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do centipedes run on cat or dog hardware
kity
dogy
OH MY GOD GUY LOOK AT THIS BABY I FOUBND IN MY PARENTS ROOM
I HAVE A NEW BABY
i forgot a crucial part of pet ownership: bothering that animal a little
id recommend offering her a gentle but annoying grisp
oh we are grisping
hamburger
fresh newborn house centipede!!!
edit: i have been deceived.
for realsies this time
for more realsies this time!!!
Been working in pest control for 3 months now and i can confidently say that nobody on earth seems to understand that sometimes You Will See A Bugs and that's Normal if you live literally anywhere with oxygen
Unfortunately it appears you have a garden that is growing several important pollinator food sources you will be seeing wasps sometimes. You want us to spray your flowers? That'll stop the wasps but only because your flowers will be Dead
I just think everyone would benefit from living in the woods for a week and having their bug tolerance forcibly increased by being forced to share a showerstall with a wolf spider the size of a half dollar everyday
whatever. go my scarab
sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really.
You’re being kind when you say “almost 100% fatality”. What people need to hear is: if you get to develop rabies symptoms, you’re dead. If you get heavy treatment after developping symptoms, you still need a miracle. Like, a real miracle, you should enter some religion if you escape that.
ALSO, I don’t want people feeling confident about petting stray/wild animals because there’s a vaccine available, either. I’ll explain why from my own experience (I’m not a doctor).
I got bitten by a wild tamarin once, on the pulp of my index finger. It drew blood, there are many wild animals in the area (tamarins, possums, bats, foxes) and it isn’t that uncommon to hear about 1 or 2 rabies cases every now and again (a puppy we gave to a friend got it, for instance), so I went to an ambulatory immediately.
Because I was bitten in an ultrasensitive area, I needed fast treatment. But it was also a small area, so the usual thing they do - inject the vaccine in the place - wasn’t a choice. They told me they’d divide the shot in 5 small ones, and inject me all over my body, so the antidote would get to my entire system fast.
Please stop for a moment and think that the disease is so worrysome that they’d rather needle me all over than to give me one shot and wait until it spread through my system.
Then they said that, okay, but there was a catch first. I needed to take an antiallergic shot. “Why?” “Because the virus is devastating, and as the vaccine is made from it, but weakened (like almost every vaccine) it will still create a reaction, and it’s a strong one, and it’s veru common for people to have strong allergic reactions to it.” YOU HAVE TO TAKE AN ANTIALLERGIC SHOT IN ORDER TO TAKE THE VACCINE COZ THE VACCINE COULD POTENTIALLY MAKE YOU REALLY SICK
ALSO IT WASN’T JUST “A LITTLE ANTIALLERGIC SHOT”
IT WAS ONE OF THESE FUCKERS HERE.
It was OBVIOUSLY dripped in my body and not injected because HAHAHAHA. Truth be told I was an adult already and I’m tall so I have a lot of mass but STILL.
So after I had taken the antiallegic and was starting to feel drowsy (as a side effect of it) the doctor came with the 5 shots.
- One in each buttock
- One in each thigh
- One in my left arm
They all stung like a bitch and I usually don’t care about shots.
“Okay so can I go home now?”
“No, we have to keep you under observation for 2h so we’re SURE the vaccine won’t give you any reaction.”
BINCH I WAS GIVEN A BUTTLOAD OF MEDICINE BUT THERE WAS STILL A RISK.
I slept through the two hours and then was liberated to go home. My legs, butt, and left arm hurt all over, like I had been punched there, for a few days. I also had a fever (not feverish, a fever)
BUT DID YOU THINK IT WAS OVER?
WRONG!!!
I had to take four reinforcement shots in the next month, one a week, so I could be positively be considered immunized. Every time I took a shot, my arm would swell and hurt like it’d been hit, and when night came I’d have a fever. Because that’s how fucking strong the vaccine is, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW VICIOUS THE VIRUS IS.
So yeah. DO NOT PUT YOURSELF IN RISK, GODDAMNIT. Rabies is a rare condition all over, THANK GOD, and 1 confirmed case can be already considered a surge and a reason for mass campaigning, AND FOR A REASON.
If you like messing with stray/wild animals, don’t go picking them up and be extra careful. Or just, like, DON’T - call a vet or an authority that can handle them safely.
I must add that I live in a country with universal healthcare, so I didn’t pay a single penny for my treatment. Is this your reality? If not, ONE MORE REASON TO NOT FUCKING PLAY WITH THIS SHIT.
Rabies is 100% lethal. Period. If you are scratched or bitten by an animal you’re not positive is vaccinated, you need to find treatment NOW. And probably go through all that shit I’ve been through (also if you are immunosupressed? I DON’T KNOW WHAT’D HAPPEN)
Stay safe and don’t be stupid ffs
Guys, I know this isn’t art nor anything like that, but I’ve been hearing about this rabies thing and ???? Look I trust none of you would risk yourselves like this, but maybe you can educate someone through my experience and stuff.
Also rabies does not necessarily cause frothing-at-the-mouth aggression in animals. Docility is also a very common symptom so any wild animal that is ‘friendly’ or ‘likes to be pet’ is suspect. Literally any wild animal is a vector.
Finally, you don’t need to be bitten. All you need is to come into contact with an infected animal’s bodily fluids through a cut that maybe you didn’t notice when you were handling it when it drooled on you.
Never touch a wild animal.
Infection with the rabies virus progresses through three distinct stages.
Prodromal: Stage One. Marked by altered behavioral patterns. “Docility” and “likes to be pet” are very common in the prodromal stage. Usually lasts 1-3 days. An animal in this stage carries virus bodies in its saliva and is infectious.
Excitative: Stage Two. Also called “furious” rabies. This is what everyone thinks rabies is–hyperreacting to stimuli and biting everything. Excessive salivation occurs. Animals in this stage also exhibit hydrophobia or the fear of water; they cannot drink (swallowing causes painful spasms of the throat muscles), and will panic if shown water. Usually lasts 3-4 days before rapidly progressing into the next stage.
Paralytic: Stage Three. Also called “dumb” rabies. As the infection runs its course, the virus starts degrading the nervous system. Limbs begin to fail; animals in this stage will often limp or drag their haunches behind them. If the animal has survived all this way, death will usually come through respiratory arrest: Their diaphragm becomes paralyzed and they stop breathing.
And to add onto the above, saliva isn’t the only infectious fluid. Brain matter is, too. If, somehow, you find yourself in possession of a firearm and faced with a rabid animal, do not go for a head shot. If you do, you will aerosolize the brain matter and effectively create a cloud of infectious material. Breathe it in, and you’ll give yourself an infection.
When I worked in wildlife rehabilitation, I actually did see a rabid animal in person, and it remains one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, because I was literally looking death in the eyes.
A pair of well-intentioned women brought us a raccoon that they thought had been hit by a car. They had found it on the side of the road, dragging its hind legs. They managed–somehow–to get it into a cat carrier and brought it to us.
As they brought it in, I remember how eerily silent it was. Normal raccoons chatter almost constantly. They fidget. They bump around. They purr and mumble and make little grabby-hands at everything. Even when they’re in pain, and especially when they’re stressed. But this one wasn’t moving around inside the carrier, and it wasn’t making a sound.
The clinic director also noticed this, and he asked in a calm but urgent voice for the women to hand the carrier to him. He took it to the exam room and set it on the table while they filled out some forms in the next room. I took a step towards the carrier, to look at our new patient, and without turning around, he told me, “Go to the other side of the room, and stay there.”
He took a small penlight out of the drawer and shone it briefly into the carrier, then sighed. “Bear, if you want to come look at this, you can put on a mask,” he said. “It’s really pretty neat, but I know you’re not vaccinated and I don’t want to take any chances.”
And at that point, I knew exactly what we were dealing with, and I knew that this would be the closest I had ever been to certain death. So I grabbed a respirator from the table and put it on, and held my breath for good measure as I approached the table. The clinic director pointed where I should stand, well back from the carrier door. He shone the light inside again, and I saw two brilliant flashes of emerald green–the most vivid, unnatural eyeshine I had ever seen.
“I don’t know why it does it,” the director murmured, “but it turns their eyes green.”
“What does?” one of the women asked, with uncanny, unintentionally dramatic timing, as she poked her head around the corner.
“Rabies,” the director said. “The raccoon is rabid. Did it bite either of you, or even lick you?” They told us no, said they had even used leather garden gloves when they herded it into the carrier. He told them to throw away the gloves as soon as possible, and steam-clean the upholstery in their car. They asked how they should clean the cat carrier; they wanted it back and couldn’t be convinced otherwise, so he told them to soak it in just barely diluted bleach.
But before we could give them the carrier back, we had to remove the raccoon. The rabid raccoon.
The clinic director readied a syringe with tranquilizers and attached it to the end of a short pole. I don’t remember how it was rigged exactly–whether he had a way to push down the plunger or if the needle would inject with pressure–but all he would have to do was stick the animal to inject it. And so, after sending me and the women back to the other side of the room, he made his fist jab.
He missed the raccoon.
The sound that that animal made on being brushed by the pole can only be described as a roar. It was throaty and ragged and ungodly loud. It was not a sound that a raccoon should ever make. I’m convinced it was a sound that a raccoon physically could not make.
It thrashed inside the carrier, sending it tipping from side to side. Its claws clattered against the walls. It bellowed that throaty, rasping sound again. It was absolutely frenzied, and I was genuinely scared that it would break loose from inside those plastic walls.
Somehow, the clinic director kept his calm, and as the raccoon jolted around inside the cat carrier, he moved in with the syringe again, and this time, he hit it. He emptied the syringe into its body and withdrew the pole.
And then we waited.
We waited for those awful screams, that horrible thrashing, to die down. As we did, the director loaded up another syringe with even more tranquilizer, and as the raccoon dropped off into unconsciousness, he stuck it a second time with the heavier dose. Even then, it growled at him and flailed a paw against the wall.
More waiting, this time to make sure the animal was truly down for the count.
Then, while wearing welder’s gloves, the director opened the door of the carrier and removed the raccoon. She was limp, bedraggled, and utterly emaciated, but she was still alive. We bagged up the cat carrier and gave it to the women again, advising them that now was a good time to leave. They heeded our warning.
I asked if I could come closer to see, and the clinic director pointed where I could stand. I pushed the mask up against my face and tried to breathe as little as possible.
He and his co-director–who I think he was grooming to be his successor, but the clinic actually went under later that year–examined the raccoon together. Donning a pair of nitrile gloves, he reached down and pulled up a handful, a literal fistful, of the raccoon’s skin and released it. It stayed pulled up.
Severe dehydration causes a phenomenon called “skin tenting”. The skin loses its elasticity somewhat, and will be slow to return to its “normal” shape when manipulated. The clinic director estimated that it had been at least four or five days since the raccoon had had anything to eat or drink.
She was already on death’s doorstep, but her rabies infection had driven her exhausted body to scream and lunge and bite.
Because, the scariest thing about rabies (if you ask me) is the way that it alters the behavior of those it infects to increase chances of spreading.
The prodromal stage? Nocturnal animals become diurnal–allowing them to potentially infect most hosts than if they remained nocturnal.
The excitative stage? The infected animal bites at the slightest provocation. Swallowing causes painful spasms, so they drool, coating their bodies in infectious matter. A drink could wash away the virus-charged saliva from their mouth and bodies, so the virus drives them to panic at the sight of water.
(The paralytic stage? By that point, the animal has probably spread its infection to new hosts, so the virus has no need for it any longer.)
Rabies is deadly. Rabies is dangerous. In all of recorded history, one person survived an infection after she became symptomatic, and so far we haven’t been able to replicate that success. The Milwaukee Protocol hasn’t saved anyone else. Just one person. And even then, she still had to struggle to gain back control of her body after all that nerve damage.
Please, please, take rabies seriously.
This has been a warning from your old pal Bear.
I knew how bad it was, but I had never read anything like the raccoon story.
I am not exaggerating when I say that is literally terrifying.
Y'all please read this. That is absolutely hideous. That’s literally like something from a horror movie.
Do not fuck around with wildlife. Or weird strays.
TFW Rabies education comes across your dash because some fuck up calls themselves Rabiosexual.
Rebloggin’ for that raccoon. o.o The original post I can pretty much guarantee is a troll, but it’s useful to know just why rabies is such serious shit.
Education right here
Extra reminder: If you see any animal other than a dog who’s been attacked by a porcupine? It’s rabid.
Dogs are dumb, friendly fucks who will investigate anything; everything else in the animal kingdom knows better than to mess with a porcupine, unless their brain is being ravaged by something beyond their control.
If you see a non-dog animal that has porcupine quills sticking out of it? Don’t try to help it yourself. Call animal control.
@talesfromtreatment @is-the-cat-video-cute tagging you to spread the word? Apparently people have forgotten that rabies is a brain disease, terrifying, is fatal if not treated immediately, the treatment is horrid, and the treatment is very expensive
Also I heard that in the USA, human rabies pre-exposure vaccines are not widely available and cost something like $900
Get your pets rabies vaccine every year, folks. Aside from everything else - and that’s a lot of everything - the test for rabies involves the brain, so the animal will be killed first.
And that is a kind end. The videos of rabies seizures are nightmarish
This is also why you’re not supposed to sleep outside without cover (ie a CLOSED tent) if there are swooping bats in your area. Apparently it can be very hard to realize you’ve been bitten by a bat (vs a bug, I guess it’s very small). Some students from my university were on a trip where they came into contact with bats, taking lots of selfies holding them etc, in the area they were supposed to be sleeping and the professor lost it when they saw some of the pictures. The students were housed elsewhere and the university had everyone vaccinated at the school’s expense- the pre-exposure vax may be expensive, but the number of shots you get post-exposure can vary (as demonstrated above) and it was ASTRONOMICAL.
When I looking for places to move to when I can finally leave the states, I looking to laws and procedures to bring my cat with. Any place that had eradicated rabies, intense policies and quarantines for any animal entering the country, unless you were coming from a different place that had also eradicated it. Some of would put your animal down if they were symptomatic at all. I remember thinking “what can’t rabies just treated?” No it can’t be, putting your pet down is the humane option if there symptomatic.
[image: a sixty-milliliter syringe, with human hand for scale. the syringe barrel is likely around five inches long and likely has an inside diameter of an inch or more.]
When I talk to my students about Louis Pasteur and the development of vaccines, I *have* to talk about rabies.
Do you know why “dog catcher” was such a serious occupation? Because in the late 1800s rabies ran rampant in urban street dogs. Because people who got bitten by street dogs… had probably just gotten a death sentence.
As a child, Louis Pasteur watched a man from his hometown die slowly, painfully, and unstoppably from rabies from a rabid wolf bite and it stuck with him so hard that when he grew up he put his own life on the line studying and working with rabid animals to develop a treatment. (Louis Pasteur’s wife, Marie Pasteur, was also a talented, passionate scientist who worked uncredited by his side. Many of their daughters also took up research.)
When Louis Pasteur did his first human test of his rabies vaccine, it was because a mother came to him desperate. Her 8 year old son had been bitten 14 times by a street dog. Doctors were certain he was going to die. She’d heard what Pasteur was working on and begged him to try to save her son.
He tried.
It worked.
This made national news. This made GLOBAL news.
And in the small Russian town of Beloi, locals read about this miracle cure. Their town had been attacked by a rabid wolf and twenty two people had been bitten. They knew these people were going to die. So the bitten people set off walking, carrying the most injured. They walked for weeks to get to France, where Pasteur was based.
When they arrived, the only French word they knew was “Pasteur.” Their cases were dangerously far along, possibly too far. Pasteur began treatment anyway, pushing with the most aggressive dosages he dared.
This also caught global attention. The world waited on tenterhooks.
Pasteur’s vaccine saved 19 out of 22.
The world was awed.
And when those Russian villagers returned home, to their families, it would have been like seeing the dead return.
Vaccinations changed our world.
Rabies is such a terrifying and serious threat that it has shaped our cultures for centuries. The rabies vaccine is quite possibly the most important human invention since agriculture.
Vaccinate your pets.
Don’t touch wildlife.
Of lesser importance, read Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Murphy & Wasik.
Reblogging because rabies is bloody terrifying.
Also reblogging to remember Louis Pasteur, the nineteen lives he saved then, and the many others since.
Reblogging this because apparently the antivax brainrot has started to extend to pet owners wondering if their pets really need rabies vaccines, because they’re now concerned their pets are going to get autism as well. (I wish I was joking, but according to an Ars Technica article, 37% of polled pet owners are genuinely this stupid.)
Get your pets vaccinated, and if you know any pet owners who are antivaxxers, maybe keep your pets away from theirs.
oh for fuck’s sake. DO NOT FUCK AROUND WITH RABIES.
Me: I'm going to look at horse forums, I bet the drama there is so funny
Me after 4 hours of horse forums: Damn....those people really love and care about their horses...
See, I think horse people are Like That because you can't do anything with a horse without entering into The Mind of the Horse. Like yeah, to ride a horse you need an intimate understanding of how its body moves and how your body is in contact with it and everything it is seeing and hearing and feeling in its own body and how your body responding to the horse's movement and reactions creates feedbacks upon the horse's response—which in itself is borderline spiritually merging yourself with the horse consciousness —but you can't even clean a horse's feet or lead it into a pasture without some power to understand What It Is Like To Be A Horse, because a horse is a Giant Beast with strong instincts that can drive it to kill or maim in a heartbeat, and it's the horse's trust and confidence in you and by extension your trust and confidence in the horse that keeps you both safe.
So being a horse person seems to be 90% stuff like standing in the stall trying to telepathically Enter The Consciousness of the Horse to try to unlock why the horse is fucking scared shitless of mops
and subsequently to Understand the Deep Psychological Foundation of Horse Self-Confidence so as to create a Scenario where the horse can encounter a mop and feel empowered and strong rather than Murderously Terrified
I have also learned that there are a lot of riding instructors, or horse people otherwise in leadership positions, on radioactively toxic power trips.
It makes sense to me. If you're the kind of person that wants to exercise power over others, working with horses (exceedingly difficult to overpower) would by necessity hone that tendency into something truly diabolical.
Yeah this is exactly it. Horses are herd animals. Their instincts upon seeing a new thing is to look around at everybody else and figure out what the fuck is going on. You need to be the lead horse. You need to be the horse that your horse trusts enough that it will follow you and understand that the mop is not scary, because you are there and you aren't scared of it. if you are scared and jumpy, or god forbid you are the thing that is scary, then your horse is going to freak out and kill you.
Teach your children to respect animals and the world around them. Teach them that nature isn't their toy and that their actions have consequences. Teach them compassion for other beings and creatures.
A lot of people on this post are focusing on pets, which is fair but not what I intended. Any decent pet owner would teach their children how to respect their pets, their dogs and cats and the like, but pretty much everyone neglects lessons about other animals and nature in general.
Teach your kids that:
nests are important and that they need to be left untouched and undisturbed
they should NEVER take an animal that they find outside and that if they find an injured animal, they should give it space and find an adult to help
wild animals in general need a wide berth and that ANY animal can be dangerous if it feels threatened
wild animals are not pets under any circumstances
it's kinder and very easy to catch and release bugs outside instead of killing them
all bugs are important, even spiders and wasps and other scary ones
everything in nature has a job in general, and everything has a role to fill
something being scary or creepy does not mean it deserves to die
Let other living beings have autonomy. They're living their own lives, doing their own thing. There's no reason to disrupt them. If your paths cross, let them be. If you have to have to interact, then any interact should happen with the least amount of harm possible (which also includes stress).
The string bean
that is a dinosaur.
fresh newborn house centipede!!!
edit: i have been deceived.
for realsies this time
People who like mantises but aren't that into entomology are always "orchid mantises" this and "orchid mantises" that. Overrated. Can we talk about Toxodera integrifolia for a minute:
(Image links because as much as it pains me I've never seen one of these beauties irl: 1 2 3)
Like how are these things real. Girl what is that thorax shape. Why are you wearing eyeliner. And the colors? Absolutely fire. This is a 10/10 insect if you ask me.
found a cute moth!! i wish the video wasn't so indecipherably crunchy but serves me right for filming it with my ailing 8-year-old iphone 7.
it's certainly an underwing moth, and i'm pretty sure it's an oldwife underwing (Catocala palaeogama). it matches pretty flawlessly with that and there are big differences between it and other members of the genus. i wish i got a better look at the titular underwings but i was more focused on taking pictures and releasing it, i don't know how long it had been stuck on my porch but it seemed tired. it flew directly into a spiderweb trying to escape me (hence the gunk in my box) but luckily for it the web belonged to porch spider #25, who is a baby orchard orb weaver maybe 1/30th of its size. 25 is prone to dropping off the web and curling into a ball at the slightest threat so the moth was in no danger. but still! silly thing to do. their flight pattern was described as "erratic" which i definitely understand. i could go on but this post is getting long,,
look at this incredibly haunting coyote from Ohio I saw on inaturalist
I have a lot of really annoying thoughts about coyotes and how its like, a known fact that eastern coyotes are wolf and dog hybrids,
and the current red wolf population came from an effort to separate the "pure" red wolves from coyote hybrids,
and the effective population size of red wolves (genetically how much the diversity is equivalent to) is like, 10 animals, which means there's severe inbreeding depression,
but the red wolf genes are STILL OUT THERE they're just IN COYOTES and a lot of the coyotes probably have a HIGH CONTENT OF WOLF
And there has been SO much controversy over whether red wolves are their own species and a lot of people insist they're "just coyotes"
and people don't respect coyotes even if they do respect wolves and think they are totally different even though they have intermixed often in their evolutionary history.
and people keep shooting endangered wolves because "I thought it was a coyote,"
and basically one species is valued and the other species is considered to have no value even though they're not even totally separate things and a wolf that's part coyote has "polluted" genes but a coyote that's part wolf is just like. completely worthless and unremarkable for conservation.
anyways. Look at this handsome animal. Wonder what its genes are like. The tucked in waist says "dog" to me. Amazing how these creatures are evolving before our eyes and people are like "yeah yeah coyotes whatever"
@cosmosinmycoffee omg thank you for this addition, I hadn't heard of this playing out with grolar bears
I just Do Not get this prejudice towards naturally formed hybrids and denying that they have any conservation value. Yes, maybe it happened because of anthropogenic changes to the animals habitat, but...so what? Isn't it amazing that evolution can pull these neat tricks to ensure a creature's survival and the preservation of genetic diversity?
Another thing—I've read a lot of papers and studies about evolutionary history of species, and it is super normal for species to split, hybridize and blend together, split even more, and hybridize again over and over and over throughout the evolution of the clade.
It's called reticulate evolution and it's a major reason why resolving the taxonomic relationships of groups that radiated rapidly is a HUGE pain in the ass. A lot of times, species in the same genus are perfectly reproductively compatible with each other, just separated by niche or by the area they live in, and when those boundaries shift or when genetic diversity is scarce the species can merge again.
With red wolves, the conservationists have gone to great lengths to prevent hybridization with coyotes, including sterilizing coyotes in the region they're being released into the wild, and I just...I know there's reasoning behind it, they want to preserve the expression of wolf genes as much as possible, but I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I think of how little genetic diversity exists in the red wolf population and how inbred those animals are becoming.
There's just something about humans doing so much intervention and effort to stop the wolves from taking coyotes as mates to maintain their "genetic purity"...Animals try to avoid inbreeding. Most animals have a drive to disperse and find mates they're not related to. And the coyote-wolf hybrids are ridiculously successful little beasts, more successful and adaptable than either of their progenitors.
Like I get wanting to preserve the wolf phenotype and the niche it can fill, but these animals are just doing what is healthy and beneficial for their offspring. They don't know or care what a species is.
oh my god y'all i've been reading a bunch more about this and the scientists are fightingggggggg
basically it has been traditional to think hybrids are maladapted evolutionary dead ends, but it turns out hybridization is common and natural and plays a major role in evolution, which is bad news for the idea of a "species," which is a BIG PROBLEM for conservation, because...protected species, endangered species list, species conservation.
All the laws are based on species!!! In fact, hybrids are often considered a THREAT to species conservation. But the scientists are looking at the evidence and it's like okay species lowkey aren't real so what are we conserving.
One paper I looked at points out the, uhh... "value-laden" terminology used to describe hybridization—words like "contamination" and "pollution" which....hey that sounds an awful lot like eugenics?
And it literally is! It's an obsession with "purity" without considering how the ecosystem is actually affected! It turns out that a lot of the claims of hybridization forming a threat to rare species, are bullshit with no actual evidence. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that hybridization can sometimes benefit rare species, or even form something entirely new that is better at survival than its parents.
For example, coral is under extreme and immediate threat from climate change. There is a case where two declining species of coral have hybridized and formed a third new species, that is way better adapted to climate change—in fact its population is increasing. Scientists watching this are like "...guys? I think the field of conservation might be terribly wrong about the whole 'hybridization is the devil' thing."
In fact, we could end up destroying species that otherwise could survive by trying to bottle them up in a tiny, inbred "pure" gene pool, instead of allowing their genes to continue existing in a robust mixed population.
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
here is one of the articles
Experience the Moth.
reblog if you want to experience the moth