arianna @bandfairy - Tumblr Blog

shitbl0gger

hungwy

Hi... thoughts on shrimp (As animals)? If it’s too personal to say that’s ok....

not personal at all :) so they are like creatures to me

equius

Why do you even care about trans women? You're not even one of them.

bunjywunjy

So i was reading one of sy mongomery's books recently and she talkes about how wolf spiders can see the moon. Can a lot of insects, like, not see her?

I’ll tell you a secret: most arthropod eyes are incredibly shitty.

they may have a near-360-degrees of view, but most insects eyes simply aren’t on the same level as yours, and it’s because of physics!

see, each of those individual bumps on those eyes up there is a convex lens, which focuses light onto a retina to form a picture of their surroundings.

however, the power of a lens dramatically decreases the smaller it is, because small lenses capture less light to make into an image!

to these animals, the world is a brightly colored blur that extends out for a few feet around them, and ends there. so no, they CANNOT see the moon. weep for them.

to insects, humans have god-level foresight and prescience! HOW DID YOU KNOW THERE WAS FOOD OVER THERE, HUMAN. TELL ME HOW.

but some spiders are different.

see that? those eyes are completely smooth! jumping spiders in particular have developed eyes with a single massive (for a bug) lens on the outside, and a second focusing lens on the inside, giving them single-image vision much like your own.

the diagram of their eyes looks like a pair of binoculars, and their focusing power is completely nuts, enough so to make up for that underpowered lens!

so yes, some spiders CAN see the moon! take solace in this fact.

ruinsoftheempire-deactivated202

This is so cool

unashamedly-enthusiastic

phoenix-of-the-night

Everything changes while everything stays exactly the same

april

cats will be like "mreep" and every human in the vicinity will be like yes maam youre so right you know everything we love you

bunjywunjy

What animal can change their gender?

fish do, more often than you think!

many fish are capable of sex changes, though whether it’s male-to-female, female-to-male or bidirectional depends on the species.

these sex changes come in two major flavors though- changes that are induced by external factors, or changes that happen naturally at a set point in an animal’s lifecycle.

in the first group, for example, we have the clownfish!

clownfish live in family groups with one large female and multiple smaller attendant males. but if the female dies, one of the males will step in, bulk up, and transition from male to female! (so basically, Finding Nemo should have gone WAY differently)

CLOWNFISH learned TRANS YOUR GENDER

and in the other camp, we can look at the sheepshead wrasse- a large ocean fish where dominant males duel each other to control access to a large population of breeding females!

except that when a female sheepshead wrasse reaches a certain age, she goes through some major life changes- by growing a fuCKING ENORMOUS CHIN and transitioning from female to male!

SHEEPSHEAD WRASSE learned TRANS YOUR GENDER

and really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg! animals are basically doing weird sex bullshit every single second of every single day, these are just the easiest examples I could come up with.

you-better-rvn

What’s the hardest example you could come up with?

bunjywunjy

platypuses have ten sex-determining chromosomes.

badassdemonsword

my favorite kind of person are people who are only impressed by art if its like a hyper realism pencil drawing of water droplets or marilyn Monroe

psikonauti

Louis Wain (English, 1860-1939)

thecryptkeeper

tubeworqs

byjove

These are the Weerdinge Men, they were placed in a bog in modern day Drenthe in the Netherlands somewhere between 160 BC and 220 AD.

It is extremely rare to find two bog bodies intertwined in the way they are. The man on the left is laying on the man on the right’s arm, their hands are brushing. It’s impossible to tell if this was the position they were originally placed in because the force of the bog compressed their bodies so completely. They’re not well preserved as far as bog bodies go, it’s impossible to tell what the right man’s hair color would have been or to know what their faces would have looked like or how tall they would have been.

Archeology was in its infancy when they were found in 1904. The only thing that made the find notable was the pose, strangely intimate. Holding each other for all time. They were thought to be a man and a woman. They gained the nickname Mr. and Mrs. Veenstra, a play on the Dutch word for bog.

It was discovered in 2002 that they were both men. Mitochondrial DNA confirmed they were were not related.

The man on the right was disemboweled, perhaps to use his entrails in ritual divination or perhaps it was a wound he received in battle. The man on the left was too destroyed to have a clear cause of death. Why were they buried together in that pose? How did they meet their fates? If they were not biologically related, who were they to each other? Lovers? Friends? Unlucky strangers? For two millennia the man on the right has kept his arm around his companion in death. Despite the horrible pain and tragedy they endured, there is something in that which is so fundamentally human.

whitepeopletwitter

lifeinpoetry

“[after a half-hearted suicide attempt at age 13] When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all? All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess. The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly. Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says. Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy. Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do. It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin. And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.”

— Mary Karr, from Cherry