Fai_Ryy
almost home
occasionally subtle
Today's Document
Sweet Seals For You, Always
noise dept.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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shark vs the universe
Andulka
Cosmic Funnies
pixel skylines
DEAR READER
Product Placement
PR's Tumblrdome
trying on a metaphor
wallacepolsom
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Show & Tell
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@tothewildwood
Off the coast of the Cape, a time capsule - Philip Hoare - The Boston Globe - "As humans radically alter the planet, unsettling change penetrates even the watery depths"
Once the world’s seas were like this. Once you could look out from the coasts of New England or California, the British south coast or into the Tasman Sea, and witness oceans alive with animals.
Image by Gordon Studer.
There is something unsatisfying, almost nihilistic, about this idea. It deprives us of answers. As Casadevall wrote in a review, it says that virulence can arise by chance, ‘in a process that has no explanation, except for that it happened’. According to this outlook, we’re not central actors in the dramas that affect our lives. We’re not even bit players. We are just passers-by, walking outside the theatre and getting hit by flying props.
The most important parts of a microbe’s world are, after all, other microbes. They’ve been dealing with each other for billions of years before we came along. When we step into the crossfire of this ancient war, we risk becoming collateral damage. Like Wells’s Martians, we too can be laid low by coincidence.
There are, of course, all sorts of creepy crawlies that colonise the human body, from botflies to tapeworms, but the idea that a beetle accustomed to living in a dung heap could come and go from the human rectum as it pleased smelled a little like, well, you know.
Perhaps not for the faint of heart, this article hilariously outlines some cool things you may not have known about dung beetles.
I think we could do what's needed. But collectively we simply aren't. Sometimes I don't see humanity as being capable of fixing the problems we're creating. We'd have to agree to fix them. Before that, we'd have to care. We're not doing enough of any of those things. Too often, we're in denial. And we feel fine. Our main solution is that snooze button. So, let's not worry about the people of Bangladesh, Kiribati, New York and Miami, or the 23rd century. Pleasant dreams.
Strong opinion piece on the effects of climate change and our willful inaction, from Carl Safina,
At ethology’s core is Rodin’s and Rilke’s deep, mindful, detailed and patient observation, watching one’s subjects with exquisite care and attention in order to penetrate their world, rather than forcibly adjusting them to ours.
Great essay on why we like to look at animals.
We need another and a wiser… concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston
How Christmas Island protects red crabs during their annual migration: overpasses, underpasses, and a lot of people raking them off the roads.
Not clever infrastructure that deals with a nuisance, it’s a community support system for unique natural resource. This is how towns and national governments can work together to live with nature.
This is fascinating!
"To be underwater with a bluefin tuna is to witness the divine sense of nature."
- Brian Skerry, Swimming With Giants | National Geographic Proof
Yosemite HD II on Vimeo
Breathtaking timelapse of Yosemite National Park filmed over the course of over 200 miles backpacking through the park, from the same team that brought us Yosemite HD.
Colin Delehanty: WEBSITE | TUMBLR | FACEBOOK | TWITTER Sheldon Neill: WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER
Leviathan (by Howard Hall)
Stunning video featuring whale ballet!
[H/T: TreeHugger]
Bristlecone pines are the oldest trees on earth. The oldest, Methuselah, has lived more than 4,800 years.
From their perch atop the White Mountains at California’s eastern edge, the bristlecones have survived as entire human civilizations have arisen and disappeared.
But there’s a new threat to the bristlecone’s existence, a globe-spanning emanation more menacing than anything they’ve faced in thousands of years.
Learn more on KPCC’s AudioVision.
Sad and depressing.
‘The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace’ - NYTimes.com
A lovely little video summing up Alfred Russel Wallace's life.
Video -- Gorgeous Time-Lapse: Maui's Stunning Skies -- National Geographic
Sitting on a dormant volcano with a full view of the sky, the U.S. Air Force's Maui Space Surveillance Complex is ideally placed to monitor man-made objects orbiting Earth. This time-lapse from Airman magazine captures some of the truly stellar sights visible from this center, which sits at the top of Mount Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii.
Penguin Pair, Antarctica (via Photo of the Day: Best Pictures of November 2013, Gallery - National Geographic)
I took this picture at Port Lockroy during my trip to Antartica in 2010. The two penguins almost touching flippers, looking at each other, and captured against the majestic frozen background, seemed romantically involved.
Photo by Marius Ilies.
The name Rhinochimera breaks apart with meaning: rhinos = nose and chimaera = marine monster, but this fish has many names. (Our favorite: straightnose rabbitfish.) This one is swimming in Hydrographer Canyon, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, and was filmed on a Okeanos Explorer Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition dive.
via oceanexplorergov.
“Occasionally, the pen of natural selection writes a murder mystery on the pages of evolution.
Ornithologist Douglas Mock (and colleagues)
Discovered via this fascinating article by Brian Switek: Sea Otters Are Jerks. So Are Dolphins, Penguins, and Other Adorable Animals.
Natural selection has sculpted the mammalian forelimb into horses’ front legs, dolphins’ fins, bats’ wings, and my soccer ball-catching hands. Why, on the path from the primordial soup to us curious hairless apes, did evolution house the essential male reproductive organs in an exposed sac? It's like a bank deciding against a vault and keeping its money in a tent on the sidewalk.
Are testicles external for cooling, galloping, display, or something else? | Slate
