haha what the fuck

he/him| 26 | 🔞 god please | dumbshit quarantine zone just fuckin block me if you don't want to see my dumb bullshit tbh I'm begging you

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[birdslop]

SLOPPERS; WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

baby pygmy falcon has grown into a penny!!! watch her wealth multiply!!!!

[beardedmrbean]

Periscope up

[birds-in-posts]

Green heron (Butorides virescens)

[rumchatacreamlicker]

i'm Dishes, gotta wash me

[porcelainpistol]

[bimmyjimmy]

It is the Bimmy Birthday!!

[jimmyhoffathecat]

Happy bappy birthday bimmy jimmy!!!

[ziggystarling]

hi what doing

[urie]

stop calling it a girl dinner and call it by its formal name: Fend For Yourself dinner in an ingredients household

[queer-reader-07]

[alteredpanel]

[shinolavolume1-deactivated20240]

[shinolavolume1-deactivated20240]

[were--ralph]

i sent this gif to a black cowowker at work then later asked my white manager if he likes apple fritters and he was like "i fuckin love apple friters" and she laughed so hard she got a migraine

[steampunkvampireworm]

i made a sturgeon and im really proud of her even though she kinda looks like a weird dog

[aboutoriginality]

[ominous-signs]

Official ominous sign

[ominous-signs]

[rankine-radians]

The ominous temperature in this post is 3.5315π Rrad

[ominous-signs]

[huanggugugu]

thats illegal people cant do that

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Keep seeing this all-white mantis with red eyes in my backyard. Its so cool

That's such a cool looking mantis! It almost looks like that alien lol

[herpsandbirds]

violet carpenter bee on monk's pepper, germany

(i love the goth bees!)