Hannah Schmidt, 34, she/they. Artist and illustrator (art tag is simply #my art). You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky as wishfishy. Asks are open if you need it. Store at: WishFishy.redbubble.com
i really do think we should substitute gacha games instead for like. the random wikipedia article button. gives you the same "yay i got something new and exciting!" feeling without spending any money and you get to learn something new on wikipedia. the problem is that its missing a cute little storage menu where you can see all the links to different articles youve "collected"
#1 is a hoodie. No doubt about it. Zip is there, hood is there. It is a hoodie.
#2 is where we start to question a little bit. But the answer remains the same. That is a hoodie.
#3 is not difficult at all. That is a jumper. NOT A SWEATER. A sweater is not ugly unless it is a christmas sweater that is intended to be ugly. That third one is a jumper (or a pullover if you want to be different).
Join Monterey Bay Aquarium, @mbari-blog and FathomVerse as we cozy up to the ocean’s hidden wonders all month long with daily deep-sea art prompts.
Let the unique beauty of this extraordinary ocean ecosystem spark inspiration as the days turn dark and chilly. Dive into these prompts and create daily art in any medium–digital, ink, sculpture, tattoos, macaroni art, or whatever calls to you from the depths.
We’ll be reblogging art all month long, so make sure to follow @MontereyBayAquarium and @mbari-blog and tag your posts #deep sea december.
Here’s some other ways to keep the sea-lebration going all month long:
🩵 Come chat with fellow artists and share your creations in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Discord server.
🩵 Submit your art to our online gallery.
🩵 Download the FathomVerse mobile game to find inspiration while contributing to MBARI deep-sea research.
By protecting the ocean, we can all work together to preserve the unique and fragile beauty of the deep sea that inspires us to create. There’s wonder in ocean life, and caring for it helps us all. 🖤
The list of plain text prompts is available under the cut:
So, first thing you need to know is that is a very visibly healthy adult green iguana. Every part of the iguana is sharp. The claws evolved to haul a ten pound lizard up a tree. The spines are like tiny icepicks. The tail is a bullwhip. The teeth evolved to shred leaves, but they'll just as easily shred your flesh. Good luck making a healthy adult iguana do anything they don't wanna. That puts us on our first thing to look at- is the animal capable of defense and getting away, physically? Yes, definitely.
Next thing to know is what does a threatened or scared iguana look like? When an iguana is threatened, it doesn't stand on its hind legs like that; it stands on all fours and puffs itself up to look bigger, aggressively bobs its head (note: head bobbing is a behavior used for a LOT of things, it does need context- for example, they also head bob as part of mating displays), there is hissing, there is tail whipping- iguanas are not subtle creatures. None of this is the behavior of an iguana that feels threatened or is being a threat!
So what does standing like that mean? That's just simple reaching. The iguana sees something they want and is attempting to reach it, and what they want appears to be uppies, because they settle into the human's grip immediately.
Then, we see some GREAT handling from the human. There's really great communication happening between the two of them! The person picks up the iguana very securely- pelvis and pectoral girdles are well supported, and he doesn't grab. (Iguanas typically do NOT like being grabbed around the sides; many of their predators are birds and coming at them from above or gripping the sides is scary!)
As he goes in for the pet, he lets the iguana support their back half on his knee. The hold is secure but not tight; at any point, if the iggy was distressed, they could leave. But they don't- instead, you see them leaning into the pets, actively participating in the behavior. They're not even closing their eyes to block stimulus. They want this to happen.
This is the kind of bond that's possible when you can prove to a big lizard that you're trustworthy, and easily the best iguana video I've seen in a long time. Thank you for tagging me in!
Some green iguana body language resources under the jump!
Barten 2003. Green Iguana Management and Husbandry. Iguana: Journal of the International Iguana Society. I refer to this guy a lot when thinking about iguana behavior because even though the Green Iguana Husbandry issue of Iguana came out 22 years ago, Steve is a member of my herp society and has forgotten more about iguanas than any of us will ever know.
Burghardt 1977. Social behavior in hatchling green iguanas: life at a reptile rookery. Science.
Yes, Burghardt's iguana stuff is older. Yes, it's still highly relevant in the world of reptile ethology. If you can get your hands on a copy of Iguanas of the World, it's amazing how well it holds up.
Kaplan- everything on anapsid.org is at least 10 years old, but that doesn't change how valuable some of it is. Melissa knows her stuff, she just can't have iguanas anymore and unfortunately her health interferes a lot with what she wants to do.
Behavior article collection
Change-Related Stress in Green Iguanas and Other Reptiles
Interpreting Non-Breeding Behaviors in Green Iguanas
Testosterone, Aggression, and Green Iguanas
Köhler 2003. Green Iguana Communication. Iguana: Journal of the International Iguana Society.
Rice et al. 2022. Heads Nods and Boat Bobs: Behavior of Iguana Iguana Is Affected by Environment and Boat Traffic in Riparian Tropical Forest. Biotropica.
Darren Naish wrote a cool blog post for Tetrapod Zoology that's got a lot of social behavior observations! His blogs are always backed up with great sources and evidence.
After ELEVEN YEARS of work, today I finally submitted my 205-page monograph on the diamond frogs of Madagascar, genus Rhombophryne.
We are describing several new species, and re-describing almost all others, or dramatically improving knowledge of their distribution, ecology, etc., including this beautiful chap, Rhombophryne testudo, the type species of the genus. It feels so good to finally have this paper submitted. It was a huge project and it has dragged and dragged. Now I can't wait to share the new species with you all! But it will probably be many months, maybe even a year, until it sees the light of day. When it does, I will of course share it here.
For an unexpected treat that surpassed ALL my expectations, for the love of God please read the Alt Text. A masterpiece. Thank you, @markscherz , and congratulations!
500-pound stained glass crab sculpture by the late Jackie Leatherbury Douglass and her husband John Frederick Douglass, on display in Baltimore's airport
My parents have been doing some deep cleaning of their storage room/basement and as a result I now have a box full of some old sketchbooks from elementary through to post-secondary attempts one and two (third time was the charm; came out with two degrees by accident).
I’ll be going through them regardless, maybe to digitize maybe just to suffer. Should I post some embarrassing highlights online after not posting anything for years?
Terrible Old Doodles?
Yes, you will suffer embarrassment regardless and should share.
No, I don’t need to see the “squirrel” you drew when you were 5.
It took me approximately one million years (two weeks) to get around to hauling the box of sketchbooks home from work, but I am happy and apprehensive to announce that the books are safely nestled in my office and the tour will commence this evening.
I haven't looked through them yet so you will be getting all that raw, secondhand embarrassment commentary you crave.
My parents have been doing some deep cleaning of their storage room/basement and as a result I now have a box full of some old sketchbooks from elementary through to post-secondary attempts one and two (third time was the charm; came out with two degrees by accident).
I’ll be going through them regardless, maybe to digitize maybe just to suffer. Should I post some embarrassing highlights online after not posting anything for years?
Terrible Old Doodles?
Yes, you will suffer embarrassment regardless and should share.
No, I don’t need to see the “squirrel” you drew when you were 5.
I adore a good fiction podcast but my god, have you seen moss!? Felt it? Smelled it?
All 12000 (at the very, very least) species of mosses? Moss, one of the most diverse, widespread and vital groups of vascular plants? Moss, the very lifeblood of plant ecosystems??? Moss, which captures an estimated 6.43 BILLION TONNES of carbon from the atmosphere????? That moss!?
All creatures with cells that have the fancy stuff like nucleus and mitochondria are Eukaryotes. That picture is from the Wikipedia page for Eukaryotes.
Long ago there was just the Bacteria and Archaea. Then something weird happened and an Archaean ate a bacterium but the bacterium was not consumed, instead they became friends. By "friends" I mean "permanently merged together into an entirely new kind of life form that can do all kinds of fancy stuff with its cells." This life form is your ancestor and the ancestor of all Eukaryotes.
One of those new, fancy life forms ate a cyanobacteria and made it into chloroplasts. This created the plants.
A few others decided to go multicellular and form tubes out of cells that could wriggle around, and they became animals.
A few decided to also go multicellular and team up into big networks of interconnected thread-like tendrils, and they became fungi.
But most of them just kind of went off and did their own thing, going about their single-celled business, evolving into all kinds of weird stuff without doing anything multicellular. And all of those guys got called protists. Every eukaryote that didn't become multicellular is a protist.
The guys that went multicellular are just a few weirdos in these random corners of the tree of life, but they get all the attention cause we multicellular organisms are kind of self-absorbed (and we had to do some strange things to sand to turn it into lenses to see the single-celled organisms).
If each of those multicellular clades counts as a "kingdom," how many kingdoms do the single-celled guys make? Good luck with that one. We keep finding more of them.
Every time we look at some more pond water, the taxonomists collapse into sobbing again. There are too many ways to be a little guy. Every time there's a cilium or a flagellum somewhere it's not supposed to be, or there's something suspicious going on with microtubules or zoospores or helical structures something, or god forbid two guys get freaky and do another endosymbiosis again, they have to rewrite everything and there's at least two fistfights and one brawl.
Also I lied and there are plenty of eukaryotes that are multicellular and not animals, plants, or fungi, such as giant kelp
However those get called protists half the time too because with kelp, it's easier than trying to explain what the fuck it is if it isn't a plant, and with everything else, talking about it just starts an argument about what counts as a "cell" and what counts as "multi" for that matter and nothing good comes of it.
Don't worry, though, the squiggly thing isn't really its body, it's more of a shell they secrete. Yes, you see they take in minerals from their surroundings, like for example, uh...
They really like radioactive isotopes and collect radioactive materials in their bodies at high concentrations.
But this is exactly what i'm talking about, these guys are totally different from plants, animals, or fungi, just like they're totally different from kelp and amoebas, they are Their Own Thing.
@ayoungparent Well apparently slime molds are a polyphyletic group (a bunch of unrelated organisms that happened to look similar).
The Myxomycetes are the ones known as plasmodial slime molds and basically they form spores which hatch into single-celled haploid guys (basically like sperm or egg in humans) and when the spores meet each other they become a diploid cell with more and more and more nuclei until they can be one cell several meters in area and several kilograms in weight. Despite being one cell technically and having no brain, they can learn and have some form of intelligence. They are good at designing the most efficient railroad system.
The big green ball I assume you refer to is Valonia ventricosa. It has some complicated structures inside and lots of nuclei to make it work, but it is just one really big cell.
Yeah. It does mitosis and everything like a regular cell.
This guy is actually much closer related to regular plants than kelp or anything else we've discussed.
