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NASA
we're not kids anymore.
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
YOU ARE THE REASON
⁂
Kaledo Art
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
pixel skylines
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
Three Goblin Art
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Today's Document
$LAYYYTER
Andulka
tannertan36
sheepfilms
Origami Around
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@whale-fallin
hi!!!! i'd figure i should remake my pinned post with a proper introduction to myself. my name is gale! i go by they/he/it + ocean neos! this is my marine biology sideblog. my fursona is a harbor seal! uhh i think that's it! thank you for your time!!
Otters will forever be the most dramatic creatures on the planet🦦
TINY PALS
SMOL AND GOOD
a small but substantial amount of people seem to think that a lot of animals, especially cows, bees, and other domesticated animals are easily prone to exploitation from humans. and while i can understand the intent (problems with capitalism and so on), a lot of these people seem to have the assumption that none of these animals have the autonomy to say no?
which for one is very hilarious; especially with animals like bees (everyone's favorite union workers). but also rather concerning? as if these people are incapable of comprehending the idea that Maybe these animals are way more capable of saying no and displaying behaviors related to it than they'd like to admit. almost as if animals just don't have a sense of autonomy to them
Well, that’s length-wise rather than height-wise, but yes! That would be the giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), fellow countrymen of mine!
In fact, saying they’re 170 cm (5’7”) from head to tail is lowballing it a little. Some individuals as long as 180 cm (5’11”) have been recorded! Which is longer than I am tall 😔
You might have noticed that giant otters have a bit of a big cat-like look about themselves. That’s the origin of their name in Brazilian Portuguese, ariranha, which is a term from the Tupi-Guarani language and means “river jaguar”. And, just like ground jaguars, giant otters are apex predators as well: they mainly eat fish, but will hunt anything from snakes, turtles and even small caimans if given the opportunity!
Besides their size, giant otters have other traits that set them apart from their smaller cousins. For one, unlike most mustelids, they’re social animals who live in familial groups of up to twenty individuals, which whom they communicate constantly through a variety of different noises. Also, unlike other species of otter, whose tails are thick at the base and pointy at the end, giant otters’ tails also start out with a thick base, but they end up flat, which helps propel them through the water. The interesting thing about it, however, it’s that it’s not flat in an horizontal way, like the tails of other semiaquatic mammals such as beavers and platypuses. It’s flat vertically, not unlike the tail of a newt!
Source of the 2nd image: @resgateariranha on Instagram
Well, you’re entitled to your own opinion, of course. But could I perhaps bribe you into upgrading it to “ugly cute” by offering you a giant otter cuddle pile?
Church of Whale Fall
you know its very interesting how a behavior typically used as a threat display has changed to mean someone is happy and having a good time for us
Things this post says:
-Advocating for worldwide total extinction of any animal species is bad regardless of how much you personally dislike them
Things this post does not say:
-You can never kill a bug ever for any reason
-We should not enact population control in regards to invasive and disease-carrying organisms
-You must allow bugs to feed on you and infest your house and be happy about it the entire time
The “Blue Dragon River” (Odeleite River) Location: Algarve, Portugal
Odeleite is a right tributary of the River Guadiana. The river is also known as "The Blue Dragon River" because of the aerial photo showing its dark blue color and unusual curvy shape that resembles a dragon.
Don’t fucking tell her what to do. NYP you are NOTHING don’t ever speak on her again you dirty rat motherfuckers.
moo deng is stressed in most of her photos while pesto is not being unnecessarily handled or stressed and is just…vibing
they made the baby hippo have a cryptocurrency for gods sake. Let the woman splash in her pool without being monetized
Pesto is barely even aware that people are looking at him: the glass at the Melbourne Aquarium is one-way.
Crocodiles afraid of the shovel
Not afraid of the shovel? Apply the shovel!
Happy Shovel Smack Saturday
THE STORY BEHIND THIS
This emerged as a video on a French Subreddit of an crocodile farm where the man holding the shovel is trying to get all the crocs in the enclosure into the water so that maintenance can be done on the enclosure safely.
Unfortunately this has drawn harsh criticism from people believing this is abusive behavior. Crocodiles are strong, heavily scaled and armored creatures. The severity of the bonk this handler is giving them is basically a smack on the tush to get them safely into the water.
I can't believe people actually thought this funny shit was "abusive"
@kaijutegu what do you think about this?
Tl;dr: no, you're reading this, because there's nothing funny about hitting an animal with a shovel and I can't believe I have to say that.
The snouts of crocodilians are some of the most innervated tissues in the entire animal kingdom. They are more sensitive than human fingertips. They can detect the tiniest pressure changes in the water; an alligator in the pitch-black dark can sense the ripples from a single drop of water in an aquarium, even when their hearing and sense of smell are blocked. Their faces are covered with tiny sensory organs. The epidermis is 40% thinner immediately above these tiny sensory organs, while the keratin layer is 60% thinner and more compact. Here's a map of that nerve tissue:
And this guy knows that because when he hits them with the shovel, the moment of impact is on the side of the face. He is making the decision to hurt these animals.
In the stills, you can see that he's going in from the side and the front of the mouth. He's not smacking them on the tail or flank, he's hitting them in the face. These animals are afraid of him, because this man is coming in with a shovel and hurting them, on purpose. Why is the one in that second still opening its mouth and charging? Because it is afraid of the man with the shovel, who has come here to hit it.
Seriously, this is toddler stuff. Did you not learn in preschool that it hurts when you hit things? Did your parents never say "no, we don't hit the doggy, he doesn't like that?" The crocodilians don't like it either! You see how many of them fled or took defensive positions immediately? That's not a good thing in captive animal management! You want them to NOT be terrified of you because a terrified animal lashes out.
Think for a moment about your fingertips. You need those for typing, for scrolling, for touching, for finding out about the world. Now imagine me smacking the hell out of them with a shovel because I wanted you to move. Not fun, right? You'd call me abusive for doing that right? Perhaps I could have found a less-aversive way to get you to move rather than beating you with a shovel. Perhaps I should have learned your body language better, or asked you to move with auditory cues, targeting, anything else other than beating such a sensitive body part with a shovel. Crocodilians are quite trainable and easy to move in zoological settings. Here's a video from Reid Park Zoo showing exactly how their alligator targets and follows a pole:
And because crocodilians are so intelligent and have such strong sensory input, you can move them without having to be in the same room. When I was job shadowing at a zoo many years back, I moved a fully grown male Cuban crocodile away from the nest he was guarding with nothing more than some splashes in the off-exhibit water. I was fourteen and had never worked with a croc of any kind before, and I was able to do it because the zoo had trained their animals to shift. That's basic predator safety. (I mean it's basic animal safety, but I don't want to get into that. I'm talking about how bad of a zookeeper you have to be to think that the only way to shift crocodilians is to hit them.)
Even baby alligators can learn how to follow a target.
Here's a video of Zoo Australia moving the largest species crocodilian, a huge male saltwater croc. This is a far more dangerous procedure, and surprisingly, it can be done without hitting them! You'll notice they do use physical cues here, like the top jaw rope, which is aversive- but also notice where it sits. Compare it to the nerve map above, and the locations where the animals are being hit.
So yeah, this is abusive, and if you think it's not, go smack your hands with a shovel and see how you feel after. You won't like it! Also, maybe we don't hit things, because we are grown ups and have different tools in our skillset. If my one-year-old niece can gently pet a lizard, this grown-ass zookeeper can learn some basic animal handling skills.
Sources
Leitch, D. and Catania, K. Structure, innervation and response properties of integumentary sensory organs in crocodilians. J Exp Biol (2012) 215 (23): 4217–4230. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.076836
Knight, K. Croc jaws more sensitive than human fingertips. J Exp Biol (2012) 215 (23): i. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.081950
Soares, D. An ancient sensory organ in crocodilians. Nature 417, 241–242 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/417241a
St. Augustine Alligator Farm post about station training
Karen Pryor post about clicker training gharials, another crocodilian species
Reid Park Zoo post about training their alligator to move in response to a target
My other long posts about crocodilian behavior, both of which come with peer-reviewed citations
Alligator Body Language
Courtship (this one also talks about how sensitive their snouts are)
I am gonna look like the kind of tumblr user with no reading comprehension who is accidentally being exactly who this post is talking about but I assure you I know exactly what I'm doing and am disagreeing for one species and one species only
If it were possible I'd absolutely support driving fleas to extinction. Make a case for their existence! Why do fleas deserve to exist? They cause me daily suffering and serve zero purpose that I am aware of. Why can't we make them go extinct other than the fact that it would probably be difficult to only target fleas
"one species and one species only"
[transcript: flea, the common name for the order Siphonaptera, includes 2,500 species. end transcript]
you might want to do a little bit of research about the organisms you want to drive to extinction before you claim to know exactly what you're doing, but anyway...
there are already a number of people in the notes bringing up these points, which apply to all species, but here they are again anyway:
firstly, nothing has to have "a purpose", but things don't just evolve for no reason and contribute absolutely nothing to the ecosystem they're in. that's just not how it works.
secondly, parasites are basically the Robin Hood of the ecosystems they're in. they take nutrients from large, long lived organisms, and make it available for smaller organisms, thereby redistributing nutrients that would essentially get hoarded away otherwise.
yes, being bitten is annoying, but we can't just kill off everything that annoys us. in fact, parasites being annoying causes their hosts to leave the area, which affects things like migration routes, and helps prevent areas being overgrazed because the megafauna leave due to the parasites before that can happen.
yes, parasites can spread diseases, but it's much more productive and less harmful to ecosystems to put money and effort towards curing and preventing those diseases than trying to kill off their vectors.
everything in an ecosystem (with the exception of introduced species) has evolved together and adapted to each others' presence. you can't just remove an entire species from that complex, interconnected system and expect there to be no negative repercussions
All this plus most of those species won't bite humans anyway. Still, causing irritation to just humans shouldn't be a crime. We're destructive too. We shouldn't want all of nature to be safe and comfortable to us when we've already irreversibly razed so much of it for modern convenience as it is. We even probably caused the extinction of the last big predators that naturally hunted us, we should probably be satisfied with that really.
There are over 3500 species of mosquito on this planet and every single one of them contributes more to the ecosystem than you do.
You can feel the power of a Bull Hippo just watching this, the most dangerous mammal in the world.
They aren’t fat at all, that’s all pure muscle! They cannot float, they just run along the bottom of the water!
this is so fucking funny I love sharks
Shit like this is insanely rude and I hate that 1. Having this attitude about bugs & 2. Proudly proclaiming that you have this attitude about bugs (and doing so entirely unprompted on top of that) (especially in response to an Entomologist!!!!!) is considered a normal and acceptable thing to do
