tarde venientibus ossa

rheine | 20s | labrat sideblog

[volossiae]

hot single scientists researching grinding in your area

[fjordfolk]

a lot of 'don't get a pet unless you can afford xyz' and not enough 'don't get a pet if you can't imagine euthanizing it'

[threedollarsdotcom]

scientists are hard at work exploring each others bodies

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

When I was in grad school, one of my professors shared how to write a scientific paper (unsolicited, during a discussion on pelicans).

First, he said, you write the methods. You’ve been doing the methods for months, you know what goes there. You know what questions you’re trying to answer and how you went about answering them.

Now that you’ve done that, write the results. Do your analysis. Take some time to bask in having done that and chew it over.

Next: the introduction. What information do you need to set up the conclusion? Do you need to write the six worst sentences known to man as a draft conclusion so you can go back that up in the introduction? Do that.

Write that conclusion. Tie things up, you’ve done amazing. It’s looking good! Unfortunately. The hardest part is yet to come:

The abstract. An unholy melange of introduction, results, and conclusion. The thing that 90% of readers are going to stop after reading. The ultimate test of your ability to communicate your science. Thank goodness you have all this prep work done and aren’t trying to create it out of nothing! Thank goodness you didn’t try to write it first because it was the first thing on the page!

Anyway I’ve taken that approach to a lot of other kinds of writing since. I write the part I know (because of months of development) and then what that will mean, and then I work out what I need to support that, and then I write the part everyone will read.

[alisahuman]

[bedupolker]

It feels cool to be "in" on celebrity gossip before anyone else. I ran into Californian Condor V9 and looked her up on the condor lookup website. It says her current mate is dead and she has no kids but I saw her with a new man AND a juvenile.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Whale strandings draw emotional responses. But repeated rescues can cause more harm

A humpback whale repeatedly restranding in shallow waters for more than three weeks has become the focus of a complex debate.

A really important article about the stranding of “Timmy” that happened in Germany.

Pushing an exhausted and sick whale back into the ocean again and again only prolongs that animal’s suffering and potentially even worsens it.

Strandings are rarely just misadventure - the whale or dolphin is usually sick or too weak to fight against the ocean currents. They may also be extremely dehydrated from lack of food because they haven’t got any energy.

Yet time and time again we see people blocking a whale from stranding or members of the general public dragging the whale back into the ocean by their tail. And getting very upset when they’re asked to put their ego aside and call the professional marine mammal rescue teams instead of making a viral video posing themselves as a big hero.

I know people want to help. But it’s endlessly frustrating to get a text to respond to a whale stranding as someone who is trained, only to find out someone’s just pushed the whale back into the ocean without any assessment.

It’s likely that whale is going to re-strand somewhere else - often a quieter more secluded area that’s harder to get to. Or they just give up and drown.

Rarely will they swim off into the sunset with no issues.

[da-janela-lateral]

Outdoor cat owners have no concept of basic ecology and it shows. "You're saying my kitty is EVIL for following its instincts???????" obviously not, you idiot, its an animal. I don't blame it because it is designed to hunt and doesn't understand human morality. The cat's human owner, though, should stop pretending that millions of people letting their pets hunt native species for fun WON'T make their ecossystem collapse. If you stop hearing birdsong in your neighborhood its your fault 👍.

[da-janela-lateral]

Also cats are domestic animals????? Its your pet. Its your responsability to take care of it and it certainly doesn't look like you are doing this if your pet spends 90% of the day on the streets. Outside cats are in great risk for being ran over, stolen, beaten, poisoned, mauled or eaten by wild animals. A mildly bored cat is way better than a dead one and besides? Just offer your pet enrichment. You don't need to risk its life to keep it happy. You can even let it outside with supervision!! Look how many options we have. Insisting the only way to keep your cat happy is allowing it to wreck the environment and possibly die is not only fucking irresponsible, but also lazy and shows that you don't really care for the wildlife around you.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Robert Gillmor (British, 1936-2022, b. Reading, Berkshire, England) - Avocet Fly Past, Linocut Print

[fluorescentbrains]

citationless behavior

[hoot-alex]

[threedollarsdotcom]

Novody fucks with my beautiful biohazard

[galileosballs]

All this talk of Toxic Yuri, and nobody talking about Flammable Yuri, Chemically Unstable Yuri, or Yuri with Other Specific Hazards

[namira]

Like two years ago I ran into a salamander biologist in the woods who complimented my ability to 'walk quietly in the forest while causing minimal disturbance to the leaf litter.' Still goes to my head.

[greenlabcoat]

your lab coat is probably some boring color like white. zero swag. youre nothing

[sunnyonline]

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Do you make posts about extinct animals?Like gastric brooding frogs?

Alas, I don't cover extinct animals, because 1. If I did there'd be far too many species to cover, 2. I am very much not a paleontologist and I wouldn't want to accidentally spread misinformation, and 3. I'd like to keep focus on living uncharismatic species because they are often the ones most in need of conservation attention to prevent them from becoming extinct- like the gastric brooding frog.

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Actually I will take this one opportunity to talk about a now-exctinct species which was part of the inspiration for starting this blog in the first place: Colpocephalum californici, or more commonly, the California condor louse.

C. californici was a species of louse that- as far as we know- exclusively parasitized California condors. Very little is known about their ecology because when the last California condors were brought in to the LA Zoo and the San Diego Wildlife Park for a captive breeding program, they were treated with a pesticide intended to kill the lice. This was done to ensure the condors remained healthy-- despite the fact that we don't really know whether C. californici posed any serious health risks or indeed was harmful to the condors at all. And we never will.

I say all this not to denigrate the work of those involved in the condor breeding program, or the continuing conservation program. I'm sharing this because we decided that one species' survival was worth the extinction of another. Or perhaps we didn't even care enough to make that decision, since C. californici was so poorly studied prior to its extinction that it may have only been an afterthought.

I am glad that we were able to bring the condors back, and honestly if I were in a similar position of eliminating a parasite to preserve the host species I probably would make that same choice. But I want us-- me and you and everyone-- to interrogate why we make those choices. On what basis do we consider a species to be worth saving, and on what basis do we condemn them to extinction?

[thegenderal]

even before i lived in a place with a massive population of feral cats decimating the wildlife i had read the studies and knew the data said that TNR did not work and we need to be trapping and euthanizing feral cats but now that i’ve lived in a place where there are an enormous number of feral cats it’s like, inconceivable to me that anyone supports TNR, not just for the health of the world but for the sake of the fucking cats

[thegenderal]

nobody will even acknowledge it not even in most conservation circles. We have a solution to a massive, massive problem that is more humane, cheaper, easier, takes less time, prevents animal suffering, and saves valuable members of our disappearing ecosystem. And nobody is even willing to theoretically acknowledge that it exists outside of a few very small circles.