just one beating heart @c-moan - Tumblr Blog

hashtagloveloses

put this in the MOMA

ageofgeek

catchymemes

badforeachother

I’m glad this is a universal thing. The end tho…

jedi-anakin

Kate Winslet’s costumes as Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic (1997)

Costume Design by Deborah Lynn Scott

ainawgsd

Smooth-Winter Edition

ainawgsd

This seems like a good time to reblog this….

elodieunderglass

Hat tip to @kookoskuusi with my thanks!

ripe

thedragonwoodconservancy on ig

cryptidsydario

laser gun gator boys

peniswakt-deactivated20210717

oh my god i didn’t realize this video had audio

actualaster

Okay as adorable as this looks, I’m pretty sure that’s a distress sound? A “mommy help me I’m scared come save me!” sound?

@why-animals-do-the-thing

why-animals-do-the-thing

This video is from Dragonwood Wildlife Conservancy, and they are yearling (last year’s babies) Cuban crocodiles. Good news for you, this isn’t actually a distress call! According to @kaijutegu (and her giant bookshelf full of reptile resources), the laser sounds are an affiliative social call that young Cuban crocodiles use to communicate with their parents. They normally stop making the noise at around two years old, which is approximately when they start dispersing from the family group.

See, Cuban crocodiles are a super social species - and one of the few where the fathers stick around and provide paternal care for the babies! In the wild, babies would regularly interact with both parents, including when they provide food. This call is basically the type of vocalization that the babies use to communicated with their parents.

These crocodiles are being hand-raised as part of a private-sector breeding and reintroduction program (because the parents are so protective of their offspring that if you left them the babies to raise, you’d never be able to safely get close to them), and so they’re responding to the guy in the video the same way because he’s constant known safe individual and also the provider of food. He’s not a threat - his presence is a good thing, and he’s worth interacting with because it normally means food. You can also tell from their behavior and body language that they’re not stressed: some of the crocodiles are actively climbing on him and interaction of their own volition, but the ones that aren’t don’t show any indicators of hyper-vigilance. If that were a distress call, every crocodile that heard it would be alert and on edge looking for the threat. Distress calls tend to only happen once or twice, because in the wild continuing to make noise makes a baby more vulnerable: so these crocodiles wouldn’t be continually vocalizing if they felt threatened. There’s no snapping or gaping or freezing, all of which would be behavioral indicators of distress or discomfort. (Here’s a video of a baby nile crocodile being harassed by photographers which will give you a visual reference for both freezing and gaping.)

So, hey, this is certifiably cute - and good for conservation!

schafpudel

@tyrantisterror you’ve already reblogged the video but the info about social behavior in cuban crocodies also seems like something you’d like to spread

tyrantisterror

You’re darn tootin’!

plum-soup

I love how they invented the penny farthing bicycle and it was super unstable and dangerous and then FINALLY they realized “wait. Why don’t we just make the wheels the same fucking size???” And thus the “safety bicycle” (aka a normal fucking bike) was born

plum-soup

like they really thought of THIS: