Actually forget every other post about “primal” feelings and actions, the most connected to my early hominid ancestors i have ever felt in my LIFE is when slowly following an increasingly panicked sheep. I believe that slowly following ungulates is the most primally human activity in existence
That moment when the sheep has run a few times and visibly realizes that you just keep slowly walking at it and are not going anywhere and you can see it thinking “oh fuck this isn’t how being chased is supposed to work” rockets me back in time several hundred thousand years
Hey quick question OP why are you bullying a sheep
To give it medication
Pursuit predation, pursuit medication, same structural foundation.
At the time this region was a river plain with a tropical climate, experiencing seasonal floods that turned the whole area into what’s known as “viesses” (a name based on the abbreviation “V.S.S.” standing for “very shallow sea”), vast shallow lake-seas that persisted for weeks or months at a time.
So this little animal has been interpreted as being semi-aquatic, swimming around and feeding on aquatic invertebrates and tiny fish and amphibians. Its skull had numerous pits around the front of its face, suggesting that it had a highly sensitive snout – probably whiskery, allowing it to hunt entirely by touch in dark murky water, but it’s also been proposed to have possibly had an electroreceptive sense similar to modern platypuses.
The long wavelengths of the light spectrum—red, yellow, and orange—can penetrate to approximately 15, 30, and 50 meters (49, 98, and 164 feet), respectively, while the short wavelengths of the light spectrum—violet, blue and green—can penetrate further, to the lower limits of the euphotic zone. Blue penetrates the deepest, which is why deep, clear ocean water and some tropical water appear to be blue most of the time. Moreover, clearer waters have fewer particles to affect the transmission of light, and scattering by the water itself controls color. Water in shallow coastal areas tends to contain a greater amount of particles that scatter or absorb light wavelengths differently, which is why sea water close to shore may appear more green or brown in color.
Checkout @scienceisdope for more science and daily facts.
Video credit: Kendall Roberg
Fun fact! This is why there are some sea creatures in the twilight zone in the ocean who use red pigment to camoflauge. Red light doesn’t reach down that far, so there isn’t any light to reflect and the animals appear black.
So what I gather from this is… pink decides to make its own damn rules.
it’s so chilling to walk through an area where the houses are surrounded by blank sterile lawns and see a big lilac bush in full bloom without a single bug on it. No bees, no butterflies, not a stir of activity.
The neighborhood association where I work hires a truck to spray the whole subdivision. It trundles up every driveway and sprays every yard with pesticides. The children excitedly tell me about “the bug man” and know which days he comes on. I know when he’s been there, because in the following days I see the beetles, butterflies, bees, and more, all struggling on the pavement, slowly dying. The children do not realize why they are there. They poke at the bugs in fascination. I hate it.
That’s. Horrible. I have no words
Like
Those insecticides are toxic to humans as well, many are proven carcinogens, and their residues stick around for years inside homes
But even if that wasn’t so, insect populations worldwide are plummeting, and the entire food chain depends on them. Most plants and animals could not exist without insects, period
Keeping the insect ecosystem in balance is important for human health and long term flourishing. Not all species are impacted equally by these toxic chemicals, and the elimination of one species can cause an explosion in another.
For example, some of the major predators of ticks are ants, spiders, and beetles
If you kill all your ants, spiders, and beetles, it’ll take a long time for them to re-establish, but ticks can return because of a feral cat walking across your grass
What’s more, scientists have found that excluding animals from an area makes the amount of ticks that can be collected in that area to explode. We’re talking 2-3 times the amount of ticks actively foraging for things to latch onto. It seems like hungrier ticks seek food sources more and bite people more. This leads to the hypothesis that global defaunation is one of the causes of the explosion in tick borne diseases in recent years
Many birds depend on insects for food, bluebirds specifically eat a ton of mosquitoes
If you wipe out most arthropods, the the small mammals and birds that eat the bugs will visit your yard much less. Guess what that means
Current projections predict that the insect declines will be heavily impactful upon bees, butterflies, and moths, but could increase the populations of…flies and cockroaches.
Not to mention that as all the natural predators of agricultural pest insects suffer, more and more pesticides will be needed to get enough crop yields and it becomes a vicious cycle of poisoning the planet and farm laborers more and more severely to avoid collapse of food systems
Your neighborhood association is creating a bleak, sick, hungry future for those kids and everyone else.
Like, think about it:
If you kill and destroy everything in your surroundings that doesn’t benefit you directly, soon the only critters that can live there are the creatures that are parasites on you directly or that compete with you for resources.
And now they don’t have any predators to keep them at bay.
reblogging this again because researching ticks changed my brain around
like I thought “Yeah re-wilding will probably increase the risk of ticks but we just need to make tick safety widespread and common knowledge”
but then I RESEARCHED it
and the research was like “Actually tick diseases have increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 40 years, and tick ranges are expanding hugely and it’s mostly unrelated to climate change so far. And we did experiments and in areas where there aren’t any animals, the number of ticks that catch onto things passing through the area explodes, it’s like 2-3 times the number of ticks. Which is like, wait, weird, I thought animals spread ticks. But we think what’s happening is that when there’s no animals, the ticks engage in more questing behavior to find food.”
and I was like “Wait, but if the decline of animals is making the ticks look for food more, wouldn’t they…wait. Oh no. OH NO. We’re the food!”
and I looked at more research
and the research said “so the main things that kill ticks seems to be spiders, ants, and beetles.”
and I was like “spiders, ants, and beetles? the things that people see as pests and try to kill with chemicals that contaminate the whole ecosystem?—OH FUCK”
Basically it’s like
Expectation: destroying nature= fewer ticks, which means less disease
Reality: destroying nature= hungrier ticks that want to suck your blood way more and less spiders ants and beetles to eat them for you
yesterday i was talking to a Guy and i asked what time it was and he git really excited and said “time for you to get aaaaa…. SUNDIAL!!” and then started talking about sundials and sounding like a fucking commercial and i pointed out that sundials have to be in one specific spot to work and he got all nervous and asked if i’ve tried a sextant. what the fuck
not to sound like Sundial Salesman Guy but … he’s lowkey right, if you’re in a place with a fair amount of sunlight. two weeks ago i was hanging out with a little kid when she wondered aloud what time it was. i looked at the sun, adjusted my body a bit, put my elbow on the ground with the arm up perpendicular, and told her “it’s about 12:45.”
then she had to get a watch to see if i was right (pretty much — it was 12:50), and then i found myself explaining cardinal directions and sundials to a preschooler
ANYWAY MY POINT IS that no, sundials don’t require a fixed place for efficiency, only enough sun to cast a shadow & awareness of your relative direction, and knowing this is great but going on about it makes you sound horny for ancient Rome
if you don’t know how to make a sundial but need a guesstimate on how much daylight is left, hold your hand out at arm’s length horizontally and count how many fingers fit between the sun and the horizon. it’s about 15 minutes a finger.
The other day, I went down the rabbit hole of “cute donkeys” and came up with my head full of things I didn’t know about mules (the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey), and why they were once so coveted as work animals.
Brace for info dump, while enjoying this lovely photo of a trio of draft mules.
The explanation is hybrid vigour, when hybrid offspring have enhanced traits compared to its parents:
Mules are stronger, hardier, healthier, have better enduranve, harder hooves, sturdier skin and can handle extreme weather better than horses or donkeys. They are also more patient, more intelligent, and easier to handle than either of their parent species. Horses may be faster, but that’s about the single thing they’re better at than a mule of the same size.
So mules, being all around nicer to work with and getting you more work for the same amount of feed, and with less hassle, were preferred for just about every job purpose.
Habby du Magnou, a Poitevin Mulassier mare, and her daughter Lady du Magnou, a rare Poitevin mule
ALT
But since horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, mules end up with 63 chromosomes, which means they are almost invariably sterile. That’s because biology gets very confused when trying to split an uneven number of chromosomes neatly in half to create germ cells. There are a few documented exceptions of fertile mule mares (never stallions), but they are very, very rare. So you have to keep crossbreeding the two parent species to produce them, usually by breeding a donkey sire (jack) to a horse dam (mare). This is because it’s easier for a 32 chromosome egg to incorporate a 31 chromosome sperm into a viable zygote (fertilised egg) than vice versa.
Because of this, there was (and still is) in France a breed of absolutely massive draft horses, the Poitevin Mulassier, and a breed of big-ass donkeys (pun intended, but honestly, it’s arguably the largest donkey in the world, and it’s shaggy like Highland cattle), the Baudet du Pitou, two breeds whose main purpose was to breed the enormous and super-strong Poitevin mule.
The Poitevin mule
This absolute unit was the must-have work-animal for all kinds of farm and industrial work for centuries, and a significant French export, until mechanisation made these magnificent creatures obsolete.
With no demand for the Poitevin mule , its parent breeds dwindled, almost to the brink of extinction. Determined conservation efforts during the last few decades are slowly bringing their numbers back up, but they’re very far from their heyday, when some 20,000 Poitevin mules were born annually.
ThePoitevin Mulassier
Both the parent breeds are still endangered, which means most of the current effort is directed into bringing up the numbers of Poitevin horses and Pitou donkeys. This means breeding horses to horses and donkeys to donkeys, with very few breeding opportunities allowed to produce the Poitevin mule. Only about 20 of those are born each year.
roxas in Twilight Town tryna live life as a coffee barista or some other part-time job, but Nobodies randomly slink in the windows and a customer screams and points at it, and Roxas just sighs behind the counter before he summons a Keyblade and starts to climb over the counter
ALT
