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skippyin

This is how the game goes right--

despazito

CHICKEN DIVERSITY MASTERPOST

officialnormfanblog

something i put together that might also be useful for character designs

dracolunae

@pangur-and-grim

everythingfox

“Chester coming out of the pouch for his first hop. He doesn’t stay out long, but he was brave and that was a great first hop.”

The Kangaroo Sanctuary

whitmerule

nOT READY FOR WORLD YET

bemusedlybespectacled

HIS NAME IS CHESTER

fancyladssnacks

coming out of my pouch and I’ve been doing just fine now I’m going back in

koryos

you, a generalist unspecialized mouse or mouselike mammal:

- food goes from esophagus to stomach to intestine

- can eat and digest almost anything

- adaptable and can survive in many different environments

me, a specialized sanguivorous vampire bat:

- food goes from esophagus to intestine to stomach to intestine

- can only eat blood

- will die if I don’t eat for one night (unless someone vomits in my mouth)

- will die if there’s not enough humidity in the air

- will die if I exercise too much

- will become dehydrated if I drink too much

- constantly pissing so I’m not too heavy to fly

koryos

I’ve gotten a couple of requests for more info on this and also I fuckin’ love these horrible creatures so let me explain the digestive system of the vampire bat. I guarantee by the end you will be wondering how these creatures even exist.

Vampire bats are the only known obligate blood feeding vertebrates. Other animals like vampire finches supplement their blood diets with other stuff, depending on what’s available. This is because blood is a terrible food to live solely on.

Blood is, first and foremost, 92% just plain water. This means to gain appreciable nutritional value from it, you have to drink A LOT. Common vampire bats drink around 20 grams of blood each night, which doesn’t sound like much unless you realize that common vampire bats weigh, on average, around 30 grams. (Several of them could fit snugly in a teacup.) That’s like if a person who weighed 150 pounds/68 kg drank 100 lb/45 kg of fluid every night in half an hour.

This presents an issue, because vampire bats can’t just swell up into an orb and roll off when they’re done feeding- they need to be light enough to fly. So blood needs to be processed very fast by their digestive system so they can shed the water weight. This is why vampire bats start peeing within about two minutes of feeding, and continue peeing through their approximately 30 min feeding session. It shoots through their body that fast.

Peeing this much at once has consequences on the body, though. To put it briefly, while vampire bat pee is mostly clear water at the beginning of the feeding, it is dark with urea by the end. (Urea is a waste product from food that builds up in the body and is released by urine.) Because they need to keep peeing to process the blood fast and dump toxic urea from the body, their urine becomes more and more concentrated as their bodies run out of water to dilute their urine with. So even though bats may conserve 2/3 or more of their body weight of fluid each night, the vast majority of which is water, they may become dehydrated.

Their high risk of dehydration is why they can’t handle dry environments, and why you don’t find them outside of tropical environments. (Really it’s a miracle these creatures can survive at all.)

Blood isn’t just a troublesome food because you need to drink a lot of it to live. It’s troublesome because even with the water taken out, the nutritional value of what remains SUCKS, no pun intended. It’s literally basically just some proteins an iron. And while that may be why vampire bats are so jacked (seriously, they’re very muscular in places most bats aren’t), it is extremely difficult to thrive on. One big reason is that blood contains almost no fat, which is crucial to most animals because it provides spare batteries- essentially, stored energy we can use if food is scarce.

A vampire bat does not have this backup. They will literally die within about 36 hours of not feeding. Even mice can live 3-4 days without food, and they normally live for two years as opposed to a vampire bat’s 12-20 years. (Depending on their environment.) Each and every night in a vampire bat’s life is on a knife’s edge, teetering towards starvation.

These bats do help each other, however, by regurgitating small amounts of blood for their hungry colony mates who haven’t found food for the night. Without this behavior I’m not sure the species would be anywhere near the populations it has now; they might not be able to thrive at all considering how desperately mothers with pups need the food. It takes most small bats about two weeks to wean their pups. It can take vampire bats up to nine months to wean their pups (though more generally it’s around four months) because their milk suffers from the same lack of nutrition as their food. They also have unusually long pregnancies (5-7 months; most bats average around 6 weeks) for the same reason.

The energy budgeting for the vampire bats is so severe that they actually have a sharp limit for how far they can fly before they become exhausted. Vampire bats are not known to migrate or even relocate because frankly, they might end up dropping dead out of the sky.

So, to recap, each day is a struggle between life and death, the bats teeter between drinking too much and becoming too heavy to fly and/or dehydrated, or drinking too little and dying on the way back. This is a highly successful species we’re talking about here. How they’re so successful with these constraints is a mystery to me, although it might have something to do with their high intelligence.

I haven’t covered one thing, which is the structure of the vampire bat’s digestive system. So. For the vast majority of mammals, food goes in the mouth, down the esophagus, into the stomach and through the intestines. Let’s call the esophagus/stomach/intestine routine ABC. Vampire bats… take a slightly different route. Using these letters, their digestive order would be ACBC.

Take a look at the following diagram. An average insect-eating bat’s organs are shown on the left, while those of a vampire bat are on the left.

You may notice that things are a bit… off. Unlike practically any other vertebrate on the planet, a vampire bat’s esophagus splits into two branches. One branch leads directly to the intestines, the other to the stomach. The stomach and intestines are not connected in any other way.

The question is: why? Why this? Why do you have to be like this, vampire bats?

Naturally, the answer is in the diet again. The bat uses its intestines to pull out the negligible nutrition from the blood quickly, then sends the resulting wastewater to the stomach, which balloons tremendously even as it rapidly sends the blood to the kidneys. Even with their fast urination system, bats only manage to shed about a quarter of their water weight by the time they lift off into a sloshy flight, weighing easily twice as much as when they left. See the “before and after” shots below.

(Both photos taken by Jon Flanders. Hey kids, contrary to these images, never touch a bat with bare hands, much less a bat that can deliver extremely deep wounds as well as the bacteria and viruses of whatever animal they just fed on. Don’t Do That™)

Anyway. I need to stop talking about vampire bat digestion because this got uhhhhhh long. It’s a fascinating yet mystifying subject. If you want to learn more I recommend Dark Banquet: Blood and the Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt. I learned a lot of stuff that I wrote here from that particular book, and it makes for a pretty good read (even though I disagree with his hypothesis about how vampirism evolved in bats). If you’re interested in vampire bat behavior, which is equally interesting, I recommend looking into the research of Gerry Carter.

zooophagous

Nature is so fucking stupid god I love these animals

specsthespectraldragon

Bill Schutt is the dude with the author friend who killed him via vampire bat in his book, by the way, if you want to know how much Bill Schutt loves vampire bats.

the-awkward-turt

Wow, a species more digestively useless than pandas!

Also another obligatory PSA: Another reason not to touch bats with your bare hands is some species have teeth so small they can bite you without you knowing it, which is why bats are the most likely animals to pass rabies to humans in the US. Although the vast majority of bat populations don’t carry rabies, any unprotected physical contact with a bat should be treated as potential rabies exposure. Rabies is 99.99% fatal once symptoms arise.

Bats are really interesting and ecologically important critters, but not for touching!

flock-talk

What is your opinion on people who say birds shouldn't be pets?

If we’re talking parrots specifically, I’m one of those people.

Parrots just do not thrive in the standard captive environment, really the most we can hope to do is provide as much enrichment as we can to mimic their wild environments and natural behaviours to prevent countless stress behaviours. Parrots pluck, toe tap, break their beaks trying to chew cage bars, are frequently nutrient deficient, and often have weaker hearts, lungs and immune systems from being in captivity without the right environments to thrive.

Parrots aren’t a domesticated species and they simply do not thrive in our homes. We can not provide enough room for flight, enough birds for socialization with enough space for them to feel safe doing so, we can not provide the lifestyle these birds really need to be as healthy as they should be. We can do our best but at the end of the day when we’re breeding a species that more often than not suffers in our environments it doesn’t make sense to keep breeding them. If the closest we can get to optimum care is just trying to reduce constant stress then that animal isn’t thriving with us.

There’s plenty of birds that do thrive in our homes, pigeons, chickens, even finches and canaries are all extremely loving, trainable, and interactive birds that aren’t all that different than parrots. They can all be taught parlour tricks, can enjoy human interaction, many can sing sweet songs.

Keeping parrots as pets that are already stuck in the trade? Of course, they can’t be released, they need someone who will at least give their all to lead a good life. But consistently bringing more parrots in to a world that isn’t suitable for them? It’s more selfish than anything really.

veganerudition

I think most of the ppl arguing w/ u over this breeding issue are only thinking of breeding as a concept rather than an action. "we can breed out the issues so the resulting dogs will be healthy at the end!" ok u went from point A to C w/o even considering B-- the act of bringing several generations of unhealthy, suffering dogs into existence in this process. like they think there's a tasteful cut to black when 2 pugs go to breed, and suddenly we have healthy un-fucked pugs. alright, buddy

Fucking oath.

I’d want to make them look a wheezing, snorting French Bulldog while an AI gun is being stuck up their vagina and see if they can still say it’s the best thing for the dog’s well-being.

That’s what they’d have to deal with for generations before significant change could be made to current animals that are suffering these problems.

ijustkeepitmovin

Hello, my name is Dorrie and this is my bigheaded pup Remy. I adopted Remy eleven months ago from Angel City Pits at the suggestion of my gi

So this is my dog Remy. As you can see,I am asking for money to help get a tumor removed. Its located in her ribs and requires some of them to be removed. Please donate IF you can, or simply share this. Please help me help my dog!

ijustkeepitmovin

Thank you to everyone who continues to reblog this, or who has donated. Or has done both. Okease continue to share, we are getting there slowly but surely!

ijustkeepitmovin

Ya’ll are so awesome! We are slowly but surely getting there! She is going to have a biopsy and CT scan tomorrow, 7/25, to see if the lump is cancerous and then we will go from there. Please keep sharing sharing sharing! A little goes a long ass way!!!!!

jellyman-kelly

S'more shots of the sweetest, chillest, most photogenic pup that ever was. If you can, donate please, and everybody share! Thank you!!

ijustkeepitmovin

So unfortunately, yesterday I got the news the tumor is too extensive, and radiation will slow the geowth of it, it will not stop it. It isn’t operable at this point, and so we made the decison that a week after her 4th birthday, we would help her cross over the rainbow bridge. We have changed the amount needed, which at this point will pay her medical bill, and euthanasia. Please continue to share, please donate if you can. Thank you so much.

ijustkeepitmovin

This will be the last update, although I ask this post continue to be shared, and if folks can donate, please do so. Remy will be put to sleep at home on August 11th, because she hates the vets office and I don’t want her last day on earth to be in fear. I’d like to thank everyone who has shared this post, who continue to share this post, who have donayed and reached out. Please continue to share so we can hit our goal, and if you havent donated, please consider doing so. Thank you guys.

talesfromtreatment

Three out of 7 puppies from a mama dog abandoned in a park were born without front legs.

talesfromtreatment

These puppies were discussed and we’re going to see how they do. And the little brown and white one is getting adopted by a manager who already has a dog with this deformity.

talesfromtreatment

Random update, these puppies were in recently for their first round of vaccinations and they’re all doing great!

talesfromtreatment

Update time! They’re doing great!

hope-for-the-planet

Quick thinking and donations from concerned fans have quelled the aspergillosis outbreak, though 13 of the big, green parrots remain ill.

I really cannot say how relieved I am to be able to post this as a positive news story, because when the outbreak first started it looked like it might be the end of the kakapo.

This year 82 kakapo chicks hatched, a record-breaking number that was a massive victory for a species with only 142 living adults. Then, in what seemed a cruel twist of fate, the kakapo population was struck with a devastating aspergillosis outbreak.

In the end, the disease only killed two adults and five chicks. Thirteen birds remain sick but are recovering with treatment.

This could have been so, so much worse, and the reason it wasn’t was due to excellent adaptive management of the developing situation by Kakapo Recovery staff as well as Auckland Zoo (and Wildbase Recovery Hospital and Dunedin Wildlife Hospital) staff going above and beyond their typical duties to offer intense, round the clock care to sick birds.

When conservationists posted on social media that their regular budget was not prepared to handle this unforeseen tragedy, members of the public donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to help via crowdfunding.

“The outpouring of support struck Digby (head of Kakapo Recovery), who recalls how a 9-year-old in the United States asked their friends to donate to the cause in lieu of bringing birthday presents to their party. ‘Here’s a child who’s probably never going to see a Kākāpō in their life,’ he says, ‘and they care about them enough to give up all their birthday presents.’“

This year will still likely see a net increase in the wild kakapo population. Against all odds, the big, green, flightless parrots are going to be ok.

Thanks to @jacquehateshashtags for sending this in!

todaysbird

Hello may I request some Good Nests? Which nests are best nests?? Which birbs are most deserving of an honorary engineering degree???

where to start?? so many good nests!

a personal favorite nest is the nest of the quaker parrot (also known as the monk parakeet). these parrots are extremely unusual in that they build communal nests, kind of like apartment complexes. the nest has multiple holes, each leading to a separate “home”. as you can expect, these nests become huge and heavy. this is part of the reason why these parrots are banned in some states - their nests, when build on power lines, can start massive fires.

there’s also the wonderful weavers! there are many species of weavers, and their nestbuilding varies slightly between species. but they tend to make ornate hanging gourd-shaped nests, woven tightly enough to pass as some kind of funky basket!

it would be impossible to forget the incredible tailorbird family! these are birds that can SEW! using spider silk, hair, or other fine threads, they delicately sew a leaf to either form a roof over their nest or make a cup to support their nest. they do this so carefully that the leaf rarely browns around the holes.

hummingbird nests may not look like much at first (ignoring them being extremely small). but these nests are built almost entirely out of fibrous materials like spiderwebs and hair. the nests stretch to accommodate the babies as they grow!

and an honorable mention to the half-moon conure, who builds their nests WITHIN a termite mound! the termites make a protective ‘sealant’ layer around the parrot nest, which protects the young.

tinysaurus-rex-deactivated20240

Pigeons win for Worst Nest Ever award. They haphazardly set a few sticks on a cliff and call it a day.

awwcutepets

time for a nap

overtophidian

This is why you shouldn't use these types of wheels!!! It is so easy for a leg to slip thru the gaps and easily harm your little rodent.

luckyfishy

Wat dis ? Dis foods ? Am..for me ??

HURGRHHRRNLEBLEGHRGH

thepipsqueakery

Unfortunately our sweet little Romero didn’t make it last night and while I wish the outcome had been different for him I am eternally grateful to those who helped try to save him last night. Our amazing vet came in for emergency surgery, @party_piggies stayed at our house to care for the animals at home, and all of you who offered kind words.

While I know some people will see this as a cautionary tale against spaying and neutering guinea pigs I want to leave you with a few thoughts on that.

First, complications from alters are actually very low with an experienced exotic vet performing the surgery. We have had dozens of guinea pigs, rabbits, rats, chinchillas, mice, and even the occasional hamster altered and the rate of complications has been minimal. In fact, this is only the second complication requiring surgery to fix and both of those were completely freak incidents that had nothing to do with human error or anaesthesia.

Second, I would like you all to consider that Romero would never have been in this situation but for the accidental breeding of unaltered guinea pigs. He came from a mother who had been accidentally bred repeatedly. A store sold a male and female and their owner didn’t have the ability to accurately separate the sexes nor the ability to house the ever growing number of guinea pigs.

It is our policy that all guinea pigs, rabbits, and rats that are adopted from The Pipsqueakery are altered prior to adoption because frankly we would barely need to exist if not for all the accidental breeding. Pet overpopulation is a problem.

Finally, while I have seen the argument made many many times that there’s no good reason to alter guinea pigs I must disagree. A vast majority of older females that come to us unaltered suffer from reproductive diseases that would have been prevented by a spay when they were younger, healthier, and the surgery was safer. Many of the male guinea pigs that come to us have been housed alone for their lives because they are too aggressive to live with another male. Altering those males has uniformly fixed those issues and they have been able to be bonded to others and live happy lives.

We love you Romero. https://www.instagram.com/p/By5DGYpHU91/?igshid=197m3qj727ryb

mellific

all sorts of echoes in these caverns

one-dog-show

Brachicephalics in the netherlands

I haven’t seen a post about this yet but I am so excited and wanted to share some great news;

The netherlands officially banned the breeding of extremely brachycephalic dogs!

Just to make this clear though, not the breeds themselves are banned but the individuals that fall into a specific and clearly defined scheme:

It is illegal to breed with any dog whose nose is shorter than a third of the headsize. (which includes almost all pugs and french/english bulldogs)

Dogs, whose noses are a third to half the length of the head are allowed to be bred, as long as they meet every other breed standard. (This part of the law is announced as an interim solution, sadly I can’t find any details on what this exactly means…)

The scheme is following a traffic light system, shown here:

In an official notice the ministry for agriculture, nature and food quality (Ministerium LNV) announced that they’ll start to control the practical implementation of the new law. And Commedia, the association of dutch pug breeders already stated that they’re following the legal requirements starting now, setting a good example for all breeders in the country. Here’s to hoping that others won’t wait until they’re getting punished until they start to follow the new law.

Qualzucht, the breeding of severly deformed animals, whose life quality is deeply impacted - to the point of being non-existant - is still a huge issue and the law isn’t perfect at all but I think it’s a huuuge step in the right direction. I’d love to see similar developments in other countries, once they see that the breed won’t be “destroyed” by enabling them to breathe a bit better.

This law limits the breeding of a whole bunch of breeds, including pugs, english & french bulldogs, boxers, pekineses, yorkshire terriers, chihuahuas, mastiffs and staffordshire bullterriers.

Almost all information and the graphic are taken from Bollerkopp.net

Finally, please excuse my wording, as I am german which is already difficult enough hehe.