It's Worms All the Way Down, Folks.

Vel (They/Them)

[resismedievalmenagerie]

Certified Good Boys spotted in this Bestiary from ~1175. According to the Latin, "Nothing is smarter than dogs, for they have more senses than other animals, for they alone recognize their own names; they love their masters."

[janepaulina]

[stas-j-fox]

✨ Unicorn ✨

[venustapolis]

The Forerunner ('Le Précurseur') (Eugène Trigoulet, 1894)

[thelonely-shepherd]

i really like him

[thelonely-shepherd]

hamerkop

[birds-in-posts]

Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta)

[troutreznor]

i feel like people dont think im serious when i say "death to America" but like my ultimate dream is for the USA to no longer exist like of course i dont respect politicians or cops or the law i dont want a "better America" i quite literally do not want the entity known as the United States of America to outlive me

[troutreznor]

[escuerzoresucitado]

[bakersfield-row]

I’m going to have a fucking breakdown

[karatekamania]

HAAAANK! NO HANK!! THAT'S NOT A BACTERIOPHAGE! THOSE WOULD BE WAY SMALLER THAN A TARDIGRADE! THAT'S A RADIOLARIAN, A TYPE OF UNICELLULAR EUKARYOTIC ORGANISM KNOWN FOR ITS ELABORATE MINERAL SKELETONS! HAAAANK! THAT'S THE WRONG MICROBE!!!

[guerrillatech]

[revelware]

[vampirecatprince]

[beanytuesday]

For anyone interested in some further reading on these topics, I have a rough bibliography attached to this comic available on my Patreon (it's a public post.)

[wavetapper]

[awsugar]

my apologies etsy witches i was not familiar with your game

[kedreeva]

This is a quail gizzard!

This little thing contains grit used to grind up anything tough in the GI tract. Since my quail are pretty exclusively fed a processed feed, there nothing too cool in there

But clean it out and you can see the INCREDIBLY tough inner lining

It feels a little bit like wet sandpaper in there. Really cool to open up and look at.

Larger birds like chickens and turkeys that free range have gizzards full of small stones, called gastroliths. There's even a hobby some hunters have, of collecting "turkey pearls" and displaying them!

If the quail have any they are very very very small. I do wonder what the peafowl gizzards...

[weekendviking]

Here's my collection of Moa Gastroliths, mostly agates, collected in the area of Aotearoa New Zealand that I grew up in, by my grandfather, uncle and myself. In our area the local rocks are Cretaceous Basaltic Andesites, Dacites and Rhyolites, and so there's a lot of agate and quartz geodes, amygdaloids and veins. Just like a hen will go for a shiny rock for gizzard grit, Dinornis Maximus and the other Moa species in our area seemed to go for the agates particularly for gizzard stones, so you find the small ones that had been polished away too small to be useful scattered around in singles, wherever they passed in the droppings, while the larger ones you can find in clusters around where a moa died. Sometimes even in a distinct pile if the skeleton was not disturbed or even still present when fossilised/subfossil remains.

There's a distinct variety of polish that identifies a gizzard stone - pits and grooves from the pebble's original morphology are often left untouched, while high areas and corners are smoothed, but with a pitted or matte polish, rather than smoothly shiny, and often a striated or scratched texture to the polish that's quite diagnostic of gastrolith origin. If the stone is polymineralic, especially porphyritic, softer minerals will be both physically and chemically eroded more deeply than harder minerals, giving a careous texture to the polish.

[kedreeva]

This is maybe the coolest thing anyone's ever added to one of my posts. Ancient gizzard stones from an extinct giant bird??? I'm in love.

[c0y]

a coyote tugs at the strap of a trail camera [source]

[koprolithium]

[wtf-scientific-papers]

[Unsolicited nudis: ongoing spread of two non-native nudibranchs along Australia’s east coast]

Forbes et al. (2025)

[kitsunetsuki-deactivated2026051]

Playmen Magazine (July 1977)

[crevicedwelling]

here is the albino earthworm I found today! it does not look like much at first glance, because there are many earthworms that are normally unpigmented and look much like this one.

but take a closer look at the head and you’ll see that the prostomium—the little lobe that comes off the first segment—is tanylobous, having creases until segment 2. that means it’s genus Lumbricus, which are all usually a dark reddish color!

here is the albino meeting another juvenile, a Lumbricus terrestris. I’m unsure if the albino is L. terrestris or rubellus, and will need to wait for it to grow up to be able to tell.

no matter what it is, it’s a privilege to see and raise this little oddity, I will keep you all updated on its progress!