#but. pelagic birds. i do not know pelagic birds

[herpsandbirds]

I'm going to southern france next month. Any suggestions for common birds to keep an eye out for? Our library system had one book on birds of Europe and it's huge and overwhelming.

Birds of the Camargue

I do not have a way of knowing what birds are common in that region, versus what is occasional, but I can put you in touch with some resources, along with a few of the cooler birds from that region.

(*we messaged earlier about what are of southern France they would be visiting.)

Some good links:

Birds of Camargue - The Birds of Camargue (oiseaux-de-camargue.fr)

Accueil - Bureau des Guides Naturalistes - Site officiel (guide-nature.fr)

Birdwatching in the Camargue (surfbirds.com)

Little Grebes aka Dabchicks (Tachybaptus ruficollis), family Podicipedidae, order Podicipediformes

Photograph by Mainak Halder 

Bearded Reedling aka Bearded Tit (Panurus biarmicus), family Panuridae, order Passeriformes

photograph by Carlo Galliani https://www.facebook.com/carlo.galliani.58

Greater Flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus), family Phoenicopteridae, order Phoenicopteriformes

photograph by Carlo Pelagalli

European Bee-eater (Merops apiaster), family Meropidae, order Coraciiformes

photograph by Dûrzan Cîrano 

Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops), family Upupidae, order Bucerotiformes

photograph by João Gomes

[gloomymagpie]

🌿Maned Wolf🌿

Its scientific name is Chrysocyon Brachyurus. It belongs in the phylum of Chordota, the class of Mammalia(mammals), the order of Carnivora(carnivores), the family of Canidae(canids) and it's the only member of the genus Chrysocyon(it means golden dog in ancient greek).

About their weight most of my sources said that they weigh around 23kg (on average probably, because there were some sites that said they weigh around 20-30kg) and the pups around 340-430kg(when they are born). Their height ranges from 80 to 90cm on the shoulder and they are 145-190cm long with their tail being 28-40cm. It is the largest Canid in South America.

Their natural habitat consists of semi-open areas, grasslands, wet and dry forests, savannas, marshes, wetlands, dry shrub forests and swampy areas. They can be found in central-west and southerneastern Brazil, Paraguay,northern Argentina and Bolivia east and north of the Andes and far southerneastern Peru(Pampas del Heath only). It is very rare in Uruguay, possibly even displaced(on one of the sources it was mentioned that they went extinct in Uruguay and Argentina, though I only read about them being rare or extinct only in Uruguay in the rest of the sites).

Their lifespan in the wild is unknown and in captivity it is around 12-15 years. Their population today reaches 23,600 wolves.

Maned wolves are mostly active during the twilight period, which makes them Crepuscular animals. They are omnivores, with the 50%(or more) of their diet consisting of fruits and vegetables, they also eat small mammals(armadillos, rabbits, rodents, etc), birds, bird eggs, reptiles, fish, insects, gastropods and other terrestrial mollusks. Their favourite food and most common food item in their diet is Solanum Lycocarpum, or lobeira(= wolf's plant), or fruta-do-lobo(= wolf's fruit), or just wolf plant (in Wikipedia they called it wolf apple but everywhere else they referred to it as one of the above so.), it is a tomato-like fruit and it belongs in a species of flower shrub.

As I already mentioned their diet is mostly vegetables and fruits based, meat heavy diets have been proven to lead to the development of bladder stones.

Going into hunting habits, they are solitary hunters, they rotate their ears to listen for their prey in the grass. They stalk and chase their prey, they jump to catch birds midair, tap the ground to flash out the prey and pounce to catch it. They kill it by biting it on their neck or back and shaking it violently if necessary.

They have 42 teeth total as adults and given that they don't kill or hunt large prey, their upper carnassials (shearing teeth) are reduced, their upper incisors are weak and their canines are long and slender.

Maned wolves do not howl, but they emit loud barks or roar barks to let their mate know where they are and to warn other wolves to stay away. They use urine(that smells like cannabis or hops) and feces, along their borders, to mark their territory.

Pairs share overlapping territory around 25-30km². They meet only to mate during the breeding season, other than that they are independent from each other. They are monogamous and form lifelong bonds. Breeding season is controlled by photoperiod, between October and February in the northern hemisphere and between August and October in South America in captivity. Little is known about the reproductive patterns of wild maned wolves, most of our information on it comes from captive animals. Females are monoestrus, with the estrus lasting for around four days.

The gestation period lasts around 65 days and around 1-5 pups are born, in well hidden nests. The pups' eyes and ears open in day 9 of their lives. They are born with black pelage and in 10 weeks it turns red. The pups are nursed for four weeks and by then their parents feed them by regurgitation for the next 10 months and they are weaned by 15 weeks. 3-month-old pups begin to accompany their mother while she forages. Both parents engage in parental care (though it is primarily done by the mother). The pups are fully grown by the age of 1 year and this is when they leave their parents' territory.

The main threat to this species is habitat loss, but other threats are also road kills, hunting and human activities(deforestation, urban growth etc). They are listed in IUCN as near threatened, in IBAMA and ICMBio as vulnerable species and in CITES in the appendix II category (the appendix reflects the level of threat posed by international trade).

Quick edit to say that despite their appearance and name this species is not closely related to wolves nor foxes.

🌿✨️🌿✨️🌿✨️🌿✨️🌿✨️🌿✨️🌿

@lilzoo @flowerscorpses

Let me know if I missed/forgot something, feel free to reblog with more info

[h2llish]

When you have time cause i know you're writing, I'd like to hear tou talk sbout thresher shark's:3 please and thabk you!!

OF COURSE MY LOVE :33 taking abreak from writing just to answer you <3

there's three types of thresher sharks, the common thresher shark, the pelagic thresher shark, and the bigeye thresher shark.

thresher sharks as a species are known to use their tail as whip to stun their prey by slapping the water and will sometimes also herd the fish into like ball to make it easier to hunt. they're very strong swimmers and are known to leap out of the water, sometimes consistently.

i've talked about the common thresher shark, which is the biggest of the thresher shark species!

the pelagic thresher shark is the smallest of the species, and the more easily recognizable. while they mostly hunt fish, they do sometimes eat pelagic squid. they, unlike the common thresher, give birth to live young like many other sharks.

you can guess by its name; the bigeye thresher shark is categorized by its larger than normal eyes. their big eye gives them excellent vision, and by that i mean, they can see even when there is little light. their eyes can also be rotated upwards! they give birth to live young. it's unconfirmed, but along with their diet including fish, crabs, and octopus, they are thought to whip birds out of the sky with their tail.

[drgreg]

Gregory Jones Decorators Cape City Wes-kaap

Thinking of you with love on ..... Mommy time has gone however my love for won't ever go.Your teachings are ..... Mom On the 13 August was your 7th year. We all still miss you a lot and consider you on a regular dr greg hough south africa basis. In loving memory of Bobby Raucher, taken tragically from us too quickly ..... There isn't a day that goes by that you simply and mummy usually are not in my thoughts.

Thanks you for on a regular basis you spent with the beloved animals. We is not going to stop until every animal is in a loving residence. We are unable to proceed dr greg hough south africa the work you did for thus a few years however the name stays in high stead.

In loving memory of a nice girl who left an indelible mark in my lif ..... I miss you every day dad and continuously hold you in my thoughts. I love you more than you'll ever know. Dad, its been virtually two years because you left us for a greater place.

Sorry I missed it, but all credit score to BirdlifeSA for all the work done in making in possible to see great birds which you help protect & foster. Great effort by Birdlife SA giving South Africans and International visitors a chance in a lifetime to witness the pelagic birding and wildlife around Marion Island. This was a visit of a lifetime to a remote a half of the world the place no different vacationers can enterprise. This journey is a novel and exemplary tourist opportunity with so many personal advantages, prime world conservation commercial and marketing alternative.

Both teams gave their all from the very begin in a brutally intense encounter. One of our Kingswood Junior musicians, Victor took part in the Makhanda National Music Competition last week. There have been five competitors within the preliminary rounds . He proceeded to the semi-final spherical on Saturday morning, the place he was chosen to carry out within the final status concert on Saturday night. Stanley Muranganwa receives an Honours Award for Rugby.

Ma, there's not a day we dont miss you All our love mo, harve, li ..... Thanks for being the most effective dad ever, deeply missed and sadly mourned ..... Dearest Dad, It has been 18 years and never at some point you haven't bee ..... My darling Joeli I miss you more and more each day . Popsi, not a day goes by the place I do not think about you.

A journey of a Lifetime which surpassed expectations especially contemplating all of the challenges the organising group had to face. Once in a lifetime experience, by no means to be forgotten. A distinctive expertise that ticked all of the packing containers.

My sugar has gone up so much life for me could be very annoying. Lit Brady is looking after me nicely hope you see him from above. Love you mom, can't believe it's 4.5yrs you left me.

[queenlua]

i always knew the ebird discussion group was going to absolutely tear itself apart in some vicious spat of interpersonal drama

but i did not expect “misidentified buller’s shearwater” to be the inciting incident

[o-craven-canto]

Hypothetical land animal descended from a starfish.

Original page on my DeviantArt here (drawn in 2018, when I should have been working on my master thesis instead)

It's well known that echinoderms descend from bilateral ancestors [i.e. with a left/right symmetry, like vertebrates], such as the Cambrian Ctenoimbricata, and that they adopted a secondary radial symmetry as an adaptation to an increasingly sessile, filter-feeding lifestyle like that we see in sea lilies today. In fact, later Paleozoic echinoderms seem to run the gamut from fully asymmetric (Cothurnocystis) to three-sided (Helicoplacus) to five-sided (Gogia), The reduction of musculature in favor of connective- and vascular system-based movement might have the same origin. (On this argument, see Zamora et al., 2012 and Zamora & Rahman, 2015.) Interestingly, some modern echinoderms seem to be going the opposite way. Some sea cucumbers have retaken an active, and even pelagic, lifestyle, and their bodyplan is taking a more bilateral shape. Brittle stars, which are surprisingly active animals, have redeveloped their musculature and greatly reduced the vascular tube feet. So. What if an echinoderm, say a common starfish, were to evolve into a motile, bilateral, maybe even land-based animal? Now, as great as echinoderms are, they do have significant handicaps in this sense. Their vascular system, from which they depend for movement, respiration, and metabolite distribution, is open to the outside (seawater is filtered through a porous plaque called madreporite). They have no reliable system of osmoregulation, which means they can't survive without salt water. Let's be realistic, if in half a billion year echinoderms have never produced (as far as we know) so much as a freshwate species, let alone a terrestrial one, I don't think there's much hope of it happening in the future. But, just for the fun of it, let's imagine it happens anyway. A starfish somehow manages to close off its water vascular system (which is, after all, a compartment of the coelom), keeping it around only for mechanical purposes. Respiration is transferred to the body wall, which develops many small respiratory sacs; and circulation is full entrusted to the haemal system, a net of channels separate from the coelom. (In the case you need it, this is a pretty good diagram of starfish anatomy.) The hemal system develops a proper heart (rudiments of which already exist in starfish) and a kidney-like organ(s) to regulate the salinity of blood and the vascular fluid. Now our creature can live in fresh water. The water vascular system fills the larger coelom compartment and forms hydraulic muscles - connected sacs (each of which can be sealed off with a sphincter if it loses pressure) that can contract or relax thanks to walls of proper muscle. Once the body wall is flexible enough, this allows both and efficient control of movement, and mechanical support even out of the water! The creature adopts a very active lifestyle, which naturally favours a bilateral symmetry, because when you move in a consistent direction it's more efficient to place your sense organs, weapons, and mouth there (basically making a head), and not put them behind. There's no meaningful difference between left and right sides, though. Each arm of a starfish contains a nerve that runs along the ventral surface (better to pull that inside!) and ends in an "optic cushion", basically an eye. The distal tube feet allow to crudely manipulate objects. That's a good start for a head. A single eye can't see depth, but you can just do what birds (which can't look at an object with both eyes) do, and bob your head to infer distances from parallax. Of course the nerve cord will concentrate its neurons at the end, and form a crude brain. A problem: you can't put the mouth there, because the mouth of a starfish is at the center: it's the opening of the big central stomach that can be everted to swallow preys. Problem solved: pull a Snaiad and extend the stomach forward, basically as a muscular second head that exists only to feed. No, not only. Starfish have huge gonads that open between the arms to spray eggs and sperm into the water and hope for the best. Out of water, that's not an option. So let's say the gonads reorient their openings into the stomach. Now the feeding head is also a genital organ, and the land-starfish can impregnate each other with a kiss. (The female will probably just vomit the fertilized eggs, maybe in a convenient pond for a frog-style larval stage.) For respiration, say that the little cavities between the dorsal plates become hundreds of tiny lungs, each opening into a spiracle, that deliver oxygen to the haemal system. More specifically, soaking in the blood of a special haemal compartment (a "respiratory sinus"). The anterior tube feet, which will always be the first bodypart to contact something, have developed a hard cuticle that divides them in discrete segments, turning into two pairs of antennae and four of maxillae (insect-stile jaws, useful to fend off enemies and chew up food for the gastro-genital head). Similarly, independent tube feet have survived at the tip of the other four arms - which have not gained much complexity, beyond the new hydraulic musculature. In other species they may take the form of sharp claws or nimble fingers. And there you have it. A starfish from our seas turned into a barely recognizable ursine beast by a number of suspiciously convenient adaptations - not to mention a distinct lack of terrestrial competition and a generous reprieve from planetary sterilization courtesy of the Sun. An implant on a mostly empty alien planet, perhaps? Or simply evolution taking a radically different road somewhen around the Ordovician Extinction, maybe in a world in which this "vertebrate" thing didn't really work? Chissà.

@danbensen >_>

[jjungkooksthighs]

Claws of Carnality | jjk (5)

Pairing: alpha jungkook x omega reader

 Genre: smut, fluff and angst, abo/werewolf!au, soulmate!au, fantasy!au 

 Rating: 18+ / nsfw

 Word Count: 8.7k we really out here getting longer with every chapter because a bitch is hungry

 Summary: Privation looms lingeringly without your mate of whom hunts for you deep within the wood. In his absence, he still manages to fill the void even if it is only ephemeral. The sun watches while you fall prey to your desirous natures and it is only when the golden orb has begun to drip lower along the sky’s body that it is time for you to then be guided by the hands of other omegeans to prepare you for your mate upon his return even when no one yet knows, beyond you, who has already staked his claim on you. When the call of your alpha announces his incoming arrival through the forest beyond, that’s when you heed his howl and go to welcome him home, but what will you find when you get there?

 Warnings: alpha!jungkook, possessive!jungkook, jealous!jungkook, dom!jungkook, sub! reader, omega!reader, mentions of breeding/ruts/heats, mentions of a mark, slick and pre-ejaculatory production, scent marking, scenting, fingering, begging, praise kink, female masturbation, cunnilingus, breeding/impreg kink, character injury (someone gets hurt, but it isn’t serious)

A/N: My fingers are literally sore from writing so much. This one got pumped out in like a day and I’m honestly a clown because we really out here going from 1.5k with the first chapter all the way to 8.7k for chapter five. I think my hands are still shaking as I write this, but hey, this beast is finally out of the cage of my mind like it wanted to be! Seriously, this one did take some hours of sleep out of me in its need to be written, so please feed my soul and let me know that all this effort was deserving of the lack of sleep in the midst of it being midterm week at my university. 

You guys have been so freaking sweet with your kind messages so far and I really am floored at how everyone seems to be enjoying this story, so please keep that up, y’all! I hope that I did justice to everything that has been written so far and more than anything, I hope to have been able to please you all with this next installment. Now, without further ado, I give to you part five of COC!

 Part 9  Part 8  Part 7 Part 6  Part 4  Part 3  Part 2  Part 1

Feebleness fleetingly finds you under its clutches while it grasps you within the boscage of the woodlands.

 It is commanded by the titillating tendrils of your alpha’s spiced scent and your fingers tug tightly around the fine furs without thought as you stare longingly at the mound of vestments that Jungkook had so torturously left in his wake, a whine releasing itself from the bowels of your body as you try to stand on dangerously debilitated ligaments that are still too weak to bear your weight after the satori that has swayed your entire being.

 Too distracted in the pheromones of him that wrap yearningly around you, you don’t remember to pick up the abandoned silken necklace that your alpha had wantonly pulled off and away from you as your wobbling knees bring you to the forsaken garb he’d peeled so salaciously from his beautiful body.

 Next to it are the shredded, tattered remains of the trousers he’d been wearing and, distantly, you wonder how many pairs he has ruined in the past through the multitudinous shifts he must have gone through as a purebred alpha that must have been so prone to surrender to his wolf and trade his human feet for the paws of his beast.

 Your wolf bays at you to pick both up in the need to keep as much of him near to you as you can and, with embers in your mind burning only for him that are stoked by his redolence, you heed it as your knees buckle when you bend with effort to grab them.

 Belatedly, it occurs to you that your alpha had not brought an alternative change of clothes given the state of his wrecked attire.

 As you slowly run your fingers reminiscently over the destroyed fabric, there’s a thought that pushes at your conscience between a pair of golden irises that flash commandingly at you and through the smoke that hazes your mind, you remember what he’d told you.

 “I expect my mate to be waiting for me before I let every wolf in this fucking compound know that you’re mine when I claim you at the ceremony tonight.”

 The words melt away at your insides in the clear claim that they heat you with and you really can’t help it when you bring both articles that had adorned him close to your chest as you turn to tread through the woodland back from whence you came as your cheeks run hot with realization.

 Your alpha would anticipatedly await you to receive him back from the hunt he was to lead in your honor.

 He wanted you to be there to welcome him over all of the other bitches in the pack and, like the dutifully loyal omega you were meant to be, your mind had already set into its stone that you would later return to the greenwood upon the sun’s setting when all the alphas would rightfully reemerge from the forest’s foliage so that you could greet your own.

 You would do so with open arms that would bear not only your warmly joyous touch, but also the mended clothing he’d damaged to hunt for you that would serve to preserve the modesty that he intended only to show to the pack. Beyond closed doors, you wanted him to shred it all only for you.

 Beyond all of that, though, there’s the searing flame of possession that your wolf finds its rump sat firmly against in the calefaction of the emotion that is ablaze within you and you find that you’re willing to fuel it into a wildfire so that everyone will know that your alpha belongs to you should he wear the restored vestments that you would effortfully stitch back up with the hands that longed to caress and find themselves over his perfect aureate skin.

 These are what have you promptly turn to leave with the flutter of bird’s wings beating against your bosom as you amble along in obliviousness to the pair of lupine eyes that observe you protectively in the distance.

 It is only when you walk so far into the rays of the reaching sun that even your striking silhouette can no longer be beheld by them that their owner whirls around, his ears flicking toward the clang of antlers that must belong to two rearing bucks some ways off and without a moment to lose, he’s gone in the rush of the autumn leaves.

 Lost in the sea of pheromones that wash over you as the spray of them pools around you while you press your nose greedily into his garment, you pay no mind to the mated alphas or betas walking about at the early hour.

 What does demand your attention, however, is the sudden onset of sharp, panging pains that, with every step and breathe you take, sink their teeth deeper within the soft skin of your belly, a whimper caught in the fabric your mouth is held against as a vicious torrent of feverishness has your body temperature begin to lower without the warmth of your alpha as a vicious headache starts to pound against your cranium.

 In the midst of it, your own musk pungently pervades the air only to draw the eyes of unwanted wolves to your sweet smell that is enhanced due to the starting symptoms that have already set your body off in the absence of your alpha that it pines for.

 It is only when you manage to close the door to your chambers behind you, with your alpha’s clothes covetously pressed against your nose as if drunk on his ambrosial taste, that you shirk Jungkook’s furs from your body to throw them on your bed as your wolf yaps insistently to  nest amongst the pelt until the scent clinging to it has rooted itself to your cot so that no part of it has gone unseeded by your alpha.

 Once you’re satisfied with the assortment of dips and ripples of the blackened blanket of pelts that cover your duvet in its entirety, that’s when you lay down to nestle the furs, your baser being demanding that you lather yourself in its savory smell that you wish to soak in until you reek of your alpha.

The soft, downy pelage of the pelt caresses you against your exposed calves so very tenderly and, abruptly, the dress you wear is far too rough as it grazes against your skin in your movements as you quickly divest yourself of it. Somewhere in your maneuvers to take it off, your legs rub against each other only for you to widen both eyes at the sight that greets you.

 There’s slick that all but drips from your sex and it glistens along your thighs in the thick coating that marks you there and you suck in a breath as you ascertain the afflictions your body has been wracked with.

 You’ve just gone into the pre-heat acutely accompanied by a fever that every omega has intermittent interludes of upon finding their alpha.

 As if to remind you of this, a sudden shiver falls over your skin in the frosted frigidity that freezes the air around you in how cold your boudoir has just become under your steadily decreasing internal temperature.

 Without the physical comfort of your alpha, you whine, your fingers finding his garment that you’d thrown on the bed beside his furs to quickly lay it atop your bare bosom, your nipples hardening against the flocculent material that is softer than satin as it brushes against the sensitive buds deliciously.

 You sigh shakily in satisfaction as the cloth along your chest coaxes your skin with its gentle warmth through its fibrous fingers while his furs embrace you as you silently thank your alpha for leaving such giving gifts behind to smoothly soothe you in his absence.

 Your moment of respite is short lived, however, when an edged twinge of a cramp bites low into your abdomen as you grimace in pain, a fresh accretion of your juices finding your folds as you cry out the only name that could ever hope to free you from such sensations.

 “Jungkook,” his name is whispered from your lips, an irrational need setting itself alight within you as the picture of your alpha half nude from the forest flashes provocatively through your mind.

 He’d been so profoundly pulchritudinous under the morning rays and, with those dark eyes and wet mouth that had been so eager to welcome you to him, he’d only allured you more to him between his words of letch that had left you so parched after him. You can still imagine the way his hot tongue had laved at you, can still feel the deep press of his digit that had pushed down wantonly within your own lips as you’d sucked at it like a newborn calf.

 His finger had been so obscenely long while his hands had been so lewdly lined with veins over the bones that bore so much strength and you wonder how those digits would have felt deep within your velvet depths while you ponder what those lustful lips of his would do to you if they found their rightful place along your neck. You cogitate how well his defined, chiseled body would fit against yours while he’d drive his cock without abandon into the silken home of your pussy while he’d utter lascivious indecencies to you born out of lubriciousness for you.

 All of this has your hand sliding down your body without pause, your eyes closing as new need begins to burn hotly within your system in longing for your alpha.

 Your fingers find your neglected bud of nerves while you imagine that it is him that stands before the legs that you spread without hesitation for him as hunger flares behind golden rises that sear cravingly into you. You envision that it is him that commands you to taint yourself this way as you breathe in the igniting incense of him that has the flint of desire smoke profusely with the heat that simmers there as he clouds your mind until there is nothing but him that lingers there.

 “Touch yourself for me, pretty,” his hazily hallucinated voice demands within your mind.

 Helpless to deny him even in your fantasy, you obey in the want to please him even within the imaginary realm your head concocts of him. Your brows pull together in concentration as a ring finger slips between your saturated sex to collect the slick that accumulates there before finding its place atop the neglected bundle of nerves that have been ineffective for years in relieving you of your deep desire that has only ultimately and uncontrollably grown throughout your years without the aid of the alpha that you belonged to.

 Upon the first glide of a middle finger over your clit, you moan, your other hand closing compactly around the bed of furs beneath you as you envision that pink tongue of his darting delectably from his mouth to lick at his lips as he stares raptly at you before uttering,” Come on, my omega. Show me how those tiny fingers try to sate that pretty cunt that only your alpha could ever satisfy,” you imagine that he leans over you to plant two hands on either side of your hips as he sniffs, his eyes rolling back at your musk as he burrs, “Let me see how you’ve tried to give yourself the pleasure that can only be granted by the alpha you were made for, pretty.”

 You shakily sigh in response in the thirst that implores the sustenance of him through another deposit of slick as one finger begins to slowly stroke your clit while your other dips between your generously wetted folds to circle and prod at the hole that woefully weeps its essence in the denial of what it craves most.

 Helpless in the inability to disobey him, one digit breaches your sopping entrance while your other streaks over the bundle of nerves crowning your womanhood in a figure-eight pattern as you throw your head back while imagining that it is his lips that find your neck to leave behind marks that brand you as his.

 “Gods, yes, alpha...please,” You cry out, your digits inadequate next to the ones that have sinfully set your soul alight.

 Your finger sinks easily into your wet sheath as you drive it back and forth before your pace inevitably quickens, your hips pitifully trying to chase the elusive hand of pleasure as they begin to gyrate atop the bed while your other hand latches tighter onto the furs beneath you.

 You envision that the mouth you wish would claim you as his travels torturously down your body until he’s peering edaciously at your glistening sex, the squelching sounds that grow louder in your fastening ministrations only beckoning him further in the drenched deposit of slick that amplifies it.

 You envisage that he brings one plump lip between his teeth as he stares like a starved man at you behind eyes that glint with appetite as he hums, “Mmm, look at that cunt crying for its alpha. You really are desperate for me, aren’t you, pretty?” He lowers himself down to his knees to give you a piercingly hungry glare, “Tell me what you want, my omega, and I may be merciful and give you the release you want so badly. Obey this- obey me -and I will bring you to your end that was only ever mine to give to you, pretty.”

 Your fingers hasten their movements as you bear more force down and over your rapidly engorging clit, the digit that lodges itself needlingly inside you still not enough as you whimper out, “A-ah…please, alpha. I want your mouth on me. Give me your mouth, alpha.”

 The desperation for him flares as you imagine the smirk born of amusement before he descends down to your folds that shine with the sheen of your slick that has made a mess of your thighs and the bed of furs beneath you. You watch as craving of the likes in which you’ve never endured settles heavily across your abdomen only to coil tightly when, with his eyes still locked on yours, his rapturous tongue licks a long, languid stripe across the delicate skin of your inner thigh only to cause you to bite down on your tongue in effort to trap the sound of sin that yearned to escape you in the fervid felicity of that alone.

 You envision your alpha lapping unmercifully at you until the only wetness draped across your thighs is his leftover saliva, your back arching with each flick of his tongue against the sensitive skin as you whine in spite of his teasing.  

 “Is my mouth all that you desire, pretty? I could do so much more to you with my fingers. I could fuck you so well with just my hands,” your alpha muses as one digit prods at your entrance unmercifully in the way that it nudges itself back and forth between the folds of your sex as you gasp out. It’s when he extricates it from you, with your juices still soiling his finger, that he takes it into his mouth as he groans only to have you throw your arm over your face as redness sweeps over your cheeks as you pule.

 Your alpha releases his digit from his mouth with a ‘pop’ as heat winds you up when he urges, “Beg for me, my omega. Only then will I give you more. I want to see how much you need me.”

 The words fall easier than the waters from a river as you visualize him smirking knowingly as he dangles your pleasure before you like bait on his hook as you babble, “Want your fingers, too, alpha. I want you to fill me up with them until I’m so full of you that I can’t think anymore. Please, Jungkook.”

 Without warning, two fingers push pleasantly inside you as your mouth parts in an ‘o’ shape while your alpha licks at his lips, entranced in the sight of his fingers disappearing into your sex before he brings them backward only to bury them deeply within you again without prelude. Hot breath is blown over your pussy as he separates his digits in a scissoring motion that has your walls contracting around him as you press your lips together in effort to stifle the sounds he so easily draws out of you.

 It’s when he furls his fingers inside you in a perfect motion to have your toes curling that your body trembles in the sensation, your alpha noticing this as he utters, “Take it, pretty. I know you can. You’re being such an obedient girl for your alpha. I fucking love it.”

 The praise has you preening as you pant and when his tongue flattens over your womanhood to trail tortuously up so that no part of you is left untouched by him, that’s when you keen.

 “Gods, you are so fucking delicious on my tongue. I could do this forever and never tire of your flavor, my omega,” you imagine that he replaces his hand with yours only to cause you to writhe when two fingers circle over your clit unrelentingly while he gives a light, chaste kiss to the innermost part of your left leg before, with lips still coated in your essence, he croons, “Because you’ve been so good in allowing your alpha to taste you, I will give you your reward, yeah?”

 You hardly have time to think on the words he feeds you with before his lips are planted over your vulva, the wet muscle attached to the bottom his mouth sweeping along your slit while his thumb whorls over the bundle of nerves as his nose brushes against your clitoral hood to cause you to cry out.

 “Alpha, please,“ Your voice waters down into a mewl as you envisage that Jungkook, without warning, pushes his tongue so far inside you that your eyes roll to the back of your head with a stuttered sound.

 You envision that you can feel the way he grins knowingly as he watches you fall apart on him, his eyes narrowing heatedly as he plunges the appendage damningly with you as he utters, “That’s right, pretty. Call out the name of the only one who can make you feel this good. Gods, you’re so beautiful all spread out and bare for me just like you were always meant to be. Fuck, pretty.”

 You do as he says, stammering out his name in labored breaths as you imagine that he thrusts his tongue into you without fail as the tip of it perfectly hits the cluster of nerves buried deep within you over and over again. Soon, your walls begin to clench tellingly around him and by this point, your knuckles have gone white with how tight you grasp the furs in the hand that you’re not using to sinfully stimulate all of this.

 When you envisage that it is his fingers that splay possessively over one breast only to fondle it amongst digits that twiddle your nipple between them while he looks at you with a hooded gaze darkened only with the most carnal of desires, that’s when the coil of craving within you constricts as your alpha rasps, “You’re close, aren’t you, pretty? Fuck, when I take you, I can’t even imagine how you’re going to feel around my knot,” the last word has your walls closing threateningly around him as you moan out in the need your wolf bays at to be filled fully and completely by the only cock that you want to impel itself in your silken sheath and in response, he hisses, “What, you like that? You want my knot, pretty? You want to be bred until you’re swollen and round with my pups? Is that it, my omega?”

 You nod, too far gone into your indecent illusion to care anymore as your back bows when he sucks your sex between his lips as you drawl, “Yes, alpha. Please, give it to me.”

 There’s a devastating chuckle between your legs that has you trembling in anticipation and when the digits of his fingers roll your nipple between them as if he’s done this thousands of times before as he pairs it with an especially fatal propulsion of his tongue that strikes your g-spot so piercingly that it has your body convulse dangerously around it.  It is only when you’re squirming that your alpha’s all-consuming irises flash commandingly as he growls, “You’ll get your fucking pups out of me only if you yield to your alpha,” he says with the eternal flames of voracity blazing through golden rises that devour you whole as he eats you like a deprived man while he professes,” Surrender to me, pretty. Submit to me and show me how bad you want your alpha.”

 He pairs this with a catastrophic swipe of his tongue once, twice and three more times before you’re throwing your head back in blissful pleasure as you fall hopelessly apart while you plummet into your end that wracks you to a writhing mess atop soiled furs while your walls flutter fiercely around the two fingers you had unknowingly undulated against in your search for release.

 When you extricate your digits from your body, a string of slick clings to your fingers and, longingly, you wish that it wasn’t your essence on your hand, but instead that of your mate’s.

 Only your labored breaths break the silence that sets in the aftermath of your indecent deeds, your muscles aching from the awakening of new ones that have not been in use before amongst the old that have been afflicted after the strenuous strain that your alpha had wrought on your body.

 It takes a few minutes to come down from your high and your headache is furiously fast in reemerging once the remnants of your climax have faded as you groan in effort to sit up. It is then that you notice the tattered trousers you’d neglected before in the ravenousness that had eaten away at you for your alpha and, with a new resolve that prickles past the prominent pounding of your head, you decide that now would be a good time to mend them so that you will have something to present to your alpha upon his return to the compound.

 You stand on unstable legs that are beginning to become a familiarity to you in the wake of your alpha as you pull Jungkook’s garment over you and are completely content with the way the article of clothing covers your intimate parts as you fold it over your chest to tie it together with a silken cord that had been buried inside.

 Finding your small sewing kit that you’d left abandoned in the corner of your chambers, you situate yourself along the cluster of plush pillows settled along the window seat as you set to work on fixing your alpha’s attire.

 You try to mind your fingers that the needle had left you privy to numerously numbed fingers because of in the midst of the late hours of the night after stitching together the ripped remains of the clothing that the pups under your care would often tear with claws that protracted and retracted in the midst of their growing bodies.

 It is a futile attempt, for the sharp spikes that shoot through your digits inflict themselves in you anyway. Your attention is far too focused not on the article of clothing, but on the one who had worn it.

 You wonder what he might be doing right now and if he’s been thinking about you as profusely-or lewdly, mind you- as you have been about him, your wolf wanting to howl for him to beckon him back as you longingly caress the shredded trousers while you pine for the warmth of his skin and the radiance of his smile.

 Sometime later, there’s an abrupt series of knocks at your door and you smile as you fold your finished work and place it on the table next to your window seat before rising with anticipation that energetically bounds through you.

 It was time for you to be prepared and groomed so that you could be received by the alpha that no one yet knew had already staked his claim on you. Every omega went through this period before their Offering Ceremony to heighten the chances of finding them a suitable mate.

 The door opens and in leaps your best friend, Niva, who was mated last spring as she happily greets, “Y/N! Are you so excited? Your time is finally here, darling!”

 You laugh jovially at her energy as you easily question with mirth, “Good to see you, too, Niva. I am, very much so. Is it just going to be you that has the privilege of getting me ready?”

 She enfolds you in an all-encompassing embrace and you mirror the sentiment, for it is in omegean nature to be close-knit and seek the warm arms of the dynamic that is known for their nurturing, compassionate nature.

 You wrap your arms around her, but upon your best friend getting one whiff of the heavy pheromones soured by sex in every crevasse of the room, her nose wrinkles as her face twists, “Ew, Y/N, did you seriously already get bedded on the day of your ceremony? It stinks in here. Your grandmother is not going to take kindly to this. You’re supposed to be pure, remember?”

 You stand back with a smile lifting at your lips, “I know very well, Niva. Have you considered,” you lift a brow, “that perhaps I am still the virgin you always like to mess with me about being and maybe that there’s an alpha who might have given me his furs so that I could have some kind of relief in his absence?”

 Your best friend’s eyes widen in surprise, but that is soon replaced with a knowing glint of mischievousness in one eye as she takes in the visage of your disheveled appearance amidst the only article of clothing that is entirely too large in how it dwarfs your much smaller body as she queries, “Judging by the smell, whoever it is must be quite an alpha based on how strongly your room reeks of him. Judging by how that excuse for a shirt on you totally swallows you up, he must also be quite muscular and tall. Tell me,” she leans close, “has he touched you yet?”

 Your cheeks turn red as the memories flash like moving pictures through your mind in a tale recounting what had just happened and all that had occurred before and within the greenwood.

 You pull your lip between your teeth thoughtfully before you quietly admit, “In more ways than one, yes. Gods, has it been amazing, Niva. He is so…so attractively alluring in every way.”

 Your best friend holds you close as she watches the emotion color your irises and, seeing that in combination with the way your very voice had lilted with the sentiments, happiness dawns on her as she cards a hand through your hair to declare, “Then I will endeavor to make you irresistible to whoever this alpha is, darling. When I’m done with you, your alpha won’t know what hit him before it’s too late.”

 You blush when she calls in your other two omegean friends of whom carry a large assortment of oils, herbs and soaps before the three disappear into the lavatory through the adjoining antechamber in your boudoir to set to work on readying your bath.

 You busy yourself in the meantime with thoughts filled only with your alpha despite the cacophony of chatter echoing excitedly off of the walls, your attention drawn elsewhere and when Niva comes to retrieve you, that’s when you look away from the window that you’d been trying to squint through in effort to locate your alpha that still hunts for you within the greenwood.

 When you step into the copper basin that is much too large for your smaller body, the waiting waters wrap tenderly around your ailing body as the steam wafts around you in the heat of the fluid that births it. A long, drawn out breath leaves you as your tautened muscles loosen while your friends pour vial after vial of lavender, spruce and rosemary oil over you, the viscous solutions draping themselves over your skin to coax open your pores so that more of your pheromones are released to further attract prospective alphas with your scent.

 Niva takes care to drizzle you in pink salt sold out of the exotic Himalayas that she’d acquired from an especially friendly merchant after being told it had the power to make the skin glow with the might of a goddess. After that, she then spritzes the waters around you with roses, passion flowers and red clover blossoms that decorate the watery landscape around you until its canvas has been painted a magnificent magenta while you’re lathered in the herbal bath, a sigh of satisfaction falling from your lips before your best friend starts her work cleaning your hair.

 Usually, you would purr at the gentle glide of fingers over your scalp, but not today. Today, there’s only one pair of hands that you want on you and they are much too far away for your liking.

 Once the suds of soap have been rinsed from your hair, that’s when you’re left to bask in the warm water that had been drawn especially for you, for each omega has their own variation of scents that they prefer to bedeck themselves with for their Offering Ceremony in effort to lure more alphas through an amplified air of pheromones surrounding them.

 You ruminate on what Jungkook might do once he catches your naturally enhanced aroma that he’s already admitted to liking so much and, for good measure, your fingers find a floating rose and draw its soft petals over your shoulders before rubbing it along your neck.

 When the water has gone cold and you’ve been immensely imbued with the essences of nature, that’s when your friends return to retrieve you from the depths of the basin that you’ve sunken into through your calming contentment.

 Your hair is aired with oaken fans brought all the way from China before they twine and curl it around until it rests artfully in a braided bun along the crest of the back of your head, two twin strands nestled right in front of your ears to petitely frame your face.

 You really wish that you could focus on the gossip that falls freely as leaves from the trees this time of year as they labor over you, but you can’t. Not when your head swims with thoughts only of your alpha.

 Caught as you are in the tides of him that drag you along, you do not feel the bristles of a brush along your eyelids as Niva tips your head back to apply the powdery coloring that will accentuate your brilliant silver orbs before your best friend lines your lids with the blackened stick of kohl.

 Even when a light smattering of the dust of crushed rose petals is painted over your cheeks, you do not look into the mirror, for your eyes are trained on the sliver of sun that begins to wane through the rays that begin to reach backward toward their parent as your wolf bays in expectancy to receive its mate.

 Once Niva is done with her masterpiece, that’s when you’re made to stand and close your eyes before you’re walked over to the mirror that spans from the floor to the ceiling in the corner of your chambers as your other two friends produce the gown your grandmother had had made for you for this very day out of an ornately sealed box that had been left outside your door upon your return from the woods.

 You hear the clicks of the chest that signal its opening, excitement enthusiastically running amok within you when there are three collective gasps behind you as they stare in awe at your gown.

 It is lifted gingerly and delicately in its fragility and your friends help you into it slowly while slightly stiffened organza material skims your skin as it is pulled meticulously up and over your body. Once your arms have been lifted through the hollow holes and the pleated style sleeves rest atop your shoulders, that’s when the laces lining the back of the gown are pulled taut and the bodice constricts around you as you wince at the unyielding tightness that winds around your abdomen.

 Once the ties to your dress have been neatly crossed over each other in a complicated complexity that you will never see, that is the moment that you hear the distinguishing groan of aged wood being opened in the form of another box. The contents within that are unknown to you, but upon the cold, heavy material that encircles your neck, you can surmise that it is a choker meant to conceal the area so untouchable to all but the alpha whose mark you would eventually bear in its stead.

 Your best friend smiles fondly at her finished piece of artwork before stepping to the side to say, “Open your eyes, Y/N. It’s time for you to see how much the moon favors her most adored daughter.”

 You open your eyes in questioning, but before you can turn your attention to your friend, the image in the mirror captures it first as your breath catches at the sight it bestows to you, your jaw falling open in wonderment.

 Your skin all but glows under the gleam of sunlight that tries to tread over your radiance in its dimming dance as irises the color of moonlight piercingly stare back at you from under eyelids speckled with silver like the celestial body amidst the smudges of blended eyeshadow along the sides that beseech boldness in the color that matches the soils of the earth. It is set off by a cat-eye of kohl liner that is dappled thinly along the tips of your lids to demand attention in the way that it contrasts your irises. Even your lips have been streaked with the crimson of a rose to beckon beguilingly in the wish to be looked at.

 Embellishing your neck is a choker made entirely of moonstone that is set between chromium on each side. Its base rests just above your collarbones and, its thickness, it extends about two inches upward to hide away your sensitive scent glands as it covers your skin.

 Below that, though, that’s what really takes your breath away.

 Your gown looks to have been crafted from the threads of the moon’s core in the white of it that adorns your body in its entirety. Layers of gossamer-like fabric compose your dress and set carefully between it all are specks that shine like grayed moondust in the light that glimmers off of them.

 Your bodice is styled in a plunging ‘V’ that hugs your frame and is ceased only by the firm, fitted band that wraps around and hugs your middle well below your breastbone. Tied along its end is a very thin silver cord that twists into a knotted bow before your skirt loosely trails down and out, the train of it cascading like a sea behind and around you. Your arms are bare, but the sheerer and more translucent sleeves trickle over your shoulders and flow about to join the pool of fabric along your feet as you take a shaky breath.

 The woman that stares back at you is one that drips with the waters of clarity in the confidence that she exudes as she stands tall and proud. She is every bit the omega you were always meant to be as she holds her head high, her hands clasped along her front as she angles her head at you to study you and you have to close your parted maw as you stare wondrously back at her, wholly unable to move at the sight of the stranger that has your body in the mirror.

 When the familiar furs of your alpha are lowered over your shoulders, that’s when you look away, your irises finding Niva’s as she coos, “I don’t even think the ancient queen of the wolves could compare to you, darling. I really have outdone myself this time.”

 You stutter, completely in awe of yourself as you tell her, “N-Niva…this is… how did you-“

 Your best friend hushes you with a finger to her lips,” Shhh, that’s a secret, my dear. I cannot divulge my magics lest someone steal them away from me,” she teases as she puts both hands around your shoulders to encourage, “Look at yourself, my darling. You look positively radiant. Those alphas don’t stand a chance.’

 You think that maybe it is all just a trick of your senses and that it is just a hallucination, for you surely can’t actually appear the way that the girl in the mirror does, right?

 You find your visage once again on the mirror in an irrational need to confirm this only to widen your eyes at what greets you, for it is you that peers curiously back at yourself, your hand reaching out to run your fingers down the image of you that is set behind it.

 Your friends step back from you when your hand lowers and you turn to them with joyous tears that threaten to ruin all the work they labored so much from as they quickly fan the air around you in attempt to keep them trapped within your eyes as you laugh, your arms shooting out to welcome them all in a warm embrace that you are sure to thank them incessantly within.

 You enfold them in your arms until the sun’s rays strain to reach you, it’s descent into the night being announced with the raucously reverberating howl from the forest that has your blood singing in the familiarity that it is carried to you with.

 It finds your ears even here and you perk up, your wolf barking in need to go and wait for the alpha that every fiber of your being tells you is near as your best friend looks to you in understanding as she says, “Go on, Y/N. Don’t worry about us.  He’s waiting for you. Go to him.”

 You need no further coaxing as your feet move of their volition, your fingers closing around the mended trousers while you pull the furs your alpha had given to you tight around you, for it was tradition that omegas were not to expose skin before the Offering Ceremony and to be wrapped in an outer covering that preserved their purity until they were ready to shed it upon commencement of the event and acceptance of their alpha.

 The golden disk that once sat high in the sky now has dipped halfway below the horizon, but you need none of its light to locate the alpha that calls you forth as you tread tirelessly on until your nose brings you to the edge of the forest where an old trace of Jungkook still lingers.

 You crouch to leave his fixed clothing by the bark of one aged tree as you walk on, narrowing your eyes as you attempt to see beyond the long line of browned stalks that stretch on as far as the eye can see.

 Anticipation flaps with the fierceness of a black swan within you and when you hear the snap of a branch somewhere off to your left, you enter the thicket’s threshold without hesitation in your baser being’s need to relish in the warmth of your alpha.

 The stench of death thickly layers the air as you wrinkle your nose and as you find yourself standing before the broken limb of the tree, that’s when the dark silhouette of a figure steps out from behind it.

 The sun’s fading rays blind you to whoever you’ve found, but the voice that soon lathers itself all too heavily and viscously over your skin has your hair standing on end as it saccharinely presses, “Were you looking for someone? It’s okay, omega, you can tell me that you were trying to find me and profess your love to me. Everyone else does.”

 You roll your eyes at his vain vanity, “Actually, Taehyung, I was just trying to find my alpha who happens to be nearby and if he finds you here, he’s not going to take too kindly to that.”

 You turn away from the alpha, but Taehyung predatorily stalks after you and before you realize what’s happened, he’s in front of you to halt your movements, a twisted grin marring his features as he sniffs you, a tremor wracking his body as he does that has your blood running cold.

 “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, omega,” he tries to reach for you and you take a step back, not wanting his odor nor his filthy touch to stain you, “See, Jeon won’t be back for some time, sweet thing. He’s still on the mountain hauling back his kills that he’ll be too late to bargain for you with.”

 Your stomach drops to the recesses of your body as you try to move away from the alpha that hounds after you while your fingers tighten over the furs that cover you from his roving irises that roam all over you, your skin crawling everywhere that his attention slithers over.

 In the eyes that are glazed over from the onset of a rut, there is no care there. There is only gluttonous greed that bats away anything and everything that is not you.

 Your omega harks for you to submit under the alpha’s penetrating gaze, but you resist it as your own alpha’s voice traipses through your mind.

 “I will not tolerate anyone that attempts to take what is mine.”

 It is that thought that has you pushing past the instinct to yield to the alpha before you now as you shake your head, the surety set in your eyes amusing Taehyung as you spew its fires, “I would advise that you move away from me before you do something that you will regret. Your pack alpha has already made his claim on me and will not hesitate to punish you if you tarnish what belongs to him.”

 Your defiance has the alpha’s cock harden impossibly more amidst the divine incense you emit from freshly opened pores. No omega had dared to talk back to him before and it was inebriating.

 “Stars, you really are lust if it had a form, she-wolf,” the shadow convulses with dark laughter that has goosebumps growing along your skin as you back away, “Jungkook wasn’t lying when he said you were the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. You smell sweet as fuck, too…I wonder if you taste just as good.”

 Fear has your body begin to lock into place when your back nears the rough bark of a tree, “Do not do this, Taehyung. You will face wrath the likes of which you’ve never seen if you so much as lay a finger on me. I want nothing to do with you, do you understand?”

 A grin curls with malicious intent along its edges as he takes a step forward until he’s only inches away from you as he taunts, “Oh? You want nothing to do with me? Perhaps you shouldn’t be striding around smelling like temptation and sex in that little dress then, huh? You omegas always have a flair for driving us crazy when you present, but fuck, Y/N, no one holds a candle to you. I think,” his eyes glint dangerously when your back hits the thick trunk of the tree, “that you should be claimed by a real alpha that can treat you better than Jeon ever could.”

 “Taehyung,” you try through a dry mouth,” Stop. I don’t want this. Jungkook is the one I wish to bear the mark of, not you.”

 Panic sets in and seeps icily across every vein when one hand comes to rest next to your head, his eyes burning a hole into your neck as he makes a sound of consideration, “Such a lucky happenstance that the pack alpha didn’t think to mark what was his if he didn’t wish for others to taint it.”

 The alpha nears and the ache between your knuckles warrants the incoming protraction of unguis, but before they can make their appearance, there’s a raged roar born entirely of aggression that threateningly thunders through the woodland. It is stormed by the fury that is set between the crackling of claws fulminating fiercely over the trunks of trees somewhere behind you.

 It takes only one inhale through your nostrils to know who has joined you, your heart pounding faster in response as your wolf cries for its mate while his scent thaws the ice within your body that Taehyung had foolishly frozen within it.

 “I thought I made myself clear to you, boy,”  the sound bleeds into a menacing snarl from behind you and Taehyung stops in his tracks, seized as he is by the overpowering command of the alpha ranked higher even than him as Jungkook’s brooding aura pierces him like an icicle in the coldness of the familiar voice,” She’s mine. I would advise you back the fuck away from my mate before I do much worse to you than break both of your arms the last time you felt it wise to try to fucking disobey me.”

 In the chill of the frigid air that has his beast wanting to tuck its tail between its legs, Taehyung tries to ignore it as he dissentingly jeers, “Is she yours? Unfortunate that I don’t see your mark on her then, pack alpha,” Taehyung sneers, his eyes still settled on yours, though your attention is far from him at this point as you stare longingly towards the origin of where nails scrape furiously into the skins of the trees as he dares to challenge, “You are not the only wolf that thirsts for a she-wolf as parching as this one, Jeon. I could get drunk off her scent alone and you expect me to just sit back and allow you to take such an appealing aperitif away from me? Sorry, but I want to taste her myself and there’s nothing that you can do to-“

 The rest of whatever the younger alpha had been wanting to say never makes it past the confines of his mouth, for there’s a blur of golden skin that flashes before you and suddenly, Taehyung has been launched several feet into the air only for his spine to collide into the back of an old, stocky evergreen tree.

 The bark screams against the contact in the deafening series of snaps as the foolish alpha is slammed so forcefully into it that, like an arrow, his body shoots cleanly through the aged integument as the oaken pillar that has been broken in half falls to the forest floor with a thud.

 Golden irises find you under their attention as your alpha steps from behind you, your blood warming at his heated touch when he grasps your chin between his fingers to assess you for damage before laying his forehead against your own as you reach out for him, the pads of your fingers lightly trailing tenderly along his jawline as you quietly whisper,” Alpha.”

 Jungkook nuzzles you protectively before he rumbles out, “My omega. Did he hurt you? Did he touch you?”

 He’s like a furnace in the way that his skin is calefied with the intensity of the sun and you purr when he nudges at your neck as your palm finds its place where his heart beats like a drum against you as you tell him, “No, Jungkook. With you around to keep me safe, he never got that far. He was about to, but you didn’t let him, my alpha.”

 Your alpha bristles at that, his irises dimming in light of your admission as he growls, “He nearly did. He would have if I hadn’t come when I did. I sensed your scent souring and it led me here. Had I been just a bit later, I nearly would have lost what was mine,” you watch in awe how his canines draw themselves out of his gums, captivated by the way that they lengthen and grow in size until they protrude out of his mouth in their large size that is much more massive than the average alpha as he pulls away from the nook in your neck to lay a callused palm along your jaw as he utters, “I need you to stay here for me, pretty. That fucking fool needs to be reminded of who is in charge here and I intend to jog his pitiful memory so that he never forgets it.”

 He draws away entirely too soon as you whimper in his absence and you, with your eyes magnetized only for him, observe with interest the way that he strides heavily and imposingly through the cluster of trees to bear down upon the collapsed body that is a mess of tangled limbs under the broken arm of the oak he’d been forcefully thrown against.

Your alpha’s hair falls wildly over his face and, in the waning light of the sun, his eyes bear down balefully over the younger alpha as he stands nude save for the mended article of clothing covering his lower half that you had dutifully brought for him. 

 Fury is palpable in the way that it looms like a shadow off of Jungkook, in the way that it clings to his every muscle when he snaps with glistening incisors at the downed alpha as he seethes, “It seems that you’ve lost sight of who is at the top of the food chain, boy,” Your alpha towers intimidatingly over Taehyung, who hisses at him, “The one on top gets the pick of the fucking litter and that, Taehyung, has never been you. I am your pack alpha and I am the only wolf that can command all of you alphas beneath me. It’s time that I discipline you to make you aware of that fact.”

 You hardly have time to process the popping sound of bones before your alpha has lodged five razor-edged, serrated claws deep into the recesses of Taehyung’s left shoulder as the younger alpha yowls out in pain that can be heard miles away in its dismal din.

 Your alpha marvels at the crimson fluid that stains him as the red tears of Taehyung’s wounds pool around your alpha’s digits only to trickle sadly downward until they are one with the earth.

 Jungkook snarls forbiddingly when Taehyung squirms underneath him to hound out, “What happened to that mouth you like to fucking flap all the time? Too scared now to use it, boy?” Your alpha leans forward with anger flashing in his eyes, “I would suggest that you don’t fuck with me again, little wolf. You’re going to get much more than the fucking claws next time should you be foolish enough to try.”

 Your alpha draws his other arm back, your eyes widening in the darkness that is settling its dark shroud over him.

 Before another set of claws can embed themselves within the younger alpha, you call for your own and through the cloak of negative emotion that has begun to suffocate him, your voice slips between it to caress the ire of his baser being.

 When your smaller fingers enclose around the wrist of his bloodied hand, you gently coax his claws out of Taehyung, who crumples atop of the brambles along the woodland with a thump as you press yourself to your alpha’s back to offer with a soft voice, “Come back to me now, alpha. Your mate does not wish to see you so wracked by your fury. You’ve made your point clear to both him and to me.”

 Jungkook inhales deeply only for his muscles to loosen while your sweet scent laces itself around him as he turns to utter, “My omega, it is because of my mate that I must resort to the animal within me,” You watch as the dark emotion recedes slowly from his irises as he imbibes you, entirely too parched of you for so long as an emotion you’ve yet to understand intensifies in its wake when he confesses, “I can hardly help that when you beckon me so, pretty.”

[encyclopika]

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #200

Brought to you by a marine biologist and...holy hell, 200?!!

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!

Well, I’d like to commemorate this momentous occasion by covering a really interesting creature that was featured in AC Pocket Camp and that is the Opah. I’m a little biased here because I just love weird fish, especially deep sea species we don’t really know a lot about. It’s about the mystery. So, I’ll do my best to cover this amazing thing. If you want to know why we don’t have a lot of information into deep sea fish, check out my coverage of ACNH’s museum tour of the deep sea tank.

The Opah appeared in AC Pocket Camp for Fishing Tourney 40, which occurred in July 2021. Like I mentioned in the last entry, it appears that ACPC is less concerned with the actual temperature range or habitat of the fish it chooses for what events. The Opah is considered a deep-sea species, or at least an open ocean species that just doesn’t come close to land. It often lives at depths where the water temperature is around 4º C (about 39º F), which is, ya know, not a balmy summer temperature. Although Opahs as a group have a cosmopolitan distribution (aka they are found all around the world, including tropical areas) they tend to stay deep where the water is cool and sunlight can’t reach.

Anyway, the Opah is a pretty unique fish. It belongs to the Order Lampriformes, a small group of fish that include mostly deep-sea and pelagic species. The Order’s name comes from the Opah’s round shape and brilliantly-colored fins and skin, though most Lamprids are more long and slender, with most fish in the Order belonging to the “ribbonfish” clade, for which the infamous Oarfish is a part. That being said, Opahs exist apart from their cousins in the Lampridae family, which only houses one Genus, Lampris. For much of the time we’ve known that Opahs existed, we accepted that there were two species within this Genus. However, in recent years, Lampris guttatus, the comsopolitan species, has been broken up so that there are now six species with more limited ranges. As I’m sure AC Pocket Camp wouldn’t recognize this, not to mention the study occurred in 2018 after ACPC was released, I’m pretty confident this is simply Lampris guttatus, or the (original) Opah. 

Ralph Pace (NOAA Fisheries), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

So, despite the fact they look a bit goofy and fat, these fish are actually really fast and exhibit endothermy, or warm-bloodedness. In fact, the Opah is the only fish we’ve discovered so far that has whole-body endothermy, in which all of its internal organs and muscles are kept at temperatures higher than the surrounding water. (Please note, this is still unlike birds and mammals that keep their warmth at a constant temperature - the Opah’s body temp still fluctuates.)  On top of that, Opah also exhibit regional endothermy, or the act of keeping some parts of the body warmer than others. This type of endothermy is more akin to billfish, tuna, and lamnid sharks (like the great white, porbeagle, salmon, and makos). This type of endothermy usually keeps the eyes, brain, and swimming muscles at an elevated temperature which helps these fish remain active hunters in colder waters. So, unlike most deep-sea fish, the Opah doesn’t just float around in the dark waiting for prey to come to it - it has the power and energy to seek out and chase down its food, which often includes squid and smaller fish.

And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?

[firstginger]

Hi there! I’ve been trying to figure out my daemon’s form and reading your blog has been really helpful for me, so thank you very much for that! I’ve got it narrowed down to maned wolf or marbled murrelet. If you have the time, could you explain a little about each form and some of the differences between them? Thank you so much! (I was thinking analytical form, but would love to hear about them too as Pullman forms if you wouldn’t mind. To be honest, I don’t quite understand the difference between them). I really enjoy all your daemonism analyses, thanks a lot for this blog and everything you do!

thank you so much! :) i love helping people find their daemon's form, and hearing what they ended up settling as!

the maned wolf and the marbled murrelet, both great forms though with some key differences between them! before i launch into that, i'll go ahead and explain the analytical and pullman form differences because i think it's been a while since i posted about it. when the daemon finding community started and really took off, they leaned away from the way daemons are attributed in the books. they looked at animal behavior rather than symbolism: how we can translate how an animal acts and lives into a person who also represents those traits. for example, someone with a fox daemon isn't a trickster or someone sly, but are rather introverted, adaptable, loyal, etc. in the past few years, the form finding community has shifted to looking at how forms are assigned in the books -- call these "pullman forms", for the author philip pullman. in the book series, daemons are a reflection of the symbolism of the individual, rather than the behavior. they take into consideration geographic upbringing or home, color, and archetype or role: such that someone with a fox daemon would likely be cunning, mysterious, and a trickster.

my inclination is that it's nice to find a form that fits both categories, but it isn't always possible. for example, small primates fit me very well in both analytical and pullman terms, but i would ideally like a pullman form that heralds from my home of the american pacific northwest.

anyway! so let me start off with some key differences about these two species analytically. i'm guessing you've already taken a peak at the TDF write-ups for both of them. the marbled murrelet is the only murrelet that has an analysis, though i assume you've looked at the other alcids (auks, auklets, murres, murrelets, guillemots, puffins) that are on there and eliminated them. when comparing forms or even starting to find a form that's viable for you, i find the big 5 personality assessment to be helpful.

openness & conscientiousness both the marbled murrelet and maned wolf are habitual creatures, though the maned wolf certainly more so. migratory birds aren't exactly adventurous, but they absolutely have more of an element of adaptability and willingness to embrace change than species that don't migrate. the marbled murrelet has a very condensed range: this is someone that doesn't deviate from the tried and true, rather particular people who look before they leap and get their feathers ruffled when they need to change their plan. the maned wolf is more withdrawn, a potentially creative thinker but only when they have amble space and time to plan ahead. their sense of security comes from their routine and they follow that dutifully. a maned wolf individual likes their safe bubble where they can be imaginative on their terms (inxp). a marbled murrelet individual is more proactive and adaptable but hesitant to first deviate from what they know works (isxj).

extraversion and agreeableness both of these species are, first of all, introverted, passive, easy to get along with -- but for different reasons. a clear difference between them is that the marbled murrelet is going to be much more tolerant of social interaction than the maned wolf. pelagic birds tend to "flock" less than passerines, for example, and among alcids the marbled murrelet is more independent. however undeniably these birds still aggregate enough to mean that a marbled murrelet individual is comfortable in social situations. they're people with their own visions and prefer to work and create on their own, but will very readily voice their opinions and thoughts in a group. the maned wolf is different. this is an anxious animal! the maned wolf individual is private and exceptionally wary about opening up to others. they're passive because they don't want to rock the boat, though detached is a better word to describe this behavior. they don't like change in their social routine so one can expect a maned wolf to stick with their friends through thick and thin... even if it would be better for them to move on.

neuroticism as you might expect from above, the maned wolf is going to be leagues more neurotic than the marbled murrelet. auks in general aren't very neurotic bird species. while more cautious, a marbled murrelet isn't going to be as wary or private as the maned wolf. their boundaries are looser and they aren't as easily overwhelmed.

as far as pullman associations for these two go, i'd recommend first checking out this post i made about archetypes; there's also an attached quiz in there if you want to give that a try. i'd need to do some research, but the maned wolf strikes me as the magician, the sage, and the artist, while the marbled murrelet strikes me more as the explorer, the lover, and the artist. the maned wolf is going to have more symbolism of isolation, mysticism, and personal freedom, while seabirds like the marbled murrelet carry more symbols of migration, sturdiness at sea, and monogamous mating/always returning to a nesting site. not to mention that the marbled murrelet has strong associations with the ocean and the north pacific, while the maned wolf has ones with night and the savannas of south america.

hope this helps! :)

[darnestdungeon]

Pets I want to see in DD2:

-Fergus the dog-

-Pelagic Fry-

-Gargoylet-

-Bone Courtier's skull-

-Piglet Drummer-

-Fistful of Ectoplasm-

-Amiable Virago-

-Brigand 1/2 Pounder-

-Shriekerling-

-Capillary Vessel of Darkness-

Hi anon, sorry it took forever to answer this-- I wanted to draw some of these cause they sounded adorable. I gave up on drawing it, but I included the sketch for the Shrieklings under the read more nonetheless!

For those unaware, there have been a "pet slot" in your stagecoach in DD2 since day 1, but there are currently no pets to add to it.

Red Hook already included the pets in the game's early access development roadmap. So we can probably expect this some patches in the future from now!

(If you're curious and don't mind spoilers, I can share what I've found so far on the game files.)

But first, here's the Shrieklings sketch! I could not decide whether they would be normal birds or if the Eldritch mutation would affect even the Shrieker offspring, but here's what I came up with:

As for the pets, we don't have any graphics yet, but some strings of data contain the names of some possible pets! Keep in mind I'm just sharing what I found in the files-- they might change everything altogether, these could even be all placeholders as far as we know.

Bat

Cat (it is named 'black cat' in some files)

Falcon

Parrot

Rat

Raven

Yorick (also named 'skull')

(No idea what 'yorick' means, google only shows me league of legends stuff...) Ooh apparently it’s a Shakespeare reference!

From what I understood, pets are items you can equip in the inn with the Wainwright, like a Stagecoach upgrade or boss trophy. They seem to be randomly rewarded as loot from cultists or mini boss battles.

As for what they actually do, I have no clue. I imagine they must give you a passive boom, like the trophies and stagecoach upgrades. There must be more to it of course, we'll just have to wait and see!

[anonsally]

exciting new birds!

(well, new to me)

I’ve been birdwatching 3 times this week. Here are some highlights:

On Thursday in my neighborhood, I saw a female Nuttall’s woodpecker at a feeder (I’m sure I saw more of them last year than I’ve seen this year), an unexpected pair of mallards flying past (in an area without a body of water), some cedar waxwings (the best look I’ve had at those this year), and a large flock of house finches.

On Saturday in my neighborhood, I heard what Merlin’s sound ID app swore up and down was a red-shouldered hawk. It was vocalising for ages, but though I searched for quite a while and looked at the tree I thought it was in from many angles, I couldn’t find it. I also heard what Merlin claimed was a downy woodpecker; I only had a very brief glimpse but what I saw did plausibly match that identification. There had been a lot of vocalising and I wondered if it was having a territory dispute with some oak titmice. 

Today, a friend and I went to a small estuary across the freeway from the Bay. Our original intention had been to go to a marsh at 8am, but... neither of us wanted to get up that early, so we instead went to a park at 11am. In a little over an hour and a half, we ambled 2.22 miles and saw at least 24 kinds of birds, though only 20 that we could identify positively: 

a turkey vulture being mobbed by crows (usually I see crows attacking hawks, so this was surprising)

10 Canada goslings (cute! shame they will grow up to be assholes) with their parents, plus a few other adult Canada geese

a bunch of adult Mallards, including some with white bibs that I reported as “Mallard (domestic type)”

2 female buffleheads

6 very elegant black-necked stilts

2 American avocets in breeding plumage, one of which appeared to be sitting on a nest

a killdeer

a flock of unidentified peeps

a flock of short-billed dowitchers (pretty sure I’d never seen/identified those before) (hilariously, the Merlin app describes this species as a “plump, medium-sized shorebird with very long bill” ... but in defence of the people who named it, the bill, though long, is not as long as that of the long-billed dowitcher.)

a pelagic cormorant (possibly my first ever)

2 double-crested cormorants

some other cormorants we didn’t identify more specifically than that

3 snowy egrets

a great blue heron (so dinosaur-y)

a black-crowned night-heron

a green heron (!!!!!! definitely my first ever, and a fairly spectacular bird--when I spotted it I exclaimed “what is that?!”)

...and various unidentified gulls and other birds I often see in my own neighborhood.

The thing about going birdwatching in a wetlands/aquatic environment is that you see so many birds. If they’re on the water, you can spot them--unlike the birds in the trees, who are much harder to find amongst the leaves and branches. I don’t go to wetlands or aquatic environments very often, so almost every time I do go, I see at least one species I’ve never seen before. This time I added four to my eBird life list, but I know I had seen the killdeer before.

[jurassicsunsets]

Paper summary: Harrell et al.,  (2016). Endothermic mosasaurs? Possible thermoregulation of Late Cretaceous mosasaurs (Reptilia, Squamata) indicated by stable oxygen isotopes in fossil bioapatite in comparison with coeval marine fish and pelagic seabirds.

[This paper is freely available, by the way!]

Hi all! This is the first in a new weekly series I’m going to be doing, in which I will be doing a short paper review each Thursday. We’re starting off big this week, with a delve into the world of stable isotopes. 

But Hayley, you say, what in the world are stable isotopes? 

Okay, time for some backstory!

The part with the backstory

Isotopes, as you may be aware, are atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons, and therefore different atomic weights. If you think back to chemistry class, or forward to chemistry class if you haven’t taken it, in which case this might help you get a leg up, you’ll remember or just be learning that each element is defined by the number of (positively charged) protons in its nucleus. So each atom of carbon has 6 protons, and if it has more or less, then that’s a problem, because then it’s not carbon. But within the same element they can vary in numbers of (neutral) neutrons. Neutrons are important for holding together an atom’s nucleus, because if you get a bunch of positive charges together in a nucleus they start to repel, just like if you get a bunch of elementary school-aged children together. Different isotopes act basically the same, and I can guarantee you that right now some of the carbon atoms you are using in your body have six neutrons, some have seven, and some have eight. These are referred to as carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14, respectively, and that number refers to the number of (protons+neutrons) in the nucleus. [Sometimes some isotopes are unstable and undergo radioactive decay. Carbon-14 does this. But that’s not really relevant to what we’re doing today.]

(Image: This is a carbon-12 atom. The yellow and red bits in the middle are the protons and neutrons. Not remotely to scale.)

Different isotopes of the same element act mostly the same (besides sometimes being radioactive and going berserk), so animals can take them up and use them. But they don’t act entirely the same, and that information can be used by palaeontologists to learn really cool stuff about past life. 

A big thing that isotopes can do differently is something called mass-dependent fractionation. That’s fancy-people-speak for “it’s easier to move things that are less heavy”, and it means that it’s easier to move things that are less heavy. 

One useful aspect of this deals with oxygen isotope fractionation. You are breathing oxygen as you read this, and if you are not then you will not likely be reading this for very much longer. Oxygen is also present in water, though, and water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and makes up 70% of your body. It’s kind of a big deal, if you’ve never heard of it, and for our purposes it comes in two main flavours - water with oxygen-18, and water with oxygen-16. 

Oxygen-16 makes up 99.76% of all oxygen on earth, and oxygen-18 makes up 0.2% (the rest is oxygen-17, which no one cares about). This means that about 0.2% of water is heavier than the rest of water. This water is harder to move, because it’s heavier, and when evapouration occurs, oxygen-16 is more likely to evapourate because it takes less energy to move it.

But wait! Putting in more energy makes it easier to move heavy things, and this is exactly what happens. If temperatures are warmer, more oxygen-18 gets evaporated than does at colder temperatures. 

We need something to compare this to, because otherwise we’d just be measuring samples and it’d be hard to know what different numbers are referring to. For oxygen, we use the standard of Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, or V-SMOW. It’s not super important to know what that is. 

What is important is delta notation: δ18O (delta-eighteen-O) refers to how different the ratio of oxygen-18/oxygen-16 is from the standard. We use the symbol ‰, “per mil”, which is fancy people talk for 0.1%, for this, because the differences are really little. +1‰ means that there’s 0.1% more oxygen-18 in the sample than normal - that is, it’s 0.1% “heavier” than normal water. 

So, to get that all neatly said: Higher temperatures = More heavy water evapourates = the water that is left behind is lighter.

The part with the actual paper

Oh yeah, the paper! That’s why we were here. Okay, so mosasaurs were a group of big marine lizards (not dinosaurs) in the Cretaceous period. I wrote a little about them here. They looked kinda like this, and could get up to 17m/55ft long.

(Image: A mosasaur, a streamlined marine reptile with a large head, flippers, and a vertical tail fin. Image by Dimitry Bogdanov.)

Being lizards, mosasaurs have been traditionally thought to be cold-blooded - perhaps a reasonable assumption, as all living lizards are cold-blooded. However, it has been suggested various times in the literature as well as informally that mosasaurs may have been warm-blooded, owing to their assumed ecology as fast-moving pursuit predators and the fact that other marine reptiles have been demonstrated to be warm-blooded. 

In order to quantitatively test this, teeth from three species of mosasaur from the Mooreville Chalk in Alabama were collected and analysed to find the isotopic composition of oxygen. We need a control sample, though, to ensure that some geological process or change in atmospheric oxygen won’t mess up our data by adding or removing some heavy oxygen. In order to do this, the authors also tested samples from fish, turtles, and aquatic toothed birds that lived at the same time and place. That way they could place the mosasaur fossils in a reliable context. 

And the results they found are really interesting!

(Image: a graph showing δ18O values of different fossils from the Mooreville Chalk. I’ll do my best to explain what’s going on in the following paragraphs.)

Okay, so first things first. The fish and turtles tested have very similar δ18O values to each other. They both fall around the +21.2 to +22.0‰ range, or 2.12% to 2.2% heavier than “normal” water (because the “lighter” water has evapourated and left). This corresponds to a temperature of about 26-29°C (79-84°F). This is consistent with estimates of the temperature of the formation. This is what we expect from cold-blooded animals. Good! The method works!

Okay, next step. We can pretty safely assume that these birds were warm-blooded, and thus had a higher body temperature than their environment. Those tested had a δ18O value of about +18.5 to +19.5‰. That’s still heavier than normal water, but it’s less heavy than the cold-blooded animals (because the higher body temperatures led to more of the “heavy” water evapourating and leaving the body). This corresponds to body temperatures in the range of 36-39°C (97-102°F). This is right in the range of modern warm-blooded animals, and it’s another verification that the method works.

Okay, so what do the data say about mosasaurs? Well, it’s kind of a broad scatter. The δ18O values of the samples fall in the range of +19 to +21‰, which corresponds to a range 30-38.5°C (86-101°F). In other words, we’re getting body temperatures that are consistently warmer than the environment or cold-blooded animals, and in some cases are as warm as birds from the same environment!

What can we conclude from this? We can conclude that mosasaurs were probably warm-blooded, or, from the fact that some fall between the two, maybe “lukewarm-blooded” (which I wrote a bit about here). Either way, don’t think you’re safe just because it’s cold.

[persephonescat]

Birds and Other Supernatural Phenomenons

New chapter??? Already??? Yeah, don't get used to it, I have so many exams this week (and the next one too), that I think I'm gonna just straight up die. So naturally, I'm procrastinating. Yey.

(This wasn't edited nearly as much as any of the other chapters, even though I wrote at least ten different opening scenes for it. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.) And apparently, my aesthetic is writing Gotham's weather. I have no idea how that happened.

Warning for violence!

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________________

Ch. 7: Light and Darkness

Life sucks.

Sometimes, she stared into the darkest abyss and even the mere existence of it terrified her. Other times, she looked back at her life and thought, "the abyss would be pretty comfortable, after all".

She didn't know when her life turned into a cheap video-tape. The sounds were distorted, and the protagonist was horrible, but she kept watching it anyway.

***

The rain was flooding the gray streets of Gotham. The streetlights were dimmed by the thick curtain of dust and fog. Neon billboards flickered over shops, the cars sprinkled dirty water on the few pedestrians who didn't run from the weather as if it was the plague.

The rain disturbed Marinette's senses. Dick's quiet swearing was oppressed by the deafening sound of dropping water and shrieking vehicles. There were too many smells. Her vision was blurry, her red raincoat didn't protect her from getting soaking wet. She put her insensate hands in her pockets to keep them from shaking violently, but it still took all her self-control to keep herself together.

"'You okay?" Dick shouted on her right side, giving up the fight with the umbrella she gave him and settling for a small coverage over his face.

"Yes," shouted back Marinette, but her voice was lost in the downpour. 

"We're almost there!" He tucked the girl a little closer and tried to get the umbrella to protect her.

"I know," she muttered even though there was no way he could've heard her.

The buildings were closing over their heads, merging with the dark clouds. A car passed beside them, and Marinette screwed her eyes shut. It was too loud.

"Marinette?" she heard a familiar voice say. Suddenly, it was easier to breathe.

"Adrien?"

"God, are you okay? I've been looking for you." She could finally see him in his large, black raincoat, rushing towards her with an umbrella.

"Sure," she muttered, hoping her voice didn't tremble from the cold. She was grateful that he spoke in English instead of French, it would've been considerably harder for her to keep her cover otherwise.

Adrien stood next to her, holding the umbrella over her head. He only then seemed to notice the man on her side, and she wondered if he was just pretending to be normal or if he really didn't pay attention.

"Hi! Who are you?" he asked Dick kindly, but Marinette could hear the wariness in it.

"Umm..." Dick seemed to be lost in thought for a second before he answered. "Hi. My name is Dick. You are Marinette's classmate, right?"

"Yes, I am." He paused and smiled politely. "I think we should go, it's very cold out here." He was waiting for Marinette to agree, but she didn't say anything.

"Of course. I've to go too, I'm really late for work," Dick said, glancing at the Wayne Tower. "Thanks for the umbrella," he smirked one last time before shoving the dripping object into Adrien's hand and making a run for the tower. They both stared at him as he cut his way through the rain.

"Come on, let's get you to somewhere warm," said Adrien, finally turning to her. "Can I touch you?"

A few years ago, Marinette told him how uncomfortable she felt sometimes when people touched her. Since then, he always asked for her permission, especially when she was in a bad mood. She had a strong urge to roll her eyes dramatically every time he did it. It was so... Adrien of him. He always respected people's boundaries. Maybe that's why he didn't fight his father. 

The guilt was climbing up inside Marinette's throat as she remembered her investigation on Hawkmoth. Half a year ago, she started suspecting it was Gabriel Agreste, but she said nothing. Now she was almost sure and still didn't tell anyone. Not even Master Fu. She knew that if something happened to her, Tikki would tell him what he needed to know. If for some reason - Marinette didn't even want to think about that, - she couldn't, she had at least four different ways to make the guardian know.

She looked at Adrien. He seemed to be happy. His years as Chat Noir made him more confident. He was a lot like Chat now, just like how she was more and more like Ladybug. Psychologically, it was fascinating. In practice, it terrified her sometimes.

Instead of answering, she hugged Adrien's waist with one arm as they walked to the nearest diner.

***

After some getting some hot cocoa and warm food, - they both knew Marinette was not the best at eating healthily and regularly, he sat down beside her and put her freezing hands between his, warming them up. She gave him a grateful half-smile.

"Next time you decide to disappear, you could really send me a text or something. I tend to check the weather forecast, unlike some people," he said. "Why did you have a raincoat and an umbrella on you anyway?"

Marinette was starting to feel her hands again, and her mind was no longer screaming from confusion.

"I tend to come prepared, unlike some people, who constantly forget to bring a toothbrush to trips," she said mockingly.

"I mean, I don't do that constantly," he protested.

"Every. Single. Time," she told him. "I think I actually brought two spares, just in case."

"Nah, I'm good, Nino brought one for me too," he muttered, avoiding her gaze. Marinette snorted.

***

The teachers gave them the afternoon off again. The rain stopped around noon and Gotham was swimming in sunlight. The wet streets were glimmering as the light touched the asphalt, people slowly poked their heads out of their homes, a few annoyed cats were roaming around, showing off their wonderfully dry pelage.

Marinette walked slowly, admiring the sky-high buildings and silently memorizing all the shops and alleys she went by. There was a chance she was going to forget most of it by tomorrow, and once again, she cursed her brain for needing so much sleep.

St. Anthony Street was not a pretty view. Thanks to the rain, Joanne's blood was painting small, brownish-red veins on the concrete. The original red puddle was still visible, and even though it faded a lot, it was big.

Near the large, rust-colored spot, there was a smaller one. 'Must be where her hand fell next to her side,' Marinette realized. That would mean the girl entered the street from where Marinette stood, the attacker jumped at her almost immediately, and she fell backwards. The paper said the wounds were on her chest and torso, so she must've landed on her back, then the attacker stabbed her twelve times and took the murder weapon with them. Marinette could replay the scene in her mind.

Joanne must've been in a hurry because she doesn't notice someone already waiting for her. The attacker grabs her hands to keep her from escaping and knocks her back. Then they get their knife out and Joanne screams, but nobody bothers to check what's wrong. The attacker stabs her again and again. At some point, the girl is conscious enough to touch her bloody T-shirt and try applying pressure on a wound. It doesn't matter. Then her hands fall to her sides, her bloody palm leaving a mark on the asphalt, and the murderer finally stands up, looking at the body in front of their eyes. They're panting heavily. They leave with the knife, their clothes sprayed with blood.

Twelve stab-wounds would clearly state it was personal, but when it comes to hate crimes like this, it's usually pretty obvious who did it. Not many people have enemies capable of something like this.

There were multiple faults in her version of the events. 

She walked around the dark spot slowly, hundreds of ideas crossing her mind, most of them faulty and unusable. 

She rubbed her face frustratedly. If she wanted to make something out of this, she needed to sleep first.

She took off her red backpack with the black-and-white apple blossoms she made a few years prior - when she realized that the lock pick set, the handbooks, the Swiss Army Knife, the skein, scissors and needles, her not-so-secret green tea stash, the matches, her phone and the small army of power banks she always carried with her didn't fit her old purse anymore, not to mention Tikki and her cookies. 

She took out the thermostat of coffee she got on the way back with Dick and drank half of it in one gulp. Now that she was thinking about it, she might've liked coffee after all. Tikki and Kaalki both frowned at her in perfect sync inside the bag but given they were in the middle of the street, they didn't say anything.

Marinette checked the time and decided to stick around for a little more. She was wandering the block slowly, noting all the broken doors and windows on the way.

She was examining St. Anthony Street for the fourth time when she noticed something in the few threads of grass sticking out where the road and the pavement met. She went closer.

For a moment, she thought it was a wrapper or a piece of plastic, but as she took it between her gloved fingers, she realized it was a small, round wooden-bead painted ultramarine blue. 

Three days passed since the incident. Anyone could've lost a single bead since then. Actually, it might've been there for weeks, but she still slipped it into her pocket before going back to the Wayne Tower.

________________

Comments are like macarons: fun. They're fun. That's it. I'm tired. Please share your thoughts!

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@northernbluetongue @vgirl-10123 @theatreandcomicfreak @interobanginyourmom @crazylittlemunchkin @zerotosiki @worlds-tiniest-spook-pastry @my-name-is-michell @shreky-boi @coltaire @panda3506

[necropsittacus]

tag game tagged by: @circus-to-air-missile name: ren. nickname: nope, unless occasionally being called "scientist" counts (which i am very fond of tbh). that said certain people might be permitted or even outright encouraged to come up with one for me (though i obv have veto power on anything i am called). i do quite like the concept, just like..."ren" doesn't really lend itself to nicknames, esp ones i wouldn't find vaguely undignified. (also yes ren is my real human first name not an internet pseudonym) zodiac: as far as i'm concerned i'm a scorpio. height: 5'7"-5'8" ish. measurements have varied. nationality: american languages: english is the only one i'm really fluent in; two years of college russian, conversational but not fluent. did japanese long enough that i can still understand some and i really want to start learning it seriously again, but i'm out of practice, barely literate (fuck if i remember most of the few kanji i knew to start with), and have limited vocabulary. similar situation for spanish. i've done other things (finnish, french, latin, a little bit of danish back in the day...) but either didn't get nearly as far to start with or have forgotten almost everything. favourite season: fall and winter favourite flower: idk i like roses i guess? honestly a lot of things though, i'm bad at favorites but Flowers Good favourite scent: fuck if i know tbh i barely smell things nail polish remover smells nice in a toxic chemicals kind of way? or cinnamon i love cinnamon favourite fictional character: far too many; most of my si's for a while have been media so this is uhh a Long List. examples include but are not limited to starscream obv (really most of decepticon high command; i am a lovey-dovey little bastard to most people's slight consternation), turin turambar, anakin skywalker, ??most of the skeksis??, king ghidorah, sansa stark, probably still vriska on some level... coffee, tea, or hot chocolate: tea. hot chocolate good though if i'm willing to play the "will this specific chocolate item at this specific time make me vaguely ill" roulette. can't have coffee. dogs or cats: birds and reptiles lmao; fuck this dichotomy. but cats because i'm a bit scared of dogs. tbh i'm a bit scared of cats too but it's more "ah fuck i will Break This Animal and also it could hurt me i'd better be careful and give it space," where with dogs...it's more Immediate Concern About Oh God Look At Those Teeth. i don't hate them and they can be cute but i would prefer them to be a safe distance away from me. number of blankets: one at a time unless it's very cold. i have four blankets in my room but they all have slightly different homes and functions. dream trip: antarctic pelagic birding tbh; there's a lot of places i'd like to go but that's one that i think about relatively often blog established: this one probably uhh sometime around early 2015? sometime while i was in high school idk. but i remade; i've been on this hellsite since like 2013 Maybe? random fact: uhh idk is this meant to be a Fact About Me or just like a fact in general? Fact In General: penguins are (or were last i checked) thought to be more closely related to petrels and albatrosses than any other living group, which is wild because they went apeshit in like almost exactly opposite directions re the whole "flying" thing. fun fact about Me: i've fallen asleep in the vatican multiple times gender: The Void; horrible gaping wound in reality; boy but a little to the left; seeker. i tend to find Standard Gender Words that other people use to feel somewhat reductive; traditionally masculine terminology is acceptable. current time: 7:18 pm favourite musical artists: once again being able to pick favorites is not stored in the ren but i'm still on my months-long puscifer kick? uhh i think i'm legally required to say marina and the diamonds every time i get this question bc she was such a formative influence, what i've heard by garbage i've liked, i like starset. that really isn't a representative sample of anything though song stuck in my head: keep myself alive - get scared last movie i saw: the color out of space last thing i googled: thomas aquinas other blogs: edgy aesthetic sideblog i hardly ever remember exists anymore @theophagies. i've got a nsfw sideblog for a safe place to overshare about my thought processes and latest fixations around such things as needed, but i'm not giving the url to that out publicly. also i keep meaning to make a proper kin blog bc i don't really want to talk about that a ton on main. besides that, a few like vent or character-specific aesthetic sideblogs i haven't touched in years. lucky number: don't think i have one? if i have to pick a number at random for like. idk theater seats or whatnot. i tend to go for 8s or 13s, the former for embarrassing reasons, though. currently wearing: star wars t-shirt, black jeans, and octopus hat. dream job: some sort of bio thing i think? failing dark god-emperor of the world of course. maybe marine bio or genetics; i'm not sure favourite foods: general tso's tofu, cake, coffee creamer, this one place down the street's vegetarian lak sa which i had all of once but it impressed itself on my memory. in general, fried/crunchy things good, and Cake Texture good. i'm probably forgetting things tbh instruments: no. i did violin in elementary school and that's the main one i still have any sense of fondness for (obligatory piano and recorder lessons as a kid but didn't care) but would have no idea what to do with one now. also did vocal ensemble in high school; i DO miss that. favourite song: can't pick favorites. brain currently stuck on passive - a perfect circle. tag: uh. @red--thedragon @autisticsansa @outlier-roddy idk if yall have done this already but if desired. ALSO anyone else who wants to please say i tagged you!! my brain’s kind of shorting out but i love hearing things about people

[starbuck]

Mid-Atlantic Gulls in Winter!

gonna put species info and field marks under the cut so feel free to take a look if you wanna learn more about gull identification!

(starting from upper left and moving left to right)

1: Black-headed Gull (adult nonbreeding)

These guys are a European species and are becoming newly regular on the East Coast in wintertime! This particular bird is hanging out (with two of his friends) at a wastewater treatment plant in Delaware which is, thankfully for me, open to the public!

The main identification hurdle with Black-headed Gulls is that they look a lot like Bonaparte’s Gulls (8) and tend to associate with them when roosting or feeding, making differentiation difficult at times. The easiest way to know for sure is to look at the bill color - Black-headed Gulls have blood red bills while Bonaparte’s Gulls have thinner black bills. Black-headed Gulls are also slightly larger than Bonaparte’s Gulls and have more extensive black coloration on their underwings.

If you’re curious, the name ‘Black-headed Gull’ comes from their breeding plumage in which they (and Bonies as well) have fully black heads rather than just the spot they have in winter. The rest of their plumage remains largely unchanged from winter to summer. 

2: Great Black-backed Gull (adult nonbreeding)

This is the largest gull species in the world! You can tell this one is extra fierce because he is defending a cache of cheesy pretzels that someone dropped on the beach.

There’s very little that one might confuse with these certified Big Boys except for Lesser Black-backed Gulls (6) which essentially look identical to them in all cycles and plumages. As their name would suggest, however, Lesser Black-backs are smaller and, in adult plumage, are easily told from their larger counterparts by their bright yellow legs - Great Black-backs have pink legs their entire lives. 

I’ve also been told that a way to differentiate adult-plumaged birds is that Great Black-backs have slightly darker black mantles/backs than Lessers and... *throws hands up in the air* I GUESS!

3: Iceland Gull (2nd winter)

These guys are pretty easy since they are one of only two gulls on the East Coast to be known as the “white-winged gulls,” meaning that they have white primaries/wingtips regardless of age rather than black ones like every other species.

The other species of “white-winged gull” is the Glaucous Gull (which I helpfully do not have a photo of) and the main way to tell them apart is that Glaucs are really chunky while Icelands are less-so. That’s literally it. 

Icelands also tend to be less pale than Glaucs but this particular bird I photographed on my pelagic was quite pale so that’s not always a great field mark in practice. Just focus on the chonk. 

When they reach adulthood, both Iceland and Glaucous Gulls settle into the typical “white body, light gray mantle” plumage and superficially look a lot like Herring Gulls except for the color of the primaries which are still white.

4: adult nonbreeding Black-legged Kittiwake (center), 3rd winter Herring Gull (upper right), and 1st winter Lesser Black-backed Gull (bottom right)

okay one at a time here!

Kittiwake: 

I’ll hold off on going in-depth on this guy since I have two solo photos of him later in this set but they’re very cute! Look at him!

Herring Gull:

Like I said above, this guy is in 3rd winter plumage. This means that he is unusually ugly. Herring Gulls are just sort of ugly all the time regardless of plumage and they look very different from year to year until they reach adulthood. Oftentimes, I’ve seen people staring at a gull flock saying “I don’t know how to tell these apart!” when they’re really just looking at a group of differently-aged Herring Gulls.

Personally, I just consider them the generic “medium-sized gull” (since they’re the most common at the shore) and judge everything off of them. I don’t really have a lot of good ID tips for them... They look a little like Ring-billed Gulls (5) in adult plumage but they’re larger, have pale pink legs rather than yellow, and lack the prominent black bill ring that Ring-bills are named for (although they may have black or red splotches on their bills so don’t let that trip you up).

Lesser Black-backed Gull:

As I mentioned earlier, Great and Lesser Black-backed Gulls are almost impossible to tell apart, particularly in 1st winter plumage but the way I’m ID’ing this guy is by the thickness of the brown streaks on his chest and the way his head looks smaller than I would expect a Great Black-back’s head to look.

It’s a tough call though honestly, and I’d welcome a second opinion on this one.

5: Ring-billed Gull (adult nonbreeding)

The typical “parking lot gull” of the Mid-Atlantic! Sometimes spots near the beach get Laughing Gulls in the summer as well but, where I live, it’s all Ring-bills, babey! Who needs the ocean when you have concrete, amirite?

These guys are pretty distinctive. Relatively small with bright yellow legs and bill, and of course the black ring around the bill. As I said, they’re smaller than Herring Gulls (4) and they’re bigger than Laughing Gulls, Black-headed Gulls (1), and Bonaparte’s Gulls (8) - the latter two of which they associate with at that same wastewater treatment plant although I took this particular photo at the inlet!

6: Lesser Black-backed Gull (2nd winter)

I already discussed these guys vs Great Black-backs so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much!

Mostly including this one to point out that the 2nd winter plumage is much more patchy than 1st winter, with extensive white on the front and also because this photo shows the small head really well.

(Also, peep the Ring-billed Gull partially in frame there lol)

Fun fact: Lesser Black-backed Gulls used to only show up as vagrants from Europe but are now common here, particularly in winter. Maybe this is what the future looks like for Black-headed Gulls as well?

7: Black-legged Kittiwake (adult nonbreeding)

If you’ve never been far offshore, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen one of these cuties before (unless you live in Europe where they’re just all over the place for some reason. Y’all get Northern Fulmars from land too - what is wrong with your seabirds??) but they’re SO COOL! I’ve been lucky enough to see them breeding on sea cliffs on St. Paul Island, Alaska but seeing them at sea is unparalleled! The way they fly is so unique among gulls and has to be seen to be believed!

Identification-wise, they really don’t look like anything else in the Mid-Atlantic. One distinctive field mark is that their wingtips sort of look like they’ve been dipped in ink, forming almost perfect black triangles at the primaries. They’re also exceptionally small in comparison to Herring Gulls (4) and either species of Black-backed Gull (4), however, they’re only slightly smaller than Ring-billed Gulls (5) overall (but are pointier than Ring-bills if you compared them in flight).

If you go to St. Paul Island and have to tell them apart from Red-legged Kittiwakes, a good tip (other than the leg color, obviously) is that their mantles/backs are paler than those of Red-legged Kittiwakes and they’re slightly bigger.

8: Bonaparte’s Gull (adult nonbreeding)

This is an incredibly cropped photo but I didn’t want to leave the Bonies out! They’re just too cute!

They’re the smallest gull that normally occurs here (rarely we get vagrant Little Gulls which are REALLY small and make me cry because of their smallness) and, as I already compared them to Black-headed Gulls (1) in detail, I won’t do so again. The black line trailing along the edge of their primaries is pretty unique to them and, as I said before, their thin black bills are distinctive. The redness of their legs also tends to be more orangey-pink than that of Black-headed Gulls (1) but the legs look pretty dark in this particular photo so this is a good example of the fact that you should often throw individual field marks out the window and just view the bird as whole, comparing its look to those around it. 

As a small tangent based on that idea: oftentimes I’ll start to convince myself that one of the gross-looking Herring Gulls in those mixed-cycle flocks I mentioned earlier is actually something different and rare but then I stop and ask myself “is there anything about this bird’s build and structure that looks different from the Herring Gulls around it?” and, if the answer is no, then it’s just a Herring Gull that I was overthinking. Never a bad thing to step back, especially when looking at a type of bird as confusing as gulls can be!

9: Black-legged Kittiwake (adult nonbreeding)

Nothing new to say here but ain’t he cute?? He’s got a lil piece of chum in his beak!

[bunjywunjy]

DON’T FEAR THE REAPER

it’s officially the end of the week and boy howdy it’s time for a new Weird Biology article. this week’s subject is a sharp Indiana Jones tribute with a permanently adorable expression of existential dread. 

I just want to pat it on the dorsal fin and tell it everything is gonna be okay, it’s the-

DID I LEAVE THE OVEN ON

the Bigeye Thresher Shark is a mediumish shark that can grow up to 13 feet long, fully half of which is taken up by its ridiculous sickle-shaped tail. that’s like, almost 7 feet of tail alone. jesus. it’s like if when God was handing out tails to animalkind, the Thresher Shark kept sneaking back into line and no one noticed.

these sharks usually weigh in at about 350 pounds, putting them firmly in the “do not wrestle this animal for any reason” category. (most modern sharks are in this category! except for the Wobbegong. go ahead, fight a Wobbegong. it probably deserves it.)

but the Bigeye Thresher Shark does not. please be kind, he is frightened!

Bigeye Thresher Sharks are sleek, vaguely torpedo shaped, and bright metallic purple. it’s like a pool toy came to life and decided to try an existence that didn’t involve being gnawed on by toddlers.

but seriously, Bigeye Thresher Sharks are held as some of the most beautiful of all sharks! (though all sharks are beautiful on the inside.) while they’re alive, anyway. the second a Bigeye Thresher Shark expires, its bright colors fade to a dull lifeless grey. like Optimus Prime in that one movie that ruined your childhood. you know the one I’m talking about.

scientists still aren’t sure why this graying-out occurs, but theories include that it’s because these sharks are a bunch of fucking divas.

or they just don’t want people to use them for a 101 Bigeye Threshers sharkskin coat, which is understandable.

Bigeye Thresher Sharks are found in tropical and temperate waters around the world, even the Mediterranean Sea! they avoid shallow coastal waters and their throngs of tourists, sticking to the open ocean. this is important because Bigeye Threshers do a lot of deep diving, even for a shark. (or maybe they just really hate tourists.)

the Bigeye Thresher Sharks spend their nights close to the surface, swimming around dreaming little shark dreams. but when the sun rises, they dive over 1,500 feet down into the water column to hunt. I guess even sharks have a morning commute.

no coffee for sharks, though.

aside from the massive farm-equipment tail, Bigeye Thresher Sharks are noted for the gigantic anime eyeballs which gave them their name. and it’s no joke- these honkin big look-spheres can be nearly four inches across! THAT’S RIDICULOUS. 

the Bigeye Thresher Shark uses these big ol’ peepers to spot prey in the dark depths of the ocean. the squid think they can hide, but they cannot. the Bigeye Thresher Shark is an accurate and devastating hunter who can chase down fish, squid, smaller sharks, and fucking seabirds with speed and precision. 

it’s a trade off for the whole Battle Angel Alita look.

but I’ve saved the best for last! it’s time to finally disclose what that ridiculous tail is for, and why it deserves a Grim Reaper reference. well, it’s very simple- that super-long tail is basically a biological bullwhip. 

and maybe that doesn’t sound so threatening! but in this case, the Bigeye Thresher Shark cracks its tail like a whip towards a school of fish hard enough to cause a fucking underwater shockwave, which basically liquifies any small animals unlucky enough to be in the way. it completely fucking obliterates those poor fish, who never asked for this and probably have families.

it takes “shooting fish in a barrel” to a whole new level, that’s for damn sure.

after commiting mass fish homicide with its overpowered nuke of a tail, the Bigeye Thresher Shark is free to scoot around and vacuum up the dead and dying fish. success! this strategy is so effective that there are even stories of Bigeye Thresher Sharks using it against birds. no word on whether this is true or not, but I mean, it sounds like it COULD be. (and they do actually eat birds! so.)

it’s easy to see why the shark puts up with having a stupidly long and unwieldly tail; the AoE attack makes it MORE than worth it. 

it’s their up B special.

it’s because of this attack style that Bigeye Thresher Sharks are so widespread. but unfortunately, these incredible sharks actually do have a reason for making that terrified face: they’re under threat from human activity and listed as Vulnerable.

Bigeye Thresher Sharks are often caught accidentally or even on purpose by longlines, even though they pose no threat to humans. (except looking really weird, anyway.) these thresh princes of the sea need legal protections, and they need it soon. what other sea animal are we going to make Indiana Jones jokes about? sea cucumbers? come on.

THROW ME THE IDOL, I’LL MURDER A BUNCH OF FISH WITH THE WHIP.

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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee or check out my Patreon to see extra content and support Weird Biology.

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- FisheriesAquaculture, Twitter img2- Gray FishTag Research img3- Pelagic Shark Research Foundation img4- BBC img5- Defenders Of Wildlife Blog img6- Adventure Sports Network img7- Majadi Wall img8- yandex.ru