The A to Z of Amazing Zoology

I find the entire animal kingdom fascinating. Please, allow me to share it with you.

[la-laborista-republiko]

[myfrogcroaked]

These Lizards Are Full of Green Blood That Should Kill Them

They somehow seem to have evolved this weird trait several times.

“Animal blood comes in a rainbow of hues because of the varying chemistry of the molecules it uses to carry oxygen. Humans use hemoglobin, whose iron content imparts a crimson color to our red blood cells. Octopuses, lobsters, and horseshoe crabs use hemocyanin, which has copper instead of iron, and is blue instead of red—that’s why these creatures bleed blue. Other related molecules are responsible for the violet blood of some marine worms, and the green blood of leeches. But the green-blooded lizards use good old hemoglobin. Their red blood cells are, well, red. Their green has a stranger origin: Biliverdin.

They should be dead. Biliverdin can damage DNA, kill cells, and destroy neurons. And yet, the lizards have the highest levels of biliverdin ever seen in an animal. Their blood contains up to 20 times more of it than the highest concentration ever recorded in a human—an amount that proved to be fatal. And yet, not only are the lizards still alive, they’re not even jaundiced. How do they tolerate the chemical? Why did they evolve such high levels of biliverdin in the first place? And why, as Austin’s colleague Zachary Rodriguez has just discovered, did they do so on several occasions?”

Source: TheAtlantic

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

The day after I visited the Duke Lemur Center, the wonderful keeper who showed me around posted this great video of the Aye-ayes. 

Aye-ayes are nocturnal animals, so they’re kept on a flipped light cycle at the Center (it lets staff clean while the lights are on early in the morning, but then observe / work with the animals during the day when it’s dark in their enclosures). The girls happened to be awake before the lights went off when this video was taken. 

I wanted to share this video because it’s a great view of some of the adaptations that make Aye-ayes so special: their specialized “tapping finger” and super-sensitive ears. Here’s the great commentary from the DLC’s youtube channel:

“Because a significant percentage of an aye-aye’s diet consists of insect larvae that dwell inside dead or living trees, the animals have evolved a specialized method for locating the larvae. As they walk along a branch, the animals continuously and rapidly tap it with their middle finger. Cupping their huge ears forward, the aye-aye listens intently to the echoing sounds coming from the tapped tree. When the sound indicates they are above an insect tunnel, the animals begin to tear off enormous chunks of the outer bark with their impressive teeth, until the insect tunnel is revealed. Then the aye-aye inserts its slender and highly flexible third finger into the hole, and when the prey is located, it is hooked with the tip of the finger and removed. Here, Ardrey and her daughter Elphaba use the same process to eat eggs from their technician, Mel: they tap, chew, then use their long flexible middle fingers to dip into and remove the yolks of the eggs :) When they finish, the delicate eggshells remain fully intact, except for the small hole created by the aye-ayes’ strong front teeth!

I asked what the Aye-ayes were echo-locating to find in the egg, assuming it would be the air-sac, but it turns out an intern at the DLC studied them to find out, and they’re not looking for anything specific - they’re just tapping it because that’s what they instinctively do with food before they eat it. 

[dirtyberd]

[somagramme]

[historymeming]

Neko Atsume x Poets and philosophers through history

[varae-ver-you-are]

@thelegendofivalice

[yesterdaysprint]

Cat drawing contest, The St. Joseph Herald, Missouri, April 3, 1894

[sciencefriday]

New research find that the naked mole rat’s chances of dying do not increase over time. 

The naked mole rat has been boggling the minds of scientists for many years now. What it lacks in conventual cuteness it makes up for with some superpower-like qualities. It can survive for 18 minutes without oxygen. It’s practically immune to cancer. But perhaps it’s most notable characteristic is that the naked mole rat can live longer than any animal its size…up to 30 years or more.

And now scientists have discovered one more thing about this rodent’s abnormally long life—its chances of dying don’t increase over time. For most mammals, the rate of mortality increases along with age once the animal reaches adulthood (referred to as the Gompertz-Makeham law of mortality). For example, in humans, our risk of dying roughly doubles every year after turning 30. For naked mole rats, death is random.

“We’ve got as much chance of finding a one-year-old [mole rat] that has died as finding a 25-year-old that has died,” says Dr. Rochelle Buffenstein, Senior Principal Investigator at Calico. She joins Ira to discuss what she discovered digging into data on the naked mole rat. Listen to the interview with Buffenstein here.

Photos by Science Friday and Shutterstock.

[eartharchives]

Chitons can see you

Chitons have thousands of tiny lenses all over their shells that may work together to form a compound eye.

These familiar tidepool crawlers have an eye like no other.

Image by Jerry Kirkhart / Flickr

[pleatedjeans]

[railroadsoftware]

what if a grandma found the dog and you made her read that smh

[classicmeevs]

She would look past it long enough to return him, for the sake of the dog

[aphtoncorbin]

Poor Gran Dad isn’t getting any love from my niece! Hang in their Papa! 

[glumshoe]

crabs are here

[peachiiees]

@cup-of-tea-in-the-snow

[biaphrodite-deactivated20220808]

people are fucking dying. i’ve never been so furious

[bogleech]

Look at the eyes on the deep sea fish IPNOPS. They’re some of the most modified eyes ever known in a vertebrate. It’s basically lost “eyeballs” in favor of huge, concave lenses, perfect for gathering even the faintest light, possibly used to hunt bioluminescent invertebrates.

I’ve known about these since drawings of them when I was little but I never saw such clear photos of a living one before.

NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2012 Expedition. License: CC By Attribution

[skunkbear]

The researchers used high-speed photography and an instrument called a Rheometer to analyze frog saliva under prey-capturing conditions.­­­­­­­ The scientists think frog tongues could one day help engineers design reversible soft adhesives that could work at high speeds.

Read more about it here.

[typhlonectes]

The Unlikely Comeback of New Zealand’s Weirdest ‘Living Fossil’

Meet the tuatara, a three-eyed reptile with a 200-million-year-old lineage. 

(* Not a lizard)

by Amelia Urry

The tuatara should, by all rights, be extinct by now. The last living members of a 200-million-year-old family of reptiles called the Sphenodontia, the tuatara survived the cataclysm that wiped out the sphenodonts along with the dinosaurs and three-quarters of life on Earth, about 60 million years ago.

Today tuataras are stranded at the end of a broken branch on the evolutionary tree, an intriguing jumble of evolutionary clues and holdovers: Their skulls and sexual habits are birdlike, but they have the crude ears of a turtle and a brain like an amphibian’s. Their primitive hearts and lungs predate all of those. Strangest of all is the vestige of a “third eye” planted in the top of their skull like a scaly pimple.

Cold-blooded and slow-moving, the ancient reptiles—picture a sort of chubby, thick-tailed iguana about the length of your forearm—can only move at top speed for short bursts, after which they have to stop, winded and panting. Their hearts beat just six to eight times a minute, and they can go for years without eating. In the winter, they descend into hibernation so deep they seem dead. A newly hatched tuatara, roughly the size of a paperclip, may take more than 20 years before it’s old enough to reproduce—if isn’t eaten first. Even then, a female may only lay a clutch of eggs every few years…

(read more: Atlas Obscura)

photos: _Somaholiday, Archives New Zealand, KeresH, Michael Klajban

[biscuitsarenice]

1940s America

[luvyourselfsomeesteem-deactivat]

I rarely get to see moving pictures of black ppl from this early of an era in just everyday life. It’s so wild because my mind is telling me to associate these images with now but they’re from over 70 yrs ago

[animal-factbook]

Parasites can be cute too! These Cyamus lice cluster on the bodies of right whales. The clusters of white lice contrast with the dark skin of the whale, and help researchers identify individual whales because of the lice clusters’ unique shapes. via tea_and_biology

[rotifers]

oh my goodness look at those beady little eyes

[bogleech]

These “lice” (louse-like crustaceans) cause so little harm that they likely don’t qualify as parasitic, mostly feeding on dead skin and detritus, like the harmless mites that live on our own bodies! It’s even been proposed that whales also use them to quickly identify one another visually, or some other communicative purpose.

The lice cling to rough, raised patches of skin that serve no other purpose we can agree upon. As far as we know, all these patches do is collect lots and lots of lice, further evidence they may be outright beneficial to their host.