Why Sand, Though?

Trey (he/him + a whole bunch of letters) This was once a Sherlock blog.

[heyitsmeisa-blog]

[americana-plus]

jamr0ll:

This never stops being hilarious

[thelibrarina]

Do you love the color of the–

HONK

[gremlininho]

Oh to be a vulture living my silly vulture life

[pinkpiggy93]

The Angel and the Demon among us - water color, pencil and ink pen

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[thenightling]

[outofcontextdiscord]

[important-animal-images]

[cyberratz]

me when i find out something will cost a pretty penny but i only have gross and ugly pennies left

[pangur-and-grim]

a charming snile from my nap compatriot

[valiantstarlights]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[keyasaurus]

Aziraphale deciding on the color for the bookshop walls

[squeakitties]

[necromosss]

As the person who got their R keyboard broken and the world mocked me for being forced to use the uwu language as replacement

My condolences

[commodore-64]

put that back

[the-davest-of-uncles]

National Lampoon, October 1985

[midnightssea]

it’s amazing how women are able to navigate crowded rooms without ever touching a palm to a man’s lower back

[quendergeer]

you'd think occasionally men would need to touch other men like this to manoeuvre them out of the way but it never happens

[gentlyepigrams]

There's a post going around Tumblr about how if you're post-menopausal and have bleeding, you should get it checked by your doctor. I brought some minor bleeding I'd had up in a doctor visit earlier this year, prompted by that post, and this week, after a biopsy, I found out I have cancer. It's early stage and the survival odds at 5 years are 99%. I have an oncologist appointment and we may have caught it early enough that surgery alone will be sufficient treatment (no radiation/chemo).

So that post may have saved my life and it may have made my treatment a lot easier too.

If you get into menopause and then start bleeding again, really, get your reproductive innards checked out. The life you save may be your own.

[diaryofandnwoman]

A fish swimming in the Great Lakes today may have been alive before many colonial settlements existed in the region.

A new scientific study suggests lake sturgeon may live far longer than previously believed. Using 44 years of tagging and recapture data from five Great Lakes populations, researchers estimated that male lake sturgeon may live 90 to 279 years, while females could potentially reach 99 to 427 years.

For many years, scientists estimated sturgeon age by counting growth rings in fin spines, similar to tree rings. Researchers now say that method becomes less reliable as lake sturgeon age because their growth slows and the rings become increasingly difficult to distinguish. By tracking individual fish over decades, the study offers a new way to understand how long these ancient fish may live.

The findings also align with knowledge long shared by some Indigenous communities, whose oral traditions have described lake sturgeon as exceptionally long-lived beings. In many Great Lakes cultures, sturgeon hold deep importance as part of foodways, seasonal knowledge, and relationships with waterways.

Lake sturgeon were once heavily harvested and treated as nuisance fish in the late 1800s, contributing to major population declines. According to Michigan DNR reporting, less than 1% of historic Great Lakes lake sturgeon numbers remain. Because they mature slowly and reproduce over many decades, recovery takes time across generations.

The study highlights the value of long-term monitoring and collaboration among Tribal Nations, fisheries researchers, universities, and conservation agencies. Protecting healthy rivers, spawning habitat, and connected waterways remains important for the future of this species.

Sources: WWMT, Great Lakes Commission, WXYZ 7 News

[blue-dissolve]

Brother Belphegor (@pangur-and-grim) and his bald spot tonsure

🦋 | ☕ | 🔴

[laurelwen]

Older Alex and Nigel: Domestic Bliss