Cute and Small and Ready to Brawl

Aqua ☆ She/They ☆ Polyamorous

[asharixx]

I painted this a year ago. It’s still one of my favourite paintings I’ve done of Astarion, although I can see many things I can change now. Reference image taken from F R S on TikTok.

[pnglove]

[ilovetodrinkwater]

Simon and gar phone call

[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.

[cherryxe]

My piece for @poketcg-art 's Hoenn card redraw collab! I wanted to do a pokemon I've never drawn before. I've always liked that Lunatone's cool and kind of eerie. Original card art by Hajime Kusajima under the cut!

[croaksac]

HUGE developments in the big silly baby wearing fluffy pajamas fandom:

Oregon Zoo 05/30/26: This flouf is one of 15 healthy California condor chicks to hatch at our conservation center this season. A new record! #Condorable #KeepCalmAndCarrion

[pitviperofdoom]

I try not to fall into the "I never liked their work anyway" ditch when an artist/creator reveals themself to be a terrible person

BUT

a feeling I do have and will stand by is "While I enjoyed their work overall I did have some gripes that I overlooked out of affection and whimsy, but now that my loyalty is gone and my affection tainted there is nothing holding me back from enumerating my many grievances, to which the revelations of the creator's shittiness may or may not provide a new and infuriating context."

[beatrice-otter]

#such a good summation of this actually#because yeah there’s usually things that were always present#but which were easy to overlook or give the benefit of the doubt#that suddenly become relevant after a revelation about the creator#and it’s really not the same thing as the self-defensive “’I never liked it anyway’

tags via chimaerakitten

[japaneseaesthetics]

Artist: Komori Soseki Title: Moorhens Date: 1929 Medium: Color woodblock print Credit Line: Bruce Goff Archive, gift of Shin'enkan, Inc.

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[depsidase]

[haunted-hideaway]

I’m glad that OP:

1) Figured this out.

2) Shared so others can learn from their mistake.

[bsaka7]

excerpts from erin in the morning's article on the ioc's ban on transgender women and sex testing policy

[cosmonova]

Solrock for @poketcg-art's Hoenn redraw collab! I've always been a fan of the space rock duo, in my heart Minior completes them as a trio 💖

Original is Solrock (Primal Clash 83) by Midori Harada:

[beardedmrbean]

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

This is what having auditory processing issues is like.

[thegorgonist]

Secret Sea Cave

Missed Mermay 2026 but just in time for Pride! A mermaid and a pirate queen meeting for a secret tryst!

Prints in my shop!

[quillusquillus]

puts u in the rock pool

Taken in Brittany, France (north-eastern Atlantic). Species I think I can identify:

Plants:

Sea lettuce Ulva lactua

Some other kind of Ulva but a long stringy kind

Coralline alga (branching type) Ellisolandia sp. (probably elongata)

Coralline alga (encrusting type) Phymatolithon sp.

Irish moss Chondrus crispus

Sea belt Dilsea carnosa (or possibly young dulse Palmaria palmata?)

Sargassum sp. maybe? idk what the golden stuff is but it's pretty

Anemones:

Snakelocks anemone Anemonia viridis

Dahlia anemone Urticina felina

Daisy anemone Cereus pedunculatus too maybe?

Other critters:

Crumb-of-bread sponge (several colours) Hymeniacidon perlevis

Grey topshell Gibbula cinerea

Rock snail Stramonita sp. (probably haemastoma)

I don't see one but there has to be a mussel somewhere we were literally walking over giant mussel beds to get out to the low tide rock pools, there's probably an oyster somewhere too

The pale fluffy stuff looks like it might be hydrozoan colonies??

I very much welcome any corrections or additions to this list!

[stickyfrogs]

Today it is Beverley’s turn to show off her Marvellous Hole! It is Right Next To The Rock (prime location) and it is Full Of Beverley!

[stickyfrogs]

There Is A Treatie In The Plant! (By Betty and Angus!)

[thegorgonist]

MINNOW PIN! TINY SILVER FISHIE! I'm in love with how these turned out. I want to wear like 10 on a jacket and have a school of fish with me wherever I go. Hard to photograph but they look amazing in person! Sometimes a simple design really stands out~~~~ In my shop!