Loach Friend

old, weird and friend to all

[tsalala]

A young melanistic leopard in Kali Tiger Reserve, India. Photographed by Mithun Hunugund.

[were--ralph]

HE NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED

Theyre going to send a team after Mamdani this is highkey insane

[urgetocreate]

Alice Dalton Brown (American b.1939), Summer Breeze, 1995, Oil on linen, 50 in. x 70.25 in

[sandmandaddy69]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[wisphunt]

My final for the first year of my fashion and textile course :] fossils cardigan featuring living fossils like coelacanth and lots of dinosaur bones. Big love letter to palaeontology and natural history. Got super into my knitting machine but I wasn’t very adept with it yet so I sort of crocheted around the edges of my pieces and sewed them all together, and crocheted some edges/ribbing. The buttons are handmade from polymer clay. Used some second hand gold yarn I found in a charity shop and a whole bunch of mixed variegated wool together. My most ambitious project yet I completely just did not speak to people for that final month I was working on this 😭

Some close ups:

And my watercolour paintings this piece was based on:

[seabeck]

Lichen of in the genus Collemopsidium growing on a barnacle

[lichenaday]

Oh yeah, these little weirdos are such a trip. Oh yeah, barnacle? You just gonna grow on whatever the f you want? Well how would you like it if someone did that to you, huh? Get barnacled, barnacle!

[despazito]

Dendrogaster (a crustacean that parasitizes starfish)

[loving-n0t-heyting]

this is how they look

[headspace-hotel]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CRUSTACEAN.

[headspace-hotel]

my tags need to go in the main part of the post actually

[valentineblacker]

There's a different species of barnacle, Sacculina, that parasitizes crabs in a similar way to this. It has a very cursed lifecycle and I assume the crab is also having a weird time.

[headspace-hotel]

I think i've heard of this one.

I just looked it up—it injects itself into the crab's body and replaces the crab's genitals with itself, grows roots into the crab's organs (including its brain), and controls the crab's behaviors so the crab will take care of the Sacculina larvae as a female crab would its own babies—if the crab is male, the Sacculina parasite will make the crab's body produce female hormones to basically change it to female.

This is so cool...how did this even develop? How did the parasite evolve to do that? How ancient would this relationship have to be for something so complex to form?

[wovi]

[pangiokuhliia]

oblongas of the log, what is your wisdom?

i once tried to replace this fake log with a much cooler, actually real, natural log, but then i got slapped and humbled by like 15 loaches at once.

they now have two logs.

[loachfriend]

Wait how did they humble you??

I feel like my dojos are always willing but not quite smart enough to be able

[uncharismatic-fauna]

the poor thing lost a few legs because my cat got to it before i could stop her, but there was what i'm pretty sure is a golden huntsman spider in my bathroom this morning! this sucker was huuuuge. biggest wild spider i've ever seen in person

Good news- she'll likely grow those legs back in a molt or two! One of the many perks of being in a group of animals that has really nailed limb regeneration

[unalivejournal]

It's okay if you're 22 and still sleep with a stuffed animal it's called having the cuddlers spirit and it's actually what gets you into heaven

[antiqueanimals]

Wildlife in North Carolina, March 1974.

Internet Archive

[oddarette]

Windex Xenomorph

Windex Xenomorph 💦

[publicdomainreview]

Before Cousteau, way before @Octonauts, explorer Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez was bringing images of the undersea world to the surface, from his artist’s sketch pad inside a glass and steel diving bell: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/underwater-landscapes-of-eugen-von-ransonnet-villez

[fuzzygifs]

x

[loachfriend]

Pigeon Spray Park

[ratcandy]

are u guys hearing this

(This is a Great Golden Digger Wasp - Sphex ichneumoneus - doing what its name implies, digging. But you may also notice, if you turn the sound on, that she’s making some incredible noises as she does so.)