CIAMETH

Birds, animals, anthros, fandom...the random assorted interests of a zookeeper.

[yesterdaysprint]

Life Magazine, April 1910

[musicforyourplants]

[boy-matt-deactivated20181204]

*slams reblog*

[ariesaav]

Klezmer dolphins.

[willcub-deactivated20180521]

I don’t know that I’ve reblogged anything faster in my entire tumblr life.  

[onceuponamirror]

honestly they’re better than the band that played at my bat mitzvah

[fractalindigo]

I like dolphins.

I love klezmer.

But as a former band kid, this made me die laughing.

[ltwilliammowett]

The Danish training ship “Georg Stage” (1934) dresses in rainbow colour, 2021 

[dragon-in-a-fez]

not the kind of gay ship I’m used to seeing on tumblr but cool

[dubiousculturalartifact]

ship georg is an outlier but SHOULD be counted

[isvoc]

My dear champions picked another bookwyrm. Temeraire from Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon!

[sandandglass]

The Muppets s01e01

[le-sad-demiurge]

Fozzy getting hit on by lots of twinks

[cheshireinthemiddle]

Happy Pride Month

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Ten years later, this bit still slaps. They made a great pun and realized they could be nice/inclusive with it too.

[n0sebleeds]

Prey drive

[talesfromthecrypts]

Guy Pearce as Captain John Boyd in Ravenous (1999)

[infiniteoreos]

undiagnosed autistic people will be like "I don't get upset when my routine changes though!!" and it's because they've built a set of if-then loops in their head to pick from one of 6 different strict routines and they do get incredibly upset when they're unable to keep to any of the 6 scripts. I'm john normal

[thundercrackfic]

This is called a fault tree. You will always know how to act if your fault tree captures all possible scenarios. In NASA Mission Control during mission critical events like landings there are huge binders with fault tree protocols, kind of like choose your own adventure books except you’re not the one making the choices, the universe is making them for you and you’re just trying to keep up.

The engineers who develop fault trees, I am told, often imagine new ways for their precious spacecraft to die (new branches on the fault trees) either while in the shower or lying awake at 3am, because human

[toothpaste-footlocker]

[yet-another-autistic-blog]

Was just thinking about this the other day. Yeah I have a favorite seat on the bus (middle of the bus, near the back doors, slightly elevated, facing forward), but I don’t get upset if someone is already sitting there, I just pick one of my other favorite spots. Then I realized that most people probably don’t have a favorite bus seat, let alone a series of backup favorites.

[panpteryx]

[teaboot]

Why so many wolf attacks in fantasy. Where are the Boars. The immortal and humongous Boar

[alleesaur]

the productivity creatures

[xwxtchbxtchx]

[todaysbird]

GET YELLED AT

photos by carl bergstrom

[birds-in-posts]

Double-crested cormorant (Nannopterum auritum)

Great blue heron (Ardea herodias)

[the-semicolonoscopy]

It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.

[the-semicolonoscopy]

Annual reblog of Freddie and his magnificent cats.

[tumbalendar]

happy Pride Eve!

[thatdisasterauthor]

A BEAR ATE MY BEST HUMMINGBIRD FEEDER.

Rude.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Someone tell that bear he's not supposed to eat that with the skin on.

[meanderingorange]

I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks. 

I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.

This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell? 

[roach-works]

north americans don't all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:

like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.

[parkchanwoohoo]

This kid is so fucking good holy shit. I love how into it the audience is, too

[pettyartist]

Same, kid

[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.

[buraitusan]

Holy fuck this is AMAZING

[bothpalms]

Baba's domain 🐈 Collab with @ceeejus 🌟