Let me be the miserable wretch to whom the caring lead the disbelieving, that they might see the wounds and know how much of a human being's humanity three furry boys can take with them.

This video, by an ER vet, reaffirms what the therapist above is saying from the veterinary side. I rewatch it, and her video on euthanasia, whenever the grief over Sully and Alphi gets too bad.

2 Sumatran tiger cubs were just born at the Memphis Zoo which is awesome bc they are critically endangered and also I am losing my mind over this image of the cubs and their mom. The babies’ tails make a heart….

literally nothing funnier than a newly born aquatic mammal realizing they've been cursed to live in water

Wet beast

Orange oakleaf butterfly

What do sea otters do when winter storms roll in? Dive in with these wild otters off the back deck of the Aquarium to find out! 🦦🌊

love to follow veterinarian practices on facebook because every one in a while they’ll post a picture of something so bizarrely funny. this axolotl getting an x-ray just took me out

ive been getting a lot of people really worried for this axolotl so i thought i’d clarify: she’s fine. she’s moist on the puppy pad so she won’t dry out and the x ray only takes a few seconds. the x ray was because she had an internal gut blockage due to the wrong substrate being used. they took another x ray after giving her barium to determine where in the gut it was, but the barium lubricated her gut enough that she passed the blockage with no invasive surgery and she’s completely fine. here she is not-flattened

She looks very pleased to be unflattened and unblockaged

Heating up

(via)

Dolphins doing cartwheels with an aquarium guest.

(via Ant.Giovanni)

I’m loving this new trend of people going to zoos and participating in animal enrichment. We use to observe large exotic animals for our entertainment, but the fact is that we are now trying to make ourselves equally as entertaining for them. It’s interactive, completely parpicipatory and I would argue that eventually someone’s gonna come up with something new enough that it expland ethologists understanding about how some animals think, problem solve, communicate and feel and I think its fantastic.

Human: play?

Aquatic creature from an entirely different branch of the animal tree: play!

Shit I’m gonna start crying that was so beautiful

Reminds me of when I was very little. I barely remember it but my parents and godparents have told me about it many times. I think it was SeaWorld but it could’ve been somewhere else. I was like two. And we went to go see the dolphins. Well my mom held me up so I could see them properly. One of the dolphins saw my mom holding me up and thought my mom was showing them her baby. So the dolphin swam off then came back with her baby to show my parents. After a few minutes my mom set me down and I started running back and forth and the dolphins swam alongside the glass with me. So they showed off their baby to us and then played with me afterwards.

Mood..

Source

Cottagecoredream 🥐🍂

Grevenbroich, Germany

This video makes my day

Octopus filmed changing colours while sleeping.

i wonder what they are dreaming about

Changing colors duh

What’s really cool about this is that cephalopod (octopus, squid, etc.) intelligence evolved completely separately from intelligence in tetrapods (which includes primates, dolphins, crows… basically any other intelligent animals you can think of). Cephalopods are very, very far away from us on the tree of life. For context, you and a starfish are more closely related than you and an octopus. The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was the so-called Urbilaterian, the hypothetical first animal with a left-right symmetric body. This animal almost certainly had, at most, an extremely simple nervous system, without anything resembling a brain.

All this is to say that the fact that this octopus appears to be dreaming means one of two things. Either

a) dreaming is a very, very old thing indeed, going directly back to the Urbilaterian. This would mean that almost every animal, from insects to starfish to sea slugs to newts, is likely to have the ability to dream in some capacity or another (unless they have specifically lost it by evolutionary simplification).

or

b) dreaming evolved entirely independently in cephalopods when they developed greater intelligence. This would suggest, at least, that there’s something very fundamental about dreaming related to intelligence itself, which causes it to emerge independently when sufficient intelligence arises.

Needless to say, either of these outcomes would be really very cool.