for a recessive trait, it will be 100% het for it, there's no other option for the parent to have given. If it's a dominant or incomplete dominant trait, every single baby will be showing the trait.

An animal that is het for a trait only has a 50% chance of passing on the mutant gene. It can either give the mutant gene or a normal gene and it's a complete toss-up over which will be provided.

However, most of the time when people refer to 'hets' in corn snakes, they're talking about recessive genes. Hets and possible hets (where there's a *chance* they carry the gene, but not a certainty) are often referred to with percentages. 100%, 66%, and 50%. You cannot go lower than 50%.

If you breed something homozygous recessive to something het for the same trait, roughly 50% of the babies will be visual for the trait and 50% will be 100% het. Only half the babies will be visual because the homozygous parent MUST give a mutant gene, but the het parent only has a 50% chance to provide it. The non-visual babies will ALL be 100% het for the trait, because that homozygous parent has no other option to provide it. Behold... a punnet square showing how that works. cc is homozygous charcoal, and we'll say Nc (not the actual way these things are shown, but it makes more sense this way) is a Normal gene and a charcoal gene.

Half the squares are cc - visual charcoals, two copies of the charcoal gene because the cc parent *had* to give a c. The Nc parent only gave a c half the time, and an N the other half. The Nc babies have one Normal gene and one charcoal gene.

Things get weirder when you breed two animals that are both het. Each parent only has a 50% chance of providing the mutant gene. With this pairing, only a quarter of the babies will be visuals. Of the non-visual babies, 2/3rds will have gotten one copy of the mutant gene, and 1/3 will have received NO copy! These none visual babies are referred to as being 66% possible het for a trait.

This 66% number tends to confuse a lot of people. A lot think it should be 75% (with that being the halfway point between a 50% het and a 100% het) but they're failing to subtract the visual babies from the equation.

Punnet square time again!

There are.... 4 squares. >_>

These squares show all the potential genetic combinations from pairing a het to a het for charcoal. One visual, 2 hets, one normal. But we're interested purely in the hets right now. We know for a fact that the visual charcoal got copies of the genes. That's not in question. So remove that square. We're now left with 3 squares. 2 of these 3 squares (66%...) have babies that are het for charcoal. One square has a baby that got no charcoal genes at all.

Visually, these 3 babies *all look the same*. You cannot tell by looking who is het for a recessive trait and who is not. Therefore, all the babies in the clutch have a 66% chance of carrying the gene.

50% hets show up when only one parent is het for a trait. Because the other parent has no ability to pass on a mutant gene, none of the babies will be visuals. And because the first parent is only het, it can give either a normal gene or a mutant gene. Again, all these babies look normal and you cannot tell who is het and who isn't. All the babies have only a 50% chance of having received the mutant gene.

As for my main breeding lines, the gene I'm working primarily with is charcoal which is recessive. They're also all at least het masque(incomplete dominant) but it really doesn't do much and I don't care about it so I ignore it. All of my current batch of charcoals are either het for, or homozygous diffused(recessive) as well.

The mother of most of my line was a charcoal het diffused, hypo(recessive), amel(recessive). The father of many of them was a pewter (charcoal + diffused) het anery(recessive), lavender(recessive).

So let's break this down. Both animals are homozygous charcoal. They will each give, for sure, a charcoal gene. Therefore ALL the babies will also be homozygous, visual charcoals. The female is het for diffused, the male is homozygous diffused. Half their babies will be pewters and half will be 100% diffused.

But now look at the rest of those hets. The female has hypo and amel. The male has anery and lavender. None of those match up. They each only have a 50% chance of giving their babies a copy of any particular het trait. So all the babies are 50% possible het for hypo, amel, anery and lavender!

Thanks to the wonders of genetic testing I know which babies were given the amel trait (Larune and Marquina), which were given the lavender trait (Dusk), and which got neither (Jet and Coal).

Previously (and this is still the case for most corn snake morphs, but they are working on it), the only way to know which possible hets a corn snake actually received was through test breeding. This is not great because it produces a lot of babies that are 'byproducts' rather than the main goal and gives you fewer years to achieve your goal with any given female.

Larune and Coal's clutch was a two-fer: It's a chance to get myself some more onyx-line worthy charcoals AND let me test Larune for her 50% diffused het and Coal's 50% hypo het. And as I got a pewter baby, that shows that she does indeed carry the diffused gene... and because what is unquestionably a phantom nose is now peeking through an egg, Coal proved to be carrying the hypo gene.

Now, my end goal with my charcoals is selectively breeding towards a solid black snake. To that end I am keeping the darkest babies from each clutch to pair together to get even darker babies.

Having hets for genes that make for lighter babies (amel, hypo, lavender and anery as *totally* random examples) is not ideal towards that end goal. The main gene I want to completely weed out is anery. I just don't find carbons (anery + charcoal) to be interesting looking. The amel gene is completely counterproductive (charcoal + amel = solid white snake) but blizzards are uncommon and popular so I wouldn't have been entirely sad to produce those. However, neither of my main males carries the gene at all which is actually a benefit to having as many snakes as possible to choose dark babies from. Lavender makes for a nice medium gray snake when paired with charcoal. Doesn't really help my goal to make dark snakes, and as neither of my main males carries the gene it's not something I really have to worry about in this generation. Hypomelanism makes for light gray snakes when paired with charcoal. This really doesn't help with my end goal either. Would rather than Coal was *not* het for hypo, and I still don't know if Jet is or not. I'll find out next year when I pair him to Larune.... or sooner if they develop a DNA test.

....

Okay, I'm done now!

[rookiek13]

A year or so ago I went to wood carving club with a bruised eye from my dog slamming his nose into my eyesocket and like every old lady there pulled me aside at some point to ask if my partner hit me here are some of the solutions they had in case he did.

-Replacing his vitimens with poision

- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.

- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.

-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?

- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.

-One lady just cheerfully informed me she had a gun and only a few years left anyway

[rookiek13]

[rookiek13]

I like big butts and I cannot lie

[rookiek13]

Today, the Federal Trade Commission launched a public inquiry to better understand how consumers may have been exposed to false or unsupported claims about “gender-affirming care”, especially as it relates to minors, and to gauge the harms consumers may be experiencing. In a Request for Information, the FTC encourages members of the public to comment on any issues or concerns that are relevant to the FTC’s consideration of this topic, including by submitting any written data, advertisements, social media posts, disclosures, or empirical research.

The public will have 60 days to submit comments at Regulations.gov, no later than September 26, 2025. Once submitted, comments will be posted to Regulations.gov. Individuals wishing to submit confidential, non-public comments should reference the alternative submission guidelines in the RFI. 

[rookiek13]

[rookiek13]

got another code red moment for us... :/

please actually reblog this post this time, as this one will gut national parks for more fucking paper. we have 14 days to stop it, giving us literally no time to do so.

they are literally betting on us to not do anything about it, because they're that desperate on keeping control, and ruining lives for everyone, but themselves.

[rookiek13]

Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste. As a result, males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago. The evolutionary history of this system appears as sexual parasitism that evolved into a natural case of cross-species cloning, resulting in the maintenance of a male-only lineage cloned through distinct species’ ova. We term females exhibiting this reproductive mode as xenoparous, meaning they give birth to other species as part of their life cycle.

[rookiek13]

At least I get a View

I can see my house from here!

[rookiek13]

I can see my house from here!