I Want To Talk To The Animals @talktotheanimals - Tumblr Blog

sitting-on-me-bum

A mother Chincoteague pony nuzzling her newborn foal on Assateague Island.

Goran Anastasovski

thombalan

gremlininho

looking. at you

michaelnordeman

Eurasian red squirrel/Sciurus vulgaris/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (15 July 2022).

pentecost

these aren’t my cats

thewriterkb

A Pangolin Procuring its Food.

Pangolins are covered in Kertatin scales (the same compound that makes human nails), which are used as a defense system. When attacked, Pangolins curl up, using these scales for protection, and can also release a noxious spray - similar to skunks.

They have tongues that can be 50cm long (1.5ft) and are so long that they begin within their chest cavity. They eat approximately 70 million insects a year, and do not have teeth, but inside have specialised spikes within their stomachs that break down food.

Sadly, Pangolins are fighting extinction as they are considered the most trafficked mammal in the world. In fact, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature estimates that a Pangolin is taken from the wild every 5 minutes.

Pangolins are used for their meat, and like a lot of other endangered species, are traded due to nonsense and pseudo-scientific health claims within Asia and Africa. It is believed that their ground-up scales can stimulate lactation, or can cure cancer and asthma.

markscherz

Making friends in the forest. Boophis septentrionalis (possibly B. andreoni).

Photo © Mark D. Scherz, 2016

thewriterkb

X-Ray of Dog Drinking Water.

Via io9, TBR

prokopetz

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

calloutnevvegas

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

revretch

….. Didn’t know most of that

iamthekaijuking

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

revretch

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

bogleech

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

assuming-dinosaur

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.