I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.
(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)
DM ME FOR BUG TALES
I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.
(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)
I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/
That study has a great diagram:
Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones
It’s a good article that showcases the way AAA games are basically hollow. They wear a lot of art, incredibly elaborate, expensive, art, but none of it comes together to make the experience it promises. Everything is built in separate pieces and stuck together later, and its boring gameplay that shows no interest in being art of its own is the glue. I remember Yahtzee did a video about the first Destiny that made this same point, about how the environmental art in a few areas was fascinating and clearly full of effort, but the gameplay was a slog that lacked the same ambition.
The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it’s heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn’t have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.
Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.
Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study
Sometimes ants can’t smell ants either and you get supercolonies
Aussie magpies are ridiculously smart, love them as an example of convergent evolution since they are not corvids but rather songbirds that have evolved to be more crow-like to fill a similar niche to corvids
Studio Ghibli vibes
love me some land crustaceans
One common test is the famous “mirror test” where an animal is given some problem that can only be solved by using its own reflection in a mirror for reference, such as a study involving an Australian ant. They put a blue dot made of felt (I think) on the ant’s head behind the antennae, and watched the ant clean itself once it saw that it’s reflection had a weird blue thing on its head. But I don’t know if there are other tests for “self awareness”
Thankfully I crawled through with a passing grade, it’s all behind me
But the benzene rings, they still haunt my nightmares
So ashamed of how shit I was at organic chemistry
My brain just could not complete those fucking benzene rings why am I so INCOMPETENT WHY
That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first
Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time
Hoooooly shit I forgot about the bedbug meltdown
HE GOOGLED “JEWS AS BEDBUGS” what a classic
Yeah I suppose the OP says “opinion” but this here fact has put me in the situation in the picture more than once
Bugs are not just bugs
Bugs are a subcategory of insects and you are wrong almost every time you call any old insect a bug
No need to go all the way to beatnik wandering artist. I feel like the creative urge can strike any person at any time, and the problem with this is that as things are currently organized, that spark will be smothered. Part of demonstrating to people why they should want things to change is appealing to those who have felt that happen to them. I don’t think a person ever forgets the pain of it, and it can happen to anyone.
Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes
Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.