Queen Bee Trainee

It's such a mervyn peake dead rat poem morning

One of the poems ever.

Stockpile non-perishables now, and grow vegetables if at all possible. If you don't have a yard, but you know someone who does see if you can use theirs in exchange for a portion of the produce. If not, do container gardening. Buy grow lights if you don't have any outdoor space. Focus on things that will produce the most yield. Learn to can. Between deporting the people who pick our food, and the tariffs it's going to get bad.

Vertical Gardening is also an excellent space saver for those that don't have the yard space. And you can save money by repurposing plastic bottles and cans into pots. (This might also help a little with the fact that the EPA is going to be more or less destroyed).

And if you can afford the initial set up, aquaponics also works very well in my experience.

I just don’t get it. How can our society act so goddamned normal about seahorses. How can anybody so casually accept that that’s a fish???

This is one of nature’s most anatomically perverse of all beasts. A FISH, like a carp or a bass or a beta is a fish, but it bent its body straight up only to bend its head permanently back down. It stretched its skull into a pipe. It tapered its tail like a lizard, specifically like a chameleon. It can also move its eyes independently by the way, you know, like a chameleon. Fun fact, it can change color to express its mood, like you know whatever does that. It doesn’t properly swim anymore. It buzzes its few remaining fins like an insect’s wings to float itself around at a snail’s pace. It lives its whole life clinging to coral branches or seaweed, which means it decided to become a “tree dweller” in an environment where gravity didn’t even matter anyway. The males get pregnant. They make noises at each other by rubbing some of their neck bones together. Every day, EVERY DAY a mated pair does a little dance and a little neck bone song so they remember which two seahorses they were. They’re a beautiful precious obscenity. Nothing so adorable ever made such a strong case against a logical creator.

They have as little skin and meat as they could get away with. Their skeleton is almost all they are.

This thing is one of the most successful hunters on the planet. Because their mouth is fused shut, except for the tip, they can create a powerful suction force in front of that one little opening in order to draw in prey. 

Lions have a 20-30% success rate on their hunts, depending on daytime and if they’re in a group. Great white sharks, anywhere from 40% to 80%, depending on the size and skill of the individual. Dragonflies, which are one of the most successful terrestrial hunters, can hit about 80-85%. Seahorses? 90% success rate, sometimes more. Only a fraction of their prey escapes that powerful vacuum. They’re incredibly precise. 

If you touch them, they feel hard, because of the skeleton underneath their skin. Their tails are being studied to make coiling bridges, because of how strong that interlocked structure is. Different species range in size from over a foot long, to barely an inch. 

Behold: not just a fish, but a wildly successful predator! 

horsey

don’t forget their majestic cousins the sea dragons! these are the leafy and weedy sea dragons

and the newest seahorse family member, discovered in 2015, the ruby sea dragon ❤️

Yeah that’s when someone tried to straighten the seahorse back out and it still didn’t look right. The more they bent and mushed it in their hands to look like a fish again the worse they fucked it up until finally they just left it and walked off and hoped nobody would ask who did this

(I love them so much)

It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)

Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.

Happy birthday to the lizard who changed it all.

why haven’t I seen anyone posting about that giant fucking baby penguin in Melbourne that’s bigger than some of the adults already

his name is Pesto <3

this bastard weighs 46 lbs at 9 months old. he’s 22 lbs heavier than his PARENTS

Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost

I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On

Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks

Can one of my followers elaborate on “The gods didn’t actually have animal heads” for me? Yes, I know the list of sources is right there, but I don’t feel like going back to college and figuring out which of those books has that explanation to look it up. Better to scream into the void that is Tumblr.

IIRC, the gods were depicted as people with animal heads to depict their human and animal forms in one statue. They were always all human or all animal, not a bit of both.

this is your not so friendly reminder that Gal Gadot has openly supported the IDF and posted a picture with the hashtags “we are right” and “I love the IDF” following a bombing of Gaza that left innocent Palestinians - including children - dead.

She directly and openly supports a genocidal state that oppresses and strips rights away from Palestinians on a daily basis.

So fuck her, fuck her “I want my neighbors to be safe” narrative that is simply untrue based on her past actions, and fuck white feminists for trying to paint her as this “girlboss!!!!!!” because she plays Wonder Woman.

For people in the comments defending her: are you reaaaaally that blind and ignorant to call her queen, while she is clearly supporting genocide and about to make a documentary on National Geographic about how 'to protect your land from colonizers' which is the highest form of hypocrisy and mass media manipulation?? Defending palestine is not a propaganda, it's an obligation that every human being should take on themselves just because they are humans like us and this has been gone for too long to keep silent.

girls dont mature faster than boys, girls are punished from an early age for the same behaviour that boys are allowed to indulge in well into adulthood

i actually talked about this with a psych professor and she believes that women/young girls have been pushed into responsibility from young ages for so long that its actually triggered an evolutionary effect where young girls are literally developing mentally early in order to cope with the stress.

Local Girls Literally Evolve To Deal With Patriarchal Bullshit