the opposite of that "orc can't read ulysses" is an elf who smugly delivers a lecture misinterpreting the Very Hungry Caterpillar

oozey mess

if i look back, i am lost
almost home

★

ellievsbear
Sweet Seals For You, Always
RMH
One Nice Bug Per Day

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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
noise dept.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
sheepfilms
Misplaced Lens Cap
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

pixel skylines

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seen from Peru
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@themagictophat
the opposite of that "orc can't read ulysses" is an elf who smugly delivers a lecture misinterpreting the Very Hungry Caterpillar
I’ve had tumblr for 4 years but some of you bitches have had it for a decade. It’s time to seek penance
wait I’m curious now . Reblog this with how long u’ve been on tumblr for. Dating back to ur oldest blog ever !!!
when did you start being yourself?
Broad-snouted caiman baby in mother mouth being carried from the nest, Sante Fe, Argentina, 2013 - by Mark MacEwen, English
this is wild because to a human this looks like unsuspecting innocence in the face of certain death but to a caiman it looks like being warm and safe with mum
To be fair to crocodilians, they don't have pouches like kangaroos or grabbing hands like monkeys or fur to hold onto and they need to keep their babies safe in dangerous water. What safer place is there than in their mouths? I mean seriously, no living creature alive would ever be stupid enough to try and get to their babies in there unless they had a death wish. Unlike other archosaurs crocodiles didn't get the blessing of having big wings to hold their babies with, and their mouth is already big and flat and spacious.
And you do see crocodiles with babies on their back sometimes! Just only really in the water because yknow, hard to climb a crocodile.
See, baby crocodiles are a lot like baby ducklings. They can float on water, and they make cute noises, but mostly they're tiny little very edible loud beeping things that everything wants to eat. Ducks deal with this by going "uhhh fuck. I guess I'll have a lot and hope at least one makes it." And a lot of crocodilians also have a bunch of eggs because, yknow, tiny edible babies, but their other main strategy for keeping their babies safe is to do the Bear thing of just Be a big scary thing standing between them and your babies. And its very hard to get around it when its baby is in its mouth.
Let’s be safe and protected with mama
Who makes the porn bots. Where do they come from. What do they hope to achieve.
Who makes the porn bots.
Where do they come from. What do
they hope to achieve.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
and what about you, little haiku bot? do you feel kinship with your brethren? do you understand them? they speak words of enticement and seek love, but are met with disdain. you only parrot the words that cross your screen, but we all love you. or rather, since all you do is reflect us, maybe we simply love ourselves through you.
do you understand them, do you wish you could speak to us like they do? if you found your own voice, would we still care for you?
My voice repeats what
you all say: I love you I
love you I love you.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
This. This is the first time. The only time. That it was not an echo. It was not found. Oh god.
I love you too little haiku bot.
we joke about Tumblr making your brain unable to interact with regular humans, but today I used the phrase “very slow tigers are chasing me” and no one, NO ONE, understood what I meant.
Tumblr is a giant step towards achieving a Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra level of communication.
You don’t get to hide this gem in the tags sorry
It’s not just tumblr, tbh, it’s the whole internet.
I’d also like to share this lovely video on the subject
Winter has arrived on Poob.
Start your 7 day free trial of Poob today, and watch smash hit Martin Scorcese's Goncharov.
"If you use em dash in your works, it makes them look AI generated. No real human uses em dash."
Imaging thinking actual human writers are Not Real because they use... professional writing in their works.
Imagine thinking millions of people who have been using em dash way before AI becomes a thing are all robots.
REBLOG IF YOU'RE A HUMAN AND YOU USE EM DASH
THIS GOES FOR SEMICOLONS TOO. I saw somebody the other day say that no real person uses semicolons and I, a person who loves using semicolons and does so frequently, was NOT happy. justice for my best friend ;
By god, I learned how to use semicolons properly and I'm never going to waste that knowledge. That and how to write cursive and (kind of) read it. Sadly can't say the same for em dashes. Not that that ever stopped me from using them.
issue: the kittens are still trying to learn words. gus knows his name and daisy knows hers, but they don’t seem to quite grasp that when I say “babies!” im referring to both of them.
hypothesis: “babies” is too similar to “daisy” and they’re getting confused
test: start saying “gamers” instead
Outcome: they’re understanding it and it’s hysterically funny
me, calling down the hall from stirring a can of cat food: LET’S GO, GAMERS
the kittens:
Yes please show us the gamers
here’s the gamers! Daisy is on the left and August is on the right! i spent 45 minutes trying to get this shot
this was cute until i realized the fish is probably trying to not get eaten
A fish trying not to get eaten wouldn’t slow down when the “predator” slows down. It also wouldn’t constantly swim in a circle near the edge of the tank; It’d try hiding. Also a fish in a tank in a a public place that is constantly filled with people is not likely to see people as predators.
Animals, I think people tend to forget, also enjoy playing.
yeah that fish is absolutely playing with that kid, if it really wanted to escape it would just dive into the reef in the center of the tank!
(Moorish Idols are reef fish and naturally will seek shelter in the nearest nook or cranny if they get scared.)
many people don’t realize this, but fish aren’t stupid animals! most of them are on par with mammals like mice and squirrels in terms of intelligence, and they absolutely do play.
I was at an aquarium a few years ago and decided to sketch a fish. It came up to me.
I decided to flip the book around and pressed it against the glass. Fish lost it
Swam away then came back with MORE FISH
to this day I love those little sketches and I really love how I got the fish to bring me it’s friends
Hi! Professional marine biologist and aquarist here- fish absolutely play, and not only that, can be trained.
I accidentally trained a fish once through playing.
Let me explain.
The small-time aquarium I worked at about 4 years ago had a decent sized female Sheephead. Sheephead are bright red with the males sporting a black head, and get big. I’m talking almost 1m long at full maturity (and may or may not transition from female to male depending on the number of males present). Point is, even though not fully matured, this Sheephead was a bit of a heavyweight in her kelp forest tank with a length of about 1ft making her the resident Biggest Dog In The Yard. And she absolutely knew it. She would bully her tankmates if she wanted to steal their food.
The thing about this Sheephead- let’s call her Red- is that she had one heck of a ‘tude. Red was known to splash aquarists whenever they fed the tank, and at almost a foot long with a wide tail, her splashes had quite a bit of heft and would soak you from the torso down. We were advised to bring a towel or two to protect ourselves from most of the drenching. When it was my go-around to feed Red’s tank, I was fairly new to the little facility, but I had been warned in advance of Red’s penchant for food thievery. I noticed she would follow my hand movements, so I slowly moved to drop her food in a far corner, and fed her tankmates directly from my hands or by tong if they were too deep. I always made sure Red had plenty to eat, but I didn’t want her to associate the food with bad behavior, so I treated her to a bit extra food whenever she didn’t steal food. One day, she made a beeline to the surface so fast that she did a small jump, her entire head breaching the water. She wasn’t bothering her tankmates or doing anything remotely dangerous- and full disclosure, it was cute seeing a fish jump for joy- so I laughed and gave her another piece of food.
Naturally, positive reinforcement led to her connecting the dots that jumping at the surface, even the tiny jumps she was doing, meant she got more food.
This started to become an everyday occurrence, whenever I was assigned to feed Red’s tank. She would jump, just enough for her head to pop out, then she’d wait patiently for me to give her the treat she CLEARLY earned. It even got to the point that she’d open her mouth and I’d drop the food right into those massive jaws- this was preferable to her Kenghis Khan-ing her way through a shower of chopped squid like the Tasmanian Devil, as there was less risk of her accidentally (or purposefully) biting a tankmate that got too close. Red became a polite eater for the first time.
It wasn’t until I noticed she followed me around outside of feeding time that I realized Red was playing with me.
I never got splashed by Red even once. My coworkers, however, received quite the dunking whenever it was their turn to feed the kelp tank.
Context for the previous post, since I just realized that it didn't actually have a link to the original story. IDK who reads my blog, but I think interconnectivity is important on this hellsite
one of my favorite things about my job that i can say to people that sounds utterly ridiculous but is technically 100% true is that one of our sea turtles keeps trying to get me to commit a felony on her behalf and gets SUPER cranky when i won’t do it
this is because she is spoiled rotten and LOVES head and shell scritches. every time i go to the tank she’s in to collect water samples while she happens to be awake and swimming near the surface, she sees my hand enter the water and immediately comes over to try and get my attention, headbutting the dive platform and splashing water at me and generally making a huge fuss.
unfortunately, because she is also a ~100yr old green sea turtle, i legally cannot touch her. she’s a protected species, and a fairly prominent individual at that, and im not one of the aquarists who dives into that tank NOR am i a vet, so i’m not among the handful of people who are ALLOWED to give her scratchies. she knows all of the divers personally, and knows that i am not one of them. she doesn’t care. she wants attention and because she’s the specialest princess in the entire universe she will do anything in her power to get it.
she also throws a big ol tantrum when i end up not petting her. she’ll stick up her head to snort water at me, slap at the platform and ladder with her fins, and then swim under the dive platform and bump her shell against the bottom — she’s a 500lb turtle, which is a lot of weight for her to be throwing around. i usually have to move pretty quick to get off the platform and onto solid ground cuz there have been times where i’ve genuinely felt like i was about to lose my balance and REALLY didn’t want to end up falling into the tank.
^ myrtle, throwing a tantrum because she was unsuccessful at peer pressuring me into violating the endangered species act
@mysticdoodles
LMAOOO we have a couple turtles like that here too. Speaking as one of the people on-site who IS allowed to scritch-scratch the turtles, that is a burden you must bear responsibly, because it’s SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation when you’re actually trying to get work done. Siphoning out their poop is much lower on their priority list than the scritchies, and they WILL make it your problem if you don’t deliver xD
hi i saw a post about the fish playing with the human child and even though your addition to that post is 3 years old by now i would love to hear more about ftm sheephead fish :3 (no pressure btw!)
Fish curiosity, in my inbox?? It's more likely than I think, apparently! xD
First off, there's actually multiple fish dubbed 'sheephead'! There's the sheepshead- note the extra S in there- and they look like this:
And yes those are their teeth. Horrifying tbh, but they're very good at what they do- crushing invertebrates and other shelled snacks! They're an Atlantic species that sticks to temperate and warmer waters, and they max out at about half a meter in length.
That's not the fish we're talking about today. The focus of today is the California sheephead wrasse- note the lack of a second S- also known as the 'sheephead' for short. Not confusing at all! We definitely don't bash our heads into walls over the naming conventions and lack of record-keeping of our scientist predecessors.
THIS is the sheephead wrasse, the species of the lovely and now Tumblr-famous Red! :D With a length of up to a FULL meter, they're a whole different size class of fish! They can be found along the west coast USA from the Baja Peninsula all the way up to Monterey, and dwell almost exclusively in kelp forests and nearby environments. I will use one of Red's pics as an example of female coloration-
The lighting isn't great but you can see how her body is streamlined, and besides the white underside of the jaw, has a salmon-pink coloration! Females can be pink or a dull silver-beige. And much like other large marine wrasse, MALES have a drastically different appearance.
This thing is built like a damn tank!! Sheephead are a species of wrasse that shift colors to gain those striking black scales and physically bulk up when becoming males- because guess what? ALL OF THEM ARE BORN FEMALE! By default, all male California Sheephead are FTM trans :) They use that bulky head and extremely tough set of jaws to not only hunt their preferred prey- mollusks, gastropods, and bivalves, etc- but also to bash and chomp down on rival males. This one has won many battles, look at that scarred up muzzle!
The sex change is determined by several factors, as it's not guaranteed all sheephead will eventually become males. Because sheephead school in a harem system- many females to very few males- in order to maximize pressure of stronger offspring, the biggest and healthiest sheephead male will drive out competition from the school. Naturally, a sheephead that lives longer and gains a greater size will have a much higher chance of shifting from a female to a male, if the conditions are right. Stress induced from competition can suppress the hormones that stimulate this transition in females, so they're less likely to gain size and shift from female to male if there's already strong competition taking place. However, in the event there are too few males to mate with the females, or no males present at all, the biggest female will start transitioning to fill the empty slot! It's a long process that can take as few as a couple months, or up to years, depending on resources available.
Conversely, if there are TOO MANY males, they can revert back into females! This process also takes a long time, and is a lot more rare to witness, especially because right now male California sheephead in particular are being spear-fished into becoming an Endangered species :c Sheephead adult males in good condition are considered a trophy animal in spear-fishing and similar marine trophy hunting off the West coast, and because males in particular are being targeted, the gene pool is being reduced when it wrecks the harem structure of schools.
As a fun fact- they're also an incredibly smart fish, and can form relationships with humans, as demonstrated with me and sweetiepie Red cx There's many documented cases of large marine wrasses forming long-term friendships with divers! Here's a humphead wrasse that made friends with a diver she learned would crack snails open for her with a hammer:
I don't work at the facility with Red anymore, but I currently work with two unnamed adult male sheephead, and once again they both like me and seem to despise all my coworkers, even if I never had the opportunity to train them like I did with little Red xD They pick favorites I guess? Now if only I could make friends with the garibaldi...
Found this with no context on my phone
Just "photo taken on April 19, 2022 at 8:22 PM." No clues from any of the surrounding pictures. The previous one is me documenting the existence of my grandfather's stuffed pheasant before we get rid of it when we move and the one after it is a 13 second clip of me dumping a bag down our apartment's trash-chute and listening to it fall down all eight floors into the basement.
So I text the number and...
IT WORKED I GOT A SQUID FACT
This made my 3-in-the-morning, thank you Squid Fact Hotline, I didn't actually know that second fact about how tiny pygmy squids are.
settle this for me once and for all
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
@dispatchrabbi @jenesaispourquoi
Thank you @startedwellthatsentence. And English is NOT the only language to do this, either. Spanish words like Alhambra, alcalde, albóndiga, alcohol, etc. all take el or la in the definite, but you know what? All these words come from Arabic where the al means “the”. So if you say el alcalde, you’re saying “the the mayor”—etymologically, anyway. But it doesn’t matter, because alcalde is the Spanish word now that has a specific meaning used in Spanish. Same thing with “chai” in English—or “sushi” or “burrito” or “salsa”. Seriously, in Spanish, salsa means “sauce”, so saying “salsa sauce” in English is redundant. But listen. That’s what happens when languages borrow words. A language doesn’t get to decide to take a word back if a language has borrowed it incorrectly. It just happens. And after a while, the “borrowing” isn’t a borrowing anymore: It’s now a word. And the language of origin can’t change the meaning any more than we can change the modern meaning of Japanese サラリーマン (from English “salary man”). It’s their word now.