Lets Light Up The Night

Cameron Elijah. Queer as fuck. Poly. Father of dragons. Sex positive. NSFW 18+ Transition blog: becoming-cameron.tumblr.com

[ripe]

thedragonwoodconservancy on ig

[cryptidsydario]

laser gun gator boys

[peniswakt-deactivated20210717]

oh my god i didn’t realize this video had audio

[actualaster]

Okay as adorable as this looks, I’m pretty sure that’s a distress sound?  A “mommy help me I’m scared come save me!” sound?

@why-animals-do-the-thing

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

This video is from Dragonwood Wildlife Conservancy, and they are yearling (last year’s babies) Cuban crocodiles. Good news for you, this isn’t actually a distress call! According to @kaijutegu​ (and her giant bookshelf full of reptile resources), the laser sounds are an affiliative social call that young Cuban crocodiles use to communicate with their parents. They normally stop making the noise at around two years old, which is approximately when they start dispersing from the family group.

See, Cuban crocodiles are a super social species - and one of the few where the fathers stick around and provide paternal care for the babies! In the wild, babies would regularly interact with both parents, including when they provide food. This call is basically the type of vocalization that the babies use to communicated with their parents.

These crocodiles are being hand-raised as part of a private-sector breeding and reintroduction program (because the parents are so protective of their offspring that if you left them the babies to raise, you’d never be able to safely get close to them), and so they’re responding to the guy in the video the same way because he’s constant known safe individual and also the provider of food. He’s not a threat - his presence is a good thing, and he’s worth interacting with because it normally means food. You can also tell from their behavior and body language that they’re not stressed: some of the crocodiles are actively climbing on him and interaction of their own volition, but the ones that aren’t don’t show any indicators of hyper-vigilance. If that were a distress call, every crocodile that heard it would be alert and on edge looking for the threat. Distress calls tend to only happen once or twice, because in the wild continuing to make noise makes a baby more vulnerable: so these crocodiles wouldn’t be continually vocalizing if they felt threatened. There’s no snapping or gaping or freezing, all of which would be behavioral indicators of distress or discomfort. (Here’s a video of a baby nile crocodile being harassed by photographers which will give you a visual reference for both freezing and gaping.)

So, hey, this is certifiably cute - and good for conservation!

[bunjywunjy]

ETHICALLY SOURCED LASER NOISES

[maureen2musings]

[xtec]

no one:

me at 6 years old with a wine glass full of grape juice:

[hyperazraphael]

Also me at 28 years old with a glass of grape juice.

[heavyweightheart]

Weight Watchers (or WW as they’re trying to rebrand themselves, as if it changes their legacy of harming fat people for money) has launched a new app for children ages 8-17 called Kurbo. I&#8…

I think it’s important to note that Weight Watchers doesn’t have any evidence that any of this will make or keep kids thin. There are no studies that show any method of eating and exercising that predicts thin kids, research from the University of Minnesota found that “None of the behaviors being used by adolescents (in 1999) for weight-control purposes predicted weight loss[in 2006]…Of greater concern were the negative outcomes associated with dieting and the use of unhealthful weight-control behaviors.” Even the thoroughly-steeped-in-fatphobia American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors and parents to avoid conversations about weight and focus on being healthy instead.

I also think it’s important to point out that the target ages of the app also include the typical ages of puberty, during which an average weight gain of 40 to 60 pounds is expected. Scenario: a kid who has been trying to manipulate their weight with this app for five years – since they were 8 years old – experiences sudden weight gain. I’m sure that won’t cause any problems at all, right?

Ok, so let’s talk about this absolute disaster, starting with the fact that Weight Watchers thinks third graders should be making three-step plans to attend birthday parties.

The app divides foods up into “stop-light” categories of green (“Go!”), yellow (“Slow Down!”) and red (“STOP and Think!”) (Exclamation points and capitalization strategy are verbatim from Kurbo which, as you probably already guessed, I will not be linking to.)

Dividing food into categories like this is a red flag for disordered eating, but it’s pretty clear at this point that Weight Watchers doesn’t care. It’s also an issue for kids who are food insecure and other kids who may have limited options for what to eat for whom just getting enough nutrition to survive can be an issue. (Let’s remember that most kids are not in charge of the foods to which they have access.)

Note that step 1 of the plan says to workout for “60 minutes MINIMUM” (emphasis mine). So, again, we’re telling 8-year-olds that in order to eat some cake at a birthday party, they must earn the right through exercise of at least an hour. This is a three-fer of harm:

It creates the belief that one has to earn the right to eat through movement which is, you guessed it,  a red flag for disordered eating.

It creates a “never enough” belief around exercise. Suggesting that kids as young as 8 should lose sleep to force themselves through an hour or more of exercise that is not by choice or for fun is ludicrous.

It sets kids up to see exercise as prevention of and/or punishment for not being thin, which gives them an excellent chance of learning to resent movement and exercise – especially since kids come in lots of sizes, and this app will never change that.

Which brings us to a fact that should be obvious – the app will harm every kid who uses it and every kid who knows about it, but it will do the most harm to fat kids (who are already trying to navigate a fatphobic world) both because it will be another tool to marginalize them, and because they are unlikely to change their body size so it will be seen as another alleged “failure” to attain thinness, which never should have been a goal in the first place.

The marketing for the app includes “before and after” photos of children, so that if kids aren’t sure what kind of bodies they should hate (be it their own body, or other kids) they can check the before pictures to make sure.

I’m already hearing stories from blog readers about parents who are actually bribing their kids to use the app with, for example, a phone. Which tells fat kids that in order to “deserve” what everyone else has – the ability to connect and communicate with their social network (which actually IS tied to health,) they first need to be thin, or at least commit to trying to be. That’s a lesson that will continue to harm them for the rest of their lives if they internalize it.

[ants-are-fascinating]

When ants die, a few days later they emit oleic acid, which tells the living ants to dispose of their corpse.

A myrmecologist named Ed Wilson discovered this and dropped the chemical on a living ant. It was immediately carried off, despite the fact that it was still moving, and clearly not dead.

[periegesisvoid-deactivated]

“I’M GETTING BETTER”

[kuroba101]

Bring out your dead. Eh, close enough.

[glitterandgrunge]

IM NOT YET DEAD SIR

[lazorsandparadox]

You left out the part where the ant, believing HERSELF to be dead, stayed in self imposed exile in the ant graveyard until the acid wore off and she realized she was not supposed to be in the ant graveyard.

[silent-wordsmith]

@finite-experience, this seems like the sort of thing you’d like to see

[mister-christmas]

Ant 1: To the ant graveyard with you

Ant 2: But I’m not dead

Ant 1: You smell dead

Ant 2: Fair enough

[eric-coldfire]

Ant 1: “I thought you were dead.”

Ant 2, after acid wears off: “I got better.”

[ottermatopoeia]

Ant 2, returning to the colony: i lived bitch

[cutepetclub]

From @veggiedayz: “Blackberry has a song he wants to sing for you.” #cutepetclub [source: http://ift.tt/28SdMmN ]

[slightly-oblivvyous]

Kitten: *small mew* Cameraperson: *soft “ohhh”* Kitten: *BIG LONG MEOW* Cameraperson: *soft laughter* “What was that?” Kitten: *tiny mew*

[haintxblue]

the caption did not prepare me

[followthebluebell]

the highest ratio of meow to cat that i’ve ever encountered

[strawberrypatty]

The smallest kittehs have the biggest meows, I’ve found.

[subsidiary]

[6qubed]

man we’ve been doing funerals all wrong over here

[hokuto-ju-no-ken]

My friends, weeping at my funeral as they shove 5s and 10s between the biggest titties they’ve ever seen: it’s what he would’ve wanted

[jessicaroux]

[animalwoonz]

[expressions-of-nature]

[olearypoetry]

[vivoconcerti]

[awwww-cute]

[girlpanties]

where’s that quiz where you choose lke 4 colours u like and 4 u dont and it hands your ass on a plate

[girlpanties]

thank you @cumleaf @@ http://www.astro.com/cgi/atxgen.cgi?btyp=cf

[claycoloredmotherlessness-deact]

This hurt my feelings

[sassippi]

Well fuck me

[lostodosblancos]

I have done this thing once every couple months and every time I hate it a little more because it knows me better than I know myself

[2scorchedwings]

[thebritishteapot]

what THE FUCK

[hloneheart]

how the FUCK

[ryuchurro]

Wwwwh

[birdsareblooming]

uuuumu what

[brandwhorestarscream]

Noooo don’t call me out like this nooooooooo

[vrepit-salt]

I hate how accurate this is

[constellations-and-energy]

I’VE BEEN READ FOR FILTH

[im-a-deceptikhan]

Lmaooo that test ain’t shit 😭😭😭😤

[tayalldaynyc]

Know me better than I know myself

[pontevaporub]

holy shit i thought this was a joke and now i’m uPSet

[lucidwitchery]

[sparreauxchirps]

I just learned the origin of pink lemonade and I need you all to hear this.

So this dude selling concessions at a circus back in like 1857 ran out of lemonade and he needed water to make more, but there wasn’t a stream or water pump, BUT the BAREBACK HORSE RIDER had just washed her pink tights in a bucket of water, staining the water pink. So, being the enterprising fella he was, dude just threw in the lemons and sugar and told everyone it was special strawberry lemonade. Well, the circus patrons saw pink lemonade and thought, “That’s fucking amazing!” and he ended up selling twice as much lemonade than usual.

To reiterate.

This dude sold people sweaty horse crotch water and it was so popular it became an Actual Fucking Thing.

DELICIOUS.

[ct-7567]

Thats pussy babe!

[anxietyproblem]