Kodama Krossing @synesthetician - Tumblr Blog

mammalianmammals

Brown Hyenas (Parahyaena brunnea), adults and pup, family Hyaenidae, Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa

Photographs by Marcus Westberg

pnglove

Mate, you’ve got a chubby lizard on your dashboard

markscherz

Graced by Geckolepis typica from Madagascar. I love that they’re quite round creatures and then they have these dainty little toes. Also, their scales are full bone and both scale and skin come off when they get grabbed, which is…unpleasant. Consequently, catching these geckos for research without damaging them requires special techniques. 19th century researchers used bundles of cotton wool, but I imagine this wasn’t very effective, because cotton still has a lot of friction and the friction would pull the skin and scales off. In my (quite extensive) experience, the best technique is to carefully and quickly flick the geckos from their tree trunk or branch into an open dry plastic bag using a finger or stick.

mrskayathefrog

'scuse me, Mr @markscherz, does it harm the gecko for the scales to come off?

like, of course it harms them but... can they grow back? like how some lizards can drop their tails and eventually the tails grow back

markscherz

Not only do they grow back, but they come back so well that we cannot even tell where they have ripped off before. This is very weird, because when a lizard loses its tail, it is very obvious where it has been lost and regrown. Not so these chaps. They seek out a humid place to hide, and within a few weeks, skin and scales have started to regrow. The fact that they can do this so well is the reason a team has just sequenced their genome. I believe it is hoped that the skin regeneration tech they have built into their cells could eventually be harnessed for human skin grafts.

depsidase

the habitat loss, food source loss, extreme weather, etc caused by climate change are even more deadly to birds than any power plant.

wind turbines unfortunately do kill birds. but not at the numbers worth tearing down all the wind turbines. environmental assessments are always necessary when putting up infrastructure projects like this to mitigate potential harm but climate change itself is worse for all species. and that climate change is almost entirely caused by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas.)

and wind power is one of many ways we get ourselves off of the dirty ass environmental disaster that is extracting and burning fossil fuels for electricity.