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[zooological]

Jackpot

[zooological]

Rations for various RPG Races

[[ Source. Original creator: wats6831. Additional information and images linked under each one. ]]

Universal:

Homemade artisan herb bread, home grown and dried apples and prunes, uncured beef sausage, munster cheese. Made a small bag from cheesecloth and tied it closed.

Discussion thread here.

Dwarf:

Garlic chicken livers, smoked and peppered cheese, spiced pork sausages, hard tack, dried vegetables, dried wild mushrooms.

Discussion thread here.

Elf:

Top left to right: Evereskan Honey Comb, Elven Travel Bread (Amaretto Liquer Cake with custom swirls), Lurien Spring Cheese (goat cheese with garlic, salt, spices and shallots), Delimbyr Vale Smoked Silverfin (Salmon), Honey Spiced Lichen (Kale Chips), and Silverwood Pine Nuts.

Discussion thread here.

Halfling:

From upper left: “Honeytack” Hard tack honey cakes, beef sausage, pork sausage mini links, mini whole wheat toast, cranberry cheddar cheese mini wedge, mini pickles, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, lower right is my homemade “travel cake” muesli with raisins, golden prunes, honey, eggs and cream.

Discussion thread here.

Half-Orc:

Wrapped in cheesecloth and tied in burlap package. Forest strider drumsticks, molasses sweet wheat bread “black strap”, aged Munster, hard boiled eggs, mixed wild nuts.

Discussion thread here.

Orc:

Orcs aren’t known for their great cuisine. Orcs prefer foods that are readily available (whatever can be had by raiding), and portable with little preparation, though they have a few racial delicacies. Toughs strips of lean meat, bones scavenged from recent kills, and dark coarse bread make up the bulk of common orc rations.Fire roasted rothe femur (marrow is a rare treat) [beef femur], Strips of dried meat (of unknown origin) [homemade goose jerky], foraged nuts, only edible by orcs….nut cracker tusks [brazil nuts], coarse black bread, made with whatever grains can be pillaged [black sesame bread], Pungent peppers [Habanero peppers stuffed with smoked fish and olives].

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Gnome:

Pan fried Delimbyr smelt, spiced goat cheese (paprika crusted hand pressed Fontina), Gnome shortbread (savory pistachio), glass travel jar filled with Secomber Red (wine), hard boiled quail eggs packed in rolled oats (to keep safe), dried figs from Calimshan, and Southwood smoked goat sausage (blood sausage).

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Lizardfolk:

Lizardfolk are known to be omnivores, forage for a surprising variety of foods found within the confines of their marshy environs, in this case the Lizard Marsh near Daggerford. Fresh caught boiled Delimbyr Crayfish on wild chives, coastal carrageen moss entrapping estuary brine shrimp (irish moss, dried brine shrimp), Brackish-Berries (blackberries), Blackened Dart-Frog legs (frog legs) on spring sprouts (clover sprouts), roasted bog bugs on a stick!

More images here. Discussion thread here.

Drow:

From top left: Menzoberranzan black truffle rothe cheese (Black Knight Tilsit), Donigarten Moss Snails (Escargot in shallot butter sauce), Blind cave fish caviar in mushroom caps (Lumpfish caviar), faerzress infused duck egg imported from the surface Realms (Century egg), Black velvet ear fungus (Auricularia Black Fungus Mushroom).

More images here. Discussion thread here.

[zooological]

humans are kinda cute we pass stories down generations to instill a sense of wonder in people we’ll never know and we have little bells on our houses to tell each other that we’ve arrived and we shiver when we get cold and we have an endless amount of curiosity and if the night sky is clear our first instinct is to look up at the stars and think about going on big adventures

[zooological]

gentle reminder:

you’re still very young and you’re not supposed to have your whole life figured out yet. dont stress, it’ll all work out and life will be just how you imagined.

[zooological]

[zooological]

She won’t forget that in a hurry: Elephant rubs her eye in disbelief after cataract op to restore her sight

It was a truly mammoth undertaking, but Duchess the blind elephant will finally be able to see again after receiving what was quite possibly the world’s largest ever cataract operation. The first ever elephant cataract operation in the UK: Duchess was treated for her for a cataract, in the hopes of regaining sight in one eye

Follow for more Vet-Trek: The Fauna Frontier

[zooological]

Boo!

[zooological]

The reason I’m disinterested in ethics discussions is that honestly it’s really just based in subjective feelings and emotions. People thought it was “ethical” to starve Keiko so he’d go out to sea and stop depending on his human family even though it killed him. People still think it’s ethical to take cetaceans out of the home they’ve know all their lives and dump them in a polluted ocean sea pen because it’ll make them personally feel better. 

It’s a very black and white way of thinking and sets the whole discussion up for personal attacks rather than a productive dialogue based on tangible concepts eg. “x is unethical, therefore if you support this, you’re a horrible person.” 

[zooological]

Reblog if you ARE a woman in STEM, SUPPORT women in STEM, or ARE STILL BITTER about Rosalind Franklin not getting credit for discovering the structure of DNA and the Nobel prize going to Watson and Crick instead.

[zooological]

if i were a zookeeper my intrusive thoughts would be wild

[zooological]

Given the high probability for things in Jurassic Park to go 100% haywire, would you still take a job there in order to treat a stegosaurus?

I would most definitely take a job at Jurassic Park, IF I got to make recommendations that would be actually listened to and wouldn’t be fired for swearing. The job of a veterinarian should not be to do what you are told by your employer, it should be to solve problems and advocate for the welfare of the animals in your care.

The Tyranosaus get’s enrichment, the sauropods get enrichment, the stegosaurs get enrichment, everybody gets enrichment.

Misuse of the clicker in clicker training will result in the device being inserted somewhere uncomfortable.

We are not feeding Jurassic carnivores meat from mammals which they are likely ill-suited to digest and metabolize. We know aquarium fish, which are not adapted to eating mammals, develop cardiac and fat distribution problems if their protein is supplemented with beef so let’s aim for a slightly more ‘natural’ diet of bird and reptile proteins (crocodile, anyone?)

Like, seriously, let’s not train a prehistoric reptile, brought back to the modern world with no parents to teach it about food, to see mammals as a source of food. It shouldn’t have any innate instincts to do so, so lets leave well enough alone.

In fact, let’s not give them live prey at all. I think not training the dinosaurs to hunt is probably a good idea.

Lets get somebody who knows what they’re doing to design enclosures so we can see the animals, and give them enough space to not go stir crazy.

While we’re at it, the enclosures for larger animals can have more safety features - bolt holes for humans that the biggest critters can’t fit through,  honestly we even have these in livestock handling facilities, it’s not that hard!

We are not going to introduce DNA from modern species which are potentially parthenogenic

So, so much quarantine.

Some modern reptiles would need to be kept in order to seed the local environment with suitable microflora and microfauna for the dinosaurs to pick up. You might have cloned a dinosaur, but I’d bet dollars for donuts you didn’t clone it’s intestinal flora!

Quarantine again. Nothing is getting off the island, and ideally nothing from visitors is contacting anything in the exhibit.

Ian Malcom has to walk around being opinionated about everything, and suitably paranoid.

The roof of every building gets an evacuation point for a helicopter.

The stegosaurs get extra treats.

[zooological]

sure i guess sex is okay but have you ever closed a dozen tabs after finishing an academic paper

[zooological]

There's an enormous difference between animal rights and conservation.

I stopped buying Lush products a while ago, largely because of this issue (I didn’t want to give money to charities that use fear-mongering, hand-wringing anthropomorphism to actively fight biodiversity), and their treatment of the Little Fireface Project only solidified this. Now Lush has sponsored a conference whose end goal is essentially dead elephants, whether they want to admit that or not. 

I’m sure they wouldn’t admit it, but their goals- no captive breeding, no zoo care- are hugely problematic from a conservation standpoint because- let’s face it- there’s no way to ensure elephant survival in the wild at this moment in time. Not when there’s such a global demand for ivory, and not when their habitats are so valuable to developers, timber companies, and mining companies.

This of course brings up a really salient ethical issue- if elephants can’t survive long-term in the wild, should we be “ark” breeding them, trying to preserve them in captivity for future generations? Unfortunately, that’s not the question these groups ask. Their “solution” is to just take the elephants from “bad” captivity (zoos) and put them in “good” captivity (sanctuaries).

However, these sanctuaries aren’t actually all that safe for elephants.

They’re not the African savannah minus people, where the elephants can just run free. There’s still barns. There’s still fences. There’s still tuberculosis- zoos can have that too, but zoos have better vet care and actually train the animals to participate in their own healthcare- which means that vet checks are less stressful. Sanctuaries, even the ones that do some vet training, still can’t really disinfect their grounds, and they can’t get rid of that TB bacteria- which can stick around for absolute ages. There’s still risks, and I don’t think these free the elephants people actually realize that. It’s like with cetaceans- the answer isn’t “free ‘em all,” nor is it “captivity is the ONLY SOLUTION.” Animal conservation, especially for species like elephants that have a pretty good wild population, is all about middle roads. There’s got to be a middle ground, and animal rights totally misses that. They’re so obsessed with the idea of “freedom” that they don’t actually stop to think about what freedom really means for these animals. Humans are the most successful invasive species anywhere in the world, and we’re not just going to go away because a bunch of animal rights activists think it’d be good. Even if they do successfully get elephants out of zoos, what good will that do? It won’t stop poaching, it’ll just make good science more difficult to do.

But animal rights people don’t actually care about science. They might think they care about individual animals, but they’re totally missing the point at a species/ecosystem level. Closing zoos will do absolutely nothing positive for wild animals- if anything, it’ll just make things worse. But that’s what these groups want- they still think zoos are animal jails and are willfully ignorant about the actual science of animal conservation. It’s not just about warm fuzzy feelings and the souls of animals- it’s about making logical, rational decisions to protect genetic diversity in these animal populations. Putting all those “poor abused zoo animals” in sanctuaries is not how this is done, and if you refuse to understand that despite the piles and piles of evidence, if you’re fundamentally anti-science, if you really think that feels are more important than reals… well, you’re part of the problem, then, aren’t you. It’s 2018. We’re wreaking havoc on our environment and our ecosystems, and without the careful application of scientific processes and knowledge, we are going to lose these things. We are going to lose the rainforests, we are going to lose millions of species- but hey, at least poor Dumbo got to live out his final years suffering from tuberculosis while somebody who thinks elephants actually talk to them dictated his care.

I’m gonna close with a quote from someone who was at the conference, because it’s kind of ridiculous, but I think proves a point.

“But what, at the end of these three, informative, tear filled, days, did we all come away with?

Did we put together a white board filled with bullet points and action steps on how to free every last one of the elephants around the world that are rotting away before our very eyes?

Nope, not even close.

But what we did achieve is something, in my view, even more important.

We listened to the elephants.”

We listened to the elephants. This is not science. This is not conservation. This is homeopathy at best. It’s not how you “save” elephants. How you save them is through careful captive breeding, making actual efforts to preserve wild elephant habitat with a minimum of human interference, studying their reproduction, diseases, biology, and other things that can impact reproductive success, and work with local communities doing boots-on-the-ground work to help develop sustainable infrastructure and jobs so that elephant ivory is less appealing to the communities that coexist with elephants. Taking elephants out of zoos and putting them in sanctuaries is not at all how to preserve a species.

Elephants are not people. They have extremely different needs, and to assume that a bunch of people who “heard the call of the elephants” but have… no actual scientific, medical, biological, or relevant zoological experience can somehow know how to conserve them better than people who actually study them is fucking ridiculous.

Which is why I’m still not gonna support Lush. 

[zooological]

Namu’s sketchbook p2

With the frail beginnings out of the way, let’s start uploading some pages in earnest. Most of these were done around and about 2014. 

The first page is a fun one: all live sketches done at the local marine park. They’ve got lovely bottlenose dolphins there and the most amazing underwater viewing glass, which is great if you want to sit your butt down and draw some dolphins. I’m very fond of the portraits, of the two ladies swimming together. Fatty dolphin in the upper right corner was much fatter and much cuter in real life, unfortunately.

The saddle billed storks (+ grey heron, raven and white-tailed sea-eagle) were also live studies, done at a different zoo. The other pages all came about while on holiday in Ibiza. My favourite might just be the baby sperm whale hanging at the surface, waiting for the adults to return from their deep dive. All the pilot whales are unfortunately a little misshapen lol. The moray eel was based on a little one I met on one of my morning swims! He had a huge fright when he saw me and desperately tried to look Big and Scary.

[zooological]

When scientists get too honest

> I would love to see more science posts on Tumblr. I particularly liked, “The postdoc who did all the work has since left to start a bakery.”

[zooological]

🐯 🐯 🐯

[zooological]

Great video! I love seeing motivated keepers and animals =)

I just saw someone trying to justify a keeper hitting a big cat because it’s “standard practise to stop them eating small animals.”

This is what actual standard practise is for carnivores. Teaching an emergency recall is a way to teach animals to drop everything they’re doing and run to their own containment for a HUGE reward and can be used in these exact situations.

No force required.