It's the Herbivores You Have To Worry About

Current Wildlife Biology student and 4-year zoo volunteer with a deep love for all things nature and conservation. Ask me about domestics and wildlife of all kinds (I know birds, reptiles, invertebrates and mammals best but will try with others!) as well as plants, nature, anything you want! This is a side blog, my main is @dawnsiren

[fear-the-hippo]

Welcome!

Hi, I’m a wildlife biology major with 4 years of experience volunteering at an AZA-certified zoo, a relatively knowledgeable pet owner, and have special interests focused on botany, foraging, conservation, animal behavior, animal care, and zoology.

Feel free to ask me questions! I am more than happy to discuss:

-Answer questions about pet care/animal treatment

-Discuss animal behaviors

-Help with animal phobias

-Interactions with wildlife

-Invasive species

-Edible plants

-Fantasy/paleo animal biology and behaviors (I’m a writer, I love brainstorming this stuff)

-Zoos/captivity (keep it civil, anon hate will be ignored)

-Species identification

-And more!

[fear-the-hippo]

Shoutout to the magpie on my campus that made Direct Eye Contact with me before diving at my head and flying off. I am unclear if this was coincidental or an act of violence, but you have my respect. But also my judgement, because you and your partner are building your nest in a tapering juniper bush along a fairly major thoroughfare right next to the sidewalk at a reasonably accessible height. Furthermore, the integrity of said structure is extremely questionable. It’s hanging halfway out the side of the bush in the skinniest least sturdy part of it, and right now it’s only half-built. I am not confident in this location’s ability to support a completed nest AND a bunch of babies.

[fear-the-hippo]

I need more wildlife friends lmao. Like my mom’s great she’ll hike with me and doesn’t care if I randomly stop to admire plants and bugs but there is a difference between ‘let’s leisurely wander down this trail and see what we find along it’ and what I want to do, which is better defined as ‘flip rocks and logs’ or ‘fuck off into the trees never to be seen again’

[fear-the-hippo]

Wildlife Biology is fun because I get to say things like “I have an interview with the moth man” completely straight-faced and it sounds like I’m applying to work for a cryptid.

[animentality]

[official-nature-posts]

Yes, desert can be biodiverse carbon sinks. No, we don’t want areas that weren’t desert before become desert due to bad land management and climate change. No, taking the water resources that are in desert regions and spilling them onto golf courses on the surface where they evaporate is bad. Yes, we can help degraded dryland ecosystems and areas that have become desertified recover by increasing biomass and increasing permeation of water, using systems such as permaculture and rewilding.

[fear-the-hippo]

Re: ‘Some forests wouldn’t exist without deserts’

This is far more true than you might think, and the greatest example of this is the relationship between the Sahara Desert and the Amazon Rainforest.

You see, the Sahara is the largest (natural) source of aerosolized minerals, in the form of wind-blown dust, on the planet. And this dust is critical for the vitality of oceans and forests alike. It drops iron into the ocean, which is essential for phytoplankton’s ability to perform photosynthesis. Phytoplankton, which are responsible for 40% of global carbon sequestration.

But back to the Amazon. The Amazon basin is poor in phosphorus, an essential nutrient for plant growth. The Amazon basin is also widely considered the most biodiverse location on Earth, and is covered in dense rainforest. How?

The Sahara. The dust particles from the desert are blown all the way across the ocean and deposited in the Amazon basin, where it serves as the main source of phosphorus for the region. It provides critical nutrients to an otherwise limited ecosystem, and keeps the forest responsible for 20% of Earth’s oxygen healthy.

The two ecosystems are intrinsically tied together.

[bunjywunjy]

Me in australia: omg doggie! C'mere boy! *whistles and pats lap*

The wild dingo i mistook for a doggie:

if it makes you feel any better, people across the entire continent of North America regularly do this with coyotes.

[fear-the-hippo]

I’ve also heard of a good number of people going ‘kitty!’ And trying to pet bobcats, which tbf…

Your average housecat is 6-12lbs and the average bobcat is 18-35lbs, so ‘large brown tabby’ vs ‘small/young bobcat’ is an understandable mixup, especially

A) in the dark

B) curled up

And/or

C) in a place you generally would not expect a bobcat to be (I.e near human habitation)

[useless-zoofacts]

6 zoo myths that arent true

[cephalopodvictorious]

Most behaviors that you see keepers demonstrate at the zoo or aquarium are natural behaviors that the animals do in the wild. When the animals do them, the keepers give them a treat and pair it with a gesture or a word, so that they associate them, and eventually the word or gesture is enough to elicit the behavior because the animal knows that there’s a reward. But here’s the thing: most of those behaviors are encouraged because they help veterinarians and keepers do health checks.

Yeah, its cute when they nose boop the stick, but also keepers need to check their vision and depth perception and mobility. Sea lions are so cute when they wave! But vets and keepers need to check under those flippers to make sure that they’re healthy and that they don’t have any restrictions on their motion or cuts on their skin. Why do they ask animals to jump? Again, to make sure that they’re healthy, and also because its fun and animals LOVE to move around and jump and have fun, its mentally stimulating. 

[coffeeandufos]

This is the most important thing I will ever reblog and anyone who is still ignorant enough to think zoos are awful can fuck off my blog. Zoos are necessary. If you think otherwise please unfollow me because I don’t want you here.

[lovedrugsandfanfic]

This is super important for people to see. I have worked at a zoo and I can not tell you how many times I’ve had to defend the zoo for the good they do. People need to learn that zoos are actually helping save endangered species.

[kaijutegu]

It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)

Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.

[spacelazarwolf]

[kaijutegu]

Happy birthday to the lizard who changed it all.

[kaijutegu]

Here’s another baby picture of Kraken! This is her with Dr. Geoffery Birchard, the George Mason professor who supervised her hatching:

She was five weeks old in this picture, which ran in the GMU student paper.

[herpsandbirds]

All of my friends that work at wildlife rehab centers have had to untangle animals from this stuff, or had animals brought in that died in it. This is especially nasty for small owl species.

[great-and-small]

Really bothers me what the climate crisis is doing to albatross marriage

[great-and-small]

Basically, the “divorce” rate of this albatross species (which typically mate for life) has nearly doubled in recent years and scientists suspect that climate change may play a big role in this phenomenon.

As is almost always the case with climate change, the negative effect is largely multifactorial. In regard to the albatrosses climbing breakup rate it’s theorized in part like this; with warming waters, decreased nutrients in the water column have caused a decline in the fish and squid that albatrosses eat. The more time they spend looking for food delays the albatross breeding window, and results in less success in hatching and raising chicks. Losing a chick is a major cause of breakup for these birds, hence the climbing divorce rate as fewer babies survive to adulthood. Even couples that are able to raise a chick together may still split up, potentially due to the high stress hormones caused by pressure to find food.

The problem isn’t exactly the albatross divorce rate itself, more that this odd little data point could signal the beginning of a collapsing food web for the Black-browed albatross and other species in their ecosystem :(

Source

[bogleech]

I doubt this is even applicable to anyone here but it is a trend with YouTube and TikTok nature people so I gotta say, unless you know for certain that it's an introduced species or some other abnormal circumstance please don't do "parasite removals" on wild animals. And even if the parasites are an introduced species or it's an unusual extreme infestation you are likely not a veterinarian and you're liable to hurt the host animal a lot more than the parasites, most species of which evolved to not shorten the host lifespan or cause it any pain.

Not to mention, if a cute little bird or crab deserves to exist then the bird lice and the crab leeches and whatnot do too, they're all animals and they've been existing together since your granddad was a worm eating sludge in the Cambrian explosion

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Not pro-cap or anti-cap: I’m pro-animal.

After the Kalia post, it’s understandable this blog is getting questions about if I’m pro- or anti-cap. The tendency seems to be to assume that I’m pro- cetacean captivity because I won’t actively condemn SeaWorld, won’t stand for the accusations against trainers, and because I hold that cetaceans can exhibit normal behaviors in captive environments. I don’t ascribe myself as agreeing with either ideology - as most long-time readers of the blog know by now I prioritize what is most important for the animals involved, and neither side of the pro-/anti- captivity debate does that. I am pro-animal, and that is what is truly important and where my ethos about husbandry, research and education comes from. 

When you hear about SeaWorld or other institutions that house captive cetaceans (and for the moment, we’ll just focus on them), you only hear two things right now; you either hear that the parks are horrible and awful and inhumane and animal abuse and that the whales are crazy and suffering, or you hear a story about a romanticized paradise where whales bond lovingly with humans in a perfectly Disney way and have every need fulfilled perfectly. Neither of these viewpoints are true. 

More importantly, neither of those viewpoints are useful. What do I want to see, as a pro-animal person? I want everybody to stop yelling, shut up, sit down, and I want actual, unbiased research. I want studies of captive whale time budgets, enrichment usage, and stereotypy behaviors. I want time- and technology-intensive studies of wild whale populations so we can have real data on the true behavioral needs of their captive peers. I want a cost-benefit analysis of possible improvements to habitats compared with their benefits to the most deficient areas of behavioral repertoires. I want studies of actual cetacean well-being and mental health, which means finding an equally scientific metric for establishing a baseline for comparison with wild populations. 

I want fucking science. I want as much research and study and collaboration across disciplines and viewpoints so we can figure out what the goddamn whales actually need and what they don’t. And you know what? When we keep fighting ourselves and mis-representing data and twisting people’s words, we don’t make that happen. SeaWorld has had to completely stop communicating about their internal operations due to attacks from the animal rights movements. They’ve been doing research as required by the AZA for decades, but now that information is highly guarded because nobody knows who they can trust. There’s no way they can admit any failing they’re aware of, even if the intent is to figure out how to do better because the news cycles are going to pull it out of proportion the moment they’re forthright about it and turn it into more hate rather than recognizing it for the progress it indicates. That. Is. Stupid. And. Ineffective. 

The two sides of the captivity debate are putting human catharsis before the actual welfare of the animals they purport to be advocating for. So for fuck’s sake, folk, if you’re really pro-animal and not pro-ego, listen to the people who know what they’re talking about and support collaboration instead of infighting. 

I’m pro-animal, are you?

[bogleech]

Please stop being frothing weirdos about invasive species. I'm begging you. If someone posts an invasive species the correct thing to say is the same thing you would say about any animal, but perhaps mention that they're non-native, and provide a link to more information. Instead you get people saying "EEEEK AAAHHHHHH NOOOOO IT'S A FOREIGN EVIL DEMON MONSTER KILL IT WITH FIRE KILL IT AHHHHHH THE USDA SAID ITS BAD SO YOU MUST OBLITERATE IT OMG OMG WAHHHHHHHHHHH" and honestly that's kind of repulsive, all that says to me is that deep down you're excited by the "official go-ahead" to treat a living organism like a monster. I don't care how bad it is for the environment, which isn't something it understands anyway. You are capable of talking about it, and yes, even destroying certain invasives with at least a modicum of dignity

[calware]

i implore you all to watch this video that my mom took and sent me

[calware]

YES EXACTLY!!! environmental storytelling

[fear-the-hippo]

ooo! Cope’s Gray tree frog! Love these little guys one of them accosted me as a child they’re the best

[byjove]

One thing that pisses me off is people seeing fish in aquariums (the establishments, not home aquariums) and being like “It’s so sad because the ocean is so big and the tank is so small and they’ll never know freedom blah blah blah-“ I’m not talking about sharks and marine mammals here but the majority of fish are not at all bothered by being in an aquarium instead of the open ocean. Like, I personally would love to be a little clown fish in one of those big reef tanks. Fed regularly. Whole team of people monitoring my health and well-being. No predators. Medicated if I show signs of illness. Aquarium fish have cushy gigs in comparison to their wild companions.

[byjove]

I saw someone say this about a blue lobster that was wild caught and brought to an aquarium. Like dude. It’s a lobster. They’re solitary sedentary creatures. They live in little crevices and they don’t move from them often. They abhor other creatures. Also, this lobster is distinctly bad at being a lobster because it is bright neon blue. I don’t think he’s yearning for the open sea. He’s probably yearning for his next mussel. Which is, coincidentally, the same thing he’d be doing if he wasn’t in an aquarium.

[queerscout]

Once when I worked at an aquarium in the Pacific North West a visitor stopped me to talk about how sad she was to see all these animals in tanks. (This is surprisingly common from visitors.) She mentioned the sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) in particular. They were her favorite, and she used to see them all the time while diving locally and suddenly there were none, but we had them and that just didn't seem right.

We ended up having a lengthy conversation about how a disease, sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS), decimated the wild populations of that species and many sea stars a few years prior and how that aquarium was actually one of the few in the country exhibiting Pycnopodia that didn't lose their entire population to the disease. We talked about some of the research that was happening to help protect them and she started to feel a little better. She wanted to feel like it was okay for her to visit the aquarium and that she wasn't just staring at caged animals.

Pycnopodia are now listed as critically endangered. They are a keystone species in their environment and SSWS is estimated to have killed 90% of the wild population. Without them, the shores of the entire west coast have changed. Now, ten years later, that same aquarium was the first to establish a successful treatment for the disease. Before that, most aquariums had the protocol to remove symptomatic animal and generally had to euthanize them because nothing could be done. Within a matter of days, they were completely melted. Now, there is a treatment. It's not a cure, but there's hope that something can be done. That same aquarium is also part of efforts to work towards reintroducing Pycnopodia to the wild to help restore the ecosystems.

People have started to understand that zoos work in conservation and education, but aquariums do, too. We talk about the California condor and black footed ferret as success stories and Panamanian golden frogs and rhinos as works in progress, but aquariums are doing that same kind of work! There are coral conservation labs, efforts to reintroduce wild animals and remove invasives (looking at you, Florida), housing of non-releasable marine mammals, research into new medical procedures and treatments, and breeding of endangered species. The fish (and inverts!) in aquariums have an easy life, and might even be part of something so much bigger.

This is your permission to feel good about visiting reputable aquariums! Enjoy looking at the pretty, and not so pretty, fish (and inverts! please give the little sea bugs some love), and know that your admission is helping to keep them healthy and well cared for, and might even lead to something that can change the world.

[typhlonectes]

Cats Kill a Staggering Number of Species across the World

Domestic cats are cherished human companions, but a new study shows the enormous breadth of species the felines prey on when they are left to roam freely.

Despite their small stature and memeable mugs, domestic cats (Felis catus) are perfectly adapted killing machines, armed with retractable claws, sharp fangs and night vision. And these potent predators are anything but picky. As humans have spread cats around the world over the past 9,000 years, these ferocious felines—which were likely domesticated thousands of years ago in the Near East—have terrorized native creatures on every continent except Antarctica. A team of researchers recently added up all the species on these invaders’ menu. In a paper published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, the team compiled a database of more than 2,000 species that have fallen victim to free-ranging domestic cats. Nearly 350 of these species are of conservation concern, and several are already extinct. “We don’t really know of any other mammal that eats this many different species,” says the study’s lead author Christopher Lepczyk, an ecologist at Auburn University. “It’s almost like an indiscriminate eater; they’re eating whatever’s available.”...

Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-staggering-number-of-species-across-the-world/

[scoriarose]

A baby rattle snake following its mommy ❤️

Definitions of parental behavior differ, but Shine points out that mother snakes seem to go to some trouble for their offspring. For instance, python moms will often stay coiled around their pile of eggs for about 2 months, even though they haven’t had anything to eat for 6 or 7 months. At first glance, it might seem hopeless for a cold-blooded animal to try to incubate its eggs. When the temperature drops sufficiently, though, the python shivers, thereby warming the clutch with heat derived from muscle activity. Many rattlesnakes and their pit viper cousins don’t lay eggs but instead give birth to ready-to-wriggle offspring. Back in the Chiricahua foothills of Arizona, the black-tailed rattler mother that so excited Hardy and Greene stayed near her youngsters and the sheltering rocks of the birth site for more than 9 days. The scenes that the researchers described in 2002 might apply as well to a mother dog and her pups. On day 4 after the birth, Hardy observed superfemale 21 near the birth site as five of her newborns crawled around. They had worked their way out of the shelter’s entrance, over the mother’s body, and a little way into the surrounding grass. An hour later, several youngsters had piled on top of her. When one wriggled over her head, she tolerantly rearranged her coils. Thus, the days went by with the family basking just outside its rocky den. About 9 days after birth, the little snakes shed their skins as their mother watched from a few inches away. The youngsters then disappeared, presumably crawling off on their own. Greene and Hardy’s detailed monitoring of black-tailed rattler life had convinced them that the females typically don’t eat during winter hibernation or the spring pregnancies that follow. Greene paints a heroic picture of the mother, who further delays her return to hunting. “She hasn’t eaten for about 10 months, but she stays around for 10 more days,” he says. He and Hardy have since observed similar behavior in several females.

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/social-lives-snakes

[slushyseals]

I had to share this because so many people seem to believe snakes are cold heartless animals that abandon their young immediately without a second thought. But that's not true at all! Mothers of many species look after their young, and the babies and mothers will seek out each other when separated. Siblings have also been found cuddling together when pregnant or brumating too!

Here's another video of a mother protecting her little one as the baby goes to her for protection.

That little baby knows their mom would give her life to keep them safe, like any good mother would.