Time to Explore

WARNING! I post a lot of creepy crawlies and scientific/educational gore. If you'd like to avoid it, blacklist 'creepy crawlies' and 'gore tw'. Documenting adventures in amateur science and other bizarre hobbies I get into. Herping, hiking, diying, vulture culture, macro photography, mushroom hunting, and rearing insects and amphibians! Inbox is always open. Photos belong to myself. Do not repost, please ask for permission to use.

[justmadscience]

The snail eggs I’ve collected are showing movement!! They’re developing so quickly, this was them just 3 days ago. (no movement at the time)

[justmadscience]

I was asked to make a design in reference to the Veronika Hubeny science panel incident, and it’s now up on my Redbubble! 

For anyone who doesn’t know, Veronika Hubeny is a theoretical physicist who specializes in string theory and quantum gravity and a professor at UC Davis. She was the only woman on a panel called Pondering the Imponderable, and at one point was interrupted so often by the host that an audience member called out ‘let her speak, please’. 

The host apologized and Hubeny took it in stride, but it rapidly became sort of a women in STEM version of ‘and yet she persisted’. As far as I understand there aren’t any hard feelings, but it did highlight how easily this sort of thing can happen, and more diversity in STEM is something I care a lot about so I was excited to attempt it.

[justmadscience]

get a job

[lepidosaurs]

everyone keeps treating all of trump’s policies about science and progress like they’re borne from ignorance and they’re letting it happen because they don’t understand the ramifications like NAH BITCH! THEY’RE CAPITALIST RICHBOYS WHO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY’RE DOING. THEY KNOW. THEY DON’T GIVE A SHIT MY DUDE. NO AMOUNT OF FB POSTS AND NEIL DEGRASSE TWEETS IS GOING TO EDUCATE THEM. THAT’S NOT HOW POLITICAL CORRUPTION WORKS.

[justmadscience]

his cabinet are all billionaires and half are tied to oil companies, they could have doctorates in every environmental and social science in existence and they’d still feign ignorance so they could silence minorities and destroy sacred sites and pump pollution into every natural resource we have.

in a country where Nestle has first dibs on drinkable water over the population of California during a drought, these dudes face zero repercussions for their actions and they’re 100% aware of it

[justmadscience]

hotwing has a flair for the dramatic

[justmadscience]

BODE 

(TODE)

[justmadscience]

it is important to eat with your children to maintain a strong familial relationship

[justmadscience]

my sons.... might be fat......

[justmadscience]

you’ll never take him alive

[justmadscience]

the tadpoles keep breaching the surface of the water like majestic dolphins with a loud ‘PLORP’ sound

my sons are strong and lively

[justmadscience]

some fuckin turd was having a party on a tall ass hill nearby, so there’s music in the bg, but I got a really good audio of the chorus near one of my favorite frog hunting spots! I heard at least two toads!!

[justmadscience]

snORPMH

[justmadscience]

(real sorry about the scratches in the way! the only tank I have that’s small enough is plastic and it’s endured me for several years so it’s pretty banged up)

Our single toad son, officially dubbed Fancy Junior by @alittlecoloredgirl, finally got his closeup after I broke out my microscope camera! 

It’s a little late in the spring for Bufo Americanus in my area, so I’m pretty sure he’s a Fowler’s Toad! We have fully formed back legs currently and he’s still eating really well despite being mid morph. (he has a blood worm in this vid, my go-to tadpole diet is spinach, kale, algae and blood worms) 

Toads don’t get enough credit for how pretty they are so I wanted to advertise my sparkly glamorous son. 

[thejusticethatissocial]

The leaders of the Rebellion…

[billibones]

This is important.

[justmadscience]

[intergalacticboner]

me: hey mom look what i got

mom: it better not be a frog

me:

[justmadscience]

WE HAVE LEG

[scavengersnest]

Vultures Beware

User JrCunkle on ebay has dozens of vulture related things for sale.

I bought an otter skeleton for my birthday, specifically the one advertised as “Taxidermy skeleton real river otter dissarticulated clean sorted by bone type”

What i got was a disaster. The box arrived 05/12/17. Upon opening it i was confronted by a wave of rotting meat smell and grease. Upon examination there was grease, blood, and dried meat on various parts of the skeleton.

While trying to get them out and into peroxide before my room smelled like a butcher that hasn’t had power in a month, i realized just how bad it was.

several of the bags were filled with dirt, bones from other animals, and various shit i couldn’t even identify. It took almost an hour to try and find all the pieces of bones from among the wreckage of the bags.

right now they’re all sitting in peroxide in the hope i can somewhat clean them, but this is by far my worst vulture purchase.

[justmadscience]

oh god, nasty. I’ve bought from them before and mine wasn’t anywhere near that bad but it was definitely less clean than I expected for something marked as ‘cleaned’. It got to me fast so I was spared some of the smell but it was still pretty gnarly. 

I hope you can salvage it, did you try messaging them about how bad it was? That sounds totally inexcusable, especially for something advertised as sorted.