A Beautiful Disaster

Lauren | 31 | United States | Still figuring it out | "The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea." -Isak Dinesen

[cottageaesthetic]

[themooninthestars]

[unusual-suspects]

x

[midnightinshadow]

[cipheramnesia]

I don't know what the specific terms are, but there's like one group of economists who are math nerds at heart, and they go "whoa, that's weird, I wonder why," and five years later publish a five hundred page thesis that's dense as a brick and says, "yeah man this is fucking unsustainable and is only going to get worse, however it looks like if we weren't putting 99.99% of all resources on earth into sustaining the lives of six people, we'd probably do okay," and no one reads it.

But there's some other group, and when they talk about economics they'll have a great, engaging tone with easy to follow graphs based on easy to locate data, with catchy titles and everything they write is like "not only is the economy getting better all the time, but it's the best it's ever been, and everyone is doing tremendously well, our system has never failed and never will, and looking at these figures we actually need to give even more resources to those six guys."

I think the second group should be put into a burlap sack and drowned.

[astraldemise]

looks at you

[astraldemise]

looks at you

[syn4k]

@bettsplendens i'd just like you to know that this is my favorite comment on this post and i'd like it to be memorialized

[animentality]

[arrowandaxe]

[bee-in-your-binnet]

Coyotes trying their damndest to get domesticated

[gallusrostromegalus]

Thoughts, in approximate order:

You know, given how C. lupus, C. lupus familiaris, and C. latrans can all create perfectly viable hybrids, and that the proto-dogs that domestic dogs descended from much more resembled coyotes than wolves, it's not really a surprise that some yotes are experimenting with domestication.

Goddamn that lady must be fucking shredded to be able to chase down a coyote through a swamp.

"Don't let wild animals into your house, you are not going to make Dogs 2.0, you're going to get injured and the animal killed." is probably obvious enough advice that I don't need to put it in the tags as a reminder.

...I know more than four people on this site that have poisoned themselves trying out 'foraging guides' they found online, two people IRL who tried to keep raccoons at pets, and have a family member who got hospitalized for Cat Scratch Fever after grabbing a feral cat bare-handed. This is apparently, not obvious enough.

Do Not Attempt To Domesticate Coyotes

[collected-sports-bra]

Genuine question:

Could coyotes be domesticated, sometime down the line? I know there are animals like bears that could never be, but coyotes seem close enough to dogs for it to work in many many many many generations.

Or is there something about coyotes that would make that impossible.

[gallusrostromegalus]

The Hare Indian Dog is a now-extinct canine that is strongly suspected to have been a domesticated coyote or coyote-dog hybrid that was bred by the Sahtu people of far northern Canada. The breed went into decline with the displacement and genocide of the Sahtu and other indigenous people of the area, and they could not keep as many of their dogs in the reservations, so the breed eventually comingled back into Newfoundland and Canadian Inuit Dogs. We don't have any preserved specimens to do any genetic testing on, so far as I know.

Could Coyotes be domesticated again? Yes and No.

Yes: They're REALLY closely related and already frequently interbreed with domestic dogs and are in a similar ecological position to the proto-dogs: comfortable living in and around human settlements, especially garbage dumps. Biologically, it's a VERY short hop (possibly as few as 2 or 3 mutations) to domestication for them.

No: The actual practicality of domesticating coyotes is negligible. Humans domesticated dogs in the first place because partially because we needed help with hunting, but probably mostly because we had fuck-all else to do for fun back then. In the modern age of readily available livestock and needing to monetize EVERYTHING or suffer for it, there isn't really much need or interest in domesticating coyotes. It'd take a large canine farming facility, similar to the fox farms of the early 1900's, multiple generations of careful genetic testing and manipulation, and would be goddamn impossible to zone or get insurance for.

The re-domestication of Cheetahs has a slightly better shot because there is a genuine need for LOTS of them as an ecological keystone species and there's decent odds of finding some rich idiots to back that project so they can have The Coolest Pet Cat.

If for some reason there became a widespread need for hunting dogs again, like say, the total collapse of society ala Cinematic Zombie Apocalypse, people would probably stick to domestic dogs, but there would be a lot of cross-breeding with coyotes FAST, especially in the USA Southwest. It's something I'd love to see a post-apocalyptic fiction author explore. That and what happens when various zoo animals eventually break out/are broken out of their enclosures and start populating new habitats. Elephants would be worth their weight in gold in a society with no more functioning bulldozers.

[perriaeyjeve]

[elbiotipo]

More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"

[paperdragonsong]

I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.

[tiredtransgal]

i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!

[silvergryphonart]

I’m in the Queensland outback. We had late rain so the winter wildflowers are here

[pnglove]

Mate, you’ve got a chubby lizard on your dashboard

[markscherz]

Graced by Geckolepis typica from Madagascar. I love that they’re quite round creatures and then they have these dainty little toes. Also, their scales are full bone and both scale and skin come off when they get grabbed, which is…unpleasant. Consequently, catching these geckos for research without damaging them requires special techniques. 19th century researchers used bundles of cotton wool, but I imagine this wasn’t very effective, because cotton still has a lot of friction and the friction would pull the skin and scales off. In my (quite extensive) experience, the best technique is to carefully and quickly flick the geckos from their tree trunk or branch into an open dry plastic bag using a finger or stick.

[mrskayathefrog]

'scuse me, Mr @markscherz, does it harm the gecko for the scales to come off?

like, of course it harms them but... can they grow back? like how some lizards can drop their tails and eventually the tails grow back

[markscherz]

Not only do they grow back, but they come back so well that we cannot even tell where they have ripped off before. This is very weird, because when a lizard loses its tail, it is very obvious where it has been lost and regrown. Not so these chaps. They seek out a humid place to hide, and within a few weeks, skin and scales have started to regrow. The fact that they can do this so well is the reason a team has just sequenced their genome. I believe it is hoped that the skin regeneration tech they have built into their cells could eventually be harnessed for human skin grafts.

[geekysteven]

A common theme in science fiction is that if you're in space, don't trust a corporation. And Earth is in space

[midnightinshadow]

[starofhisheart]

Happy pride to those 5 seconds where Charlie Swan thought Jacob was coming out to him in the most insane way possible

[midnightinshadow]

[gogumagirl]

[triangleguy]

by fomajc on instagram. im losing my shit over this

[themboots]

[commander-ledi]

one detail i think is important to point out: if you look at the video frame by frame, you will see that his pants come off

[creative-anchorage]

[desert-palm]

[captain-acab]

Catch me being a modern-day cyberpirate screaming up alongside you on the 405 in my mad max car with half a bitcoin farm's worth of RAM in the backseat as I hack your Bitchless Towyota™ device and steal the boat you're towing right off the back bumper of the tesla your dad bought you

As i roar into the sunset you have to swerve* to avoid the small flotilla of hacked Towyota devices trailing behind me

(*in fact you do not swerve because you're on hands-free driving to go along with your hitch-free towing so you can only watch helplessly as your tesla mistakes your stolen booty for a small child and accelerates crashing into it and killing you instantly)