#autotomy

[oarfishcouncil]

Can't stop me now (here is the full video)

[midnightsnackformenotyou]

[ytcomments-archive]

[onenicebugperday]

@im-flashtoo​ submitted: Seen at work (kitsap county, WA, USA) - I wish my phone had captured this pretty little guy better, he was so colorful with the yellow on his mantle!

What a beautiful little man (gender-neutral)! Looks like one of the taildropper slugs in the genus Prophysaon. They come in a wide variety  of colors and patterns! As is suggested by the name, they can apparently self-amputate part of their tail as a defensive mechanism! Neat :)

[aemperatrix]

Wisława Szymborska (tr. Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)

[mosscollector]

Wislawa Szymborska - Autotomy

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two. It abandons one self to a hungry world and with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation, retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body between what instantly become two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other. Here hope and there despair.

If there are scales, the pans don’t move. If there is justice, this is it.

To die just as required, without excess. To grow back just what’s needed from what’s left.

We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true. But only into flesh and a broken whisper. Into flesh and poetry.

The throat on one side, laughter on the other, quiet, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar— just three little words, like a flight’s three feathers.

The abyss doesn’t divide us. The abyss surrounds us.

In memoriam Halina Poświatowska

[llovelymoonn]

words by wisława szymborska

archeology (tr. clare cavanagh and stanisław barańczak) \\ landscape (1976) \\ the joy of writing (tr. czesław miłosz) \\ view with a grain of sand: "birthday" (1995) \\ map: collected and last poems: "under one small star" (tr. clare cavanagh and stanisław barańczak) \\ poems, new and collected, 1957-1997 \\ view with a grain of sand: selected poems: "tortures" (tr. clare cavanagh and stanisław barańczak) \\ view with a grain of sand: "autotomy" \\ view with a grain of sand: selected poems: "could have" (tr. clare cavanagh and stanisław barańczak) \\ nonrequired reading (1973)

[wran]

Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies

Their severed heads get around just fine until they regenerate perfectly functioning, parasite-free new bodies, scientists say.