Interesting news for fucked up weirdos who enjoy body horror and exploring differences between Self and Other

What the wine-dark oceanic FUCK.

This excerpt from the article:

"I was very excited [when I found them]," study lead author Kei Jokura, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Okazaki, told Live Science in an email. "I immediately took the fused comb jellies from the room where I was keeping them and showed them to the other lab members."

I love scientists this is so cute. And what a WILD thing to discover!!!!

THEY DID WHAT NOW

THERES AN ARTICLE AND IT WAS ON THE MEWS AMD EVERYTHIN

???!!!!!!?!?!?

WHAT I NEED TO LOOK AT THAT OMG

here’s another source:

THIS IS HUGE!!!! Right outside of New York City, wow!!

Little baby sharks,,, hunting squids and fish,,,, basking in the warm water,,,

Needless to say, I am HORRIFIED.

‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’

-Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher

fuck OFF

Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.

So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.

every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing 

This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big. 

FUCK OFF

Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are. 

They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.

Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.

Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances. 

It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.

Like seriously why the fuck y'all think everyone FREAKED THE HELL OUT when Dorothy fell into the pig pen in Wizard of Oz? It’s because pigs are HUGE and weigh a shitton and would crush her in an instant.

also dont they eat like, basically anything?

YUP. Pigs will eat people, if given the chance. They dgaf.

That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without fucking you up. The dogs wear body armour. 

I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off. 

how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?

…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”

Very carefully, I would imagine.

WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…

…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…

…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…

…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest - I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?

…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…

…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…

…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford, more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in the first a molet argent.

After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford was on the winning side…

And pigs will definitely eat people.

It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.

More here (another comment to this same OP) and here (slightly different).

Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…

…and modern…

…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…

So when Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him… now you get the resonance.

This post…it just really went places on me.

i feel like we didn’t spend long enough on the tuna

There’s a reason why “monster boar” crops up more than once in Greek myth.

Sometimes you need a whole team of heroes to take one down.

Continue Reading.

SEA BEES

hey don't cry, ‘large’ creature with 20 arms found lurking in Antarctic sea, okay??

SHES BEAUTIFUL 💕💕

Wait, beneath the sea floor?

OUGHGH??

OIUOHGHHVOIH!!!!!

Look below the sea floor and you may find a little dude and friend

Ooo fun! Basically flipping over rocks to look for isopods, but thousands of feet underwater

Words by Vagina Museum, illustrations by Anita Zaramella.

Explore Muff Busters: Vagina Myths and How to Fight Them here.

On Wikipedia, I found an article about a bacterium that is the only known organism that exists in an ecosystem containing only itself.

It eats chemicals produced from radioactive decay of rocks deep beneath the Earth's crust.

Nothing on Earth is alone except this little bacterium.

Desulforudis audaxviator??? My favorite microbe??? Found 2.7 km down a South African gold mine in a puddle of radioactive groundwater?

Also fun in microbiology when we talk about wether individuals even exist. If they don’t, this guy could be the only one. BUT even he has evidence of horizontal gene transfer with archaea! Even if you can be alone doesn’t mean you have to be.

- From the Wikipedia article

Below the poll is a series of animal images labeled A through J. A is the least close to the birds we have today; J is the closest. If you encountered these animals in the wild, which would you call birds? If you pick a higher up option, then that means you consider all the below ones birds as well - so if you pick A, then BCDEFGHIJ are all birds. If you pick J, only J is a bird.

A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO IT CAN LEAVE PALAEOBLR. I NEED PEOPLE WHO DON'T RECOGNIZE THESE ANIMALS ON SIGHT TO VOTE.

I apologize to all of y'all with vision impairments for whom this poll is inaccessible. Alas, this is an experiment, and I cannot name the taxa. Thank you.

All alt text includes artist attribution; I did not make these pictures myself.

tbh i don't really get why we divide the oceans into different oceans because they're all connected it's the same ocean

no metaphor here just pure confusion...is there a line where one ocean stops and another begins? or is it like a smooth gradient of percentages of one ocean shading into another ocean?

Yes, there is a line. There are confluences you can see and touch and they are NOT subtle in the slightest.

That's the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a particularly pronounced day.

This is the Indian and the Pacific. It's not always this obvious everywhere but the dividing lines are very much there.

Oceans have their own properties as far as temperature and salinity and unless something like a storm or a current forces them to mix they won't. Mostly this applies to vertical mixing and it gives you things like thermoclines and haloclines but water is wierd and won't mix horizontally either.

The ocean basins tend to have their own currents that go in a circle and define that ocean, and those patterns mix the water within that ocean. Like a washing machine.

The Caribbean has a little loop of its own that not on this map, but that current keeps that ocean pretty internally consistent. It's got clear warm water because of the shallow bowl of limestone sand it sits in. Where it meets the Atlantic with wildly different conditions the water is traveling in opposite directions, and it acts kind of like an oncoming lane of highway traffic. Species that have adapted to a narrow band of temperatures and salinities (most fish) can't cross, while species with a stronger homeostasis hang out there on purpose, (marine mammals, turtles, sharks). Plankton, that cannot control their horizontal movement in the water column, are held in their home territories by these barriers.

The long wavelengths of the light spectrum—red, yellow, and orange—can penetrate to approximately 15, 30, and 50 meters (49, 98, and 164 feet), respectively, while the short wavelengths of the light spectrum—violet, blue and green—can penetrate further, to the lower limits of the euphotic zone. Blue penetrates the deepest, which is why deep, clear ocean water and some tropical water appear to be blue most of the time. Moreover, clearer waters have fewer particles to affect the transmission of light, and scattering by the water itself controls color. Water in shallow coastal areas tends to contain a greater amount of particles that scatter or absorb light wavelengths differently, which is why sea water close to shore may appear more green or brown in color.

Checkout @scienceisdope for more science and daily facts.

Video credit: Kendall Roberg

Trumpeter shows us an incredible real world expression of audio waveforms.🔊🎺🔥🔥🔥🔥

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That’s pretty cool

he’s not ugly he’s handsome

distinguished

rugged 

This motherfucker survives a lightning strike and you have the gull to call them ugly?? If mother nature cant kill them what chance do you have when this mofo comes after you?!

Reblog Lightning Bison for protection from lightning.

When you reblog Lightning Bison, Lightning Bison gets 200 metres closer to the journalist who called him ugly

Speaking of whalefalls, there are an estimated half a million of them littering the floors of the abysses at any given time, they last decades each and they’re an average of less than ten miles apart, even with slightly fewer whales alive today than in the past. Back when the ocean was filled with giant prehistoric predators fighting it out, not to mention dinosaurs from land probably washing out to sea, there had to be many times the giant corpses down there. The abyss would have had to be like mountains of rotting reptiles, wouldn’t it???!

So, here’s my thinking. First: Deep-sea gigantism is a very real thing–ironically enough, the heavier the pressure, the bigger things tend to get, because it’s smarter to be soft and malleable than tiny and bony at that point, and larger surface area = more spread-out pressure.

Second: Bogleech is absolutely right that logically the carnage of the various epochs before us must have turned places like the Marianas Trench into a necropolis where the assorted detritivores feasted like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Third: People want to believe that the deep-seas is capable of hosting monsters like megalodons.

Now, I’m no big-city Monterey Bay marine biologist specializing in deep-sea autonomous exploration vessels. But I feel as though the layman focuses heavily on the megalodon, who we actually are 99.9% sure definitely must be extinct because we can track how prey reacts to predator and the math just doesn’t add up to it still being around affecting populations.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be monsters down there. Think of the style of predator a megalodon was: Viciously active, constantly seeking and hunting down its meals. Powerful muscles built for swimming long distances and speedy on top of it. The ocean is big but we’d definitely have seen evidence of them like, directly, even beyond just “whales don’t act how they would”. That sort of lifestyle lives to be noticed.

You know what I’ve thought for a while? How much deeper the abyss goes beneath the sea floor. Don’t you think it must be impossible for there not to be subterranean species in the abyss? Much of the sea floor is made up of marine snow, tiny flakes of dead bodies and remains. Shouldn’t there be detritivores feasting beneath the skin of the world? Sure, a whalefall is a bounty for decades, but that’s like resting an apple on top of a picnic table where your city is made of meat. And it’s already difficult to try and observe life that far down underwater–to the best of my knowledge we haven’t even tried burrowing down deeper and seeing what we can find.

All this is to say that with all of this combined, a part of me wonders if sea serpents might exist after all down there. Specifically, a part of me wonders how many whalefalls we don’t know about because something got there first. Something perhaps like a horrific burrowing nightmare predator such as a deep sea gigantified Bobbit worm.

That’s all. :)

I love the idea of dead gods. Not in the sense of “hey i killed something supernaturally strong” but in the sense of “i killed it and it’s still a god.” It is still worshipped. prayers are still answered. miracles are performed in its name, even as it lies pierced by a thousand swords and burning with chemical fire. even as it drifts through vacuum, decapitated and bleeding molten rock. in cosmic spite of being shot through each eye and hurled into a plasma reactor, it still radiates the power of the divine in a way that primitive death cannot smother. the nature of godchild is not so simple as to be tied to the mortality, or immortality, of any living being.

In science that's called a whalefall :)

dead gods on the bottom of the mariana trench

Can’t stop thinking abt what happens to salmon when they get horny

aight ill bite what happens when they get horny

They literally transform into a new, unbelievably fucked up creature