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natgeo
Video by Joel Sartore @joelsartore | Discovered in 2016, the Ganzhorn’s mouse lemur is one of 24 species of mouse lemur described by scientists. These small, nocturnal primates are only found on the island of Madagascar and are among the world’s most endangered group of mammals. Video taken @zooplzen
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sashidhar_vempala
We Can never take that look easy.
wildlife.hub
~ This Tiger’s stare is intense🐅⠀ While most cats despise water, tigers love taking baths to help keep themselves cool during the hottest parts of the day. They'll submerge themselves in nearby lakes and streams, soaking for up to an hour, but neck deep only. Tigers don't like getting water in their eyes, to the point that they'll actually enter the water backwards to prevent this from happening.⠀
natgeotravel Video by @babaktafreshi The World at Night project This is how aurora looks like in a real-time video, captured last week in Iceland. Many of the aurora videos, including those I posted here in the past, are timelapse that show the phenomenon much faster than reality. This is the natural speed to the human eyes. An active aurora still has dramatically fast changes in real-time, every second. I first filmed aurora in 2003 from a deck of an icebreaker on the way to Antarctica. At that time the result was too noisy even with the top-end cameras. Now some sensors are able to capture it in low-noise when used at a very high ISO and with a fast f1.4 lens.
natgeo Video by @joelsartore | The Ural owl’s four-foot wingspan allows it to glide gracefully from perch to perch as it scans the ground for smaller animals to hunt. Any surplus food the owl catches is stored either in its nest or in nearby spaces for later. Males of this species claim their territory by singing from their perch, and mates can be heard dueting during courtship. These beautiful birds of prey live in deciduous forests in Northern Europe through northern Russia and Siberia all the way to Korea and Japan.
Canyonlands National Park
Those eyes...
natgeoVideo by @joelsartore | Palawan leopard cats can be found on Palawan Island in the Philippines. They are about the size of a domestic cat but slightly leaner with distinct black markings on their heads and webbed toes. They’re solitary and spend a lot of their time resting in trees when they aren’t hunting for small mammals, birds and amphibians. They are capable of hybridizing with domestic cats, producing the popular pet breed, bengal cats. Though it’s illegal to hunt leopard cats in many countries including the Philippines, they’re still sold in the pet trade and their parts are distributed for decoration and use traditional ‘medicine’. Leopard cats are wild animals are are absolutely not suitable as household pets.
Parque nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido
© 2017 Oscar Alcañiz - Please, do not erase this text if you reblog this picture
Apparently this is the starting point for many voyages into the Himalayas
Short-eared Owl, Flying and watching me.
Stanwood 21 Jan 2017
We are watching you
These features are partially frozen, tundra lakes that are part of the Lena River delta in Siberia. The Lena currently is mostly flowing to the western part of its delta, leaving small lakes as remnants of older channels in the eastern part. Like many Arctic lakes, they swell and contract depending on the availability of water during the seasons, creating the blue and green pattern reminiscent of eyeballs. This image was taken originally by the Landsat satellite system.
-JBB
Image credit: From Above (Landsat images are public domain) https://flic.kr/p/NiBr4P
A Long Way from Sesame Street
It would seem that Jim Hensen’s most famous puppet character, Kermit the Frog, has a doppelgänger. Hyalinobatrachium dianae, also known as Diane’s bare-hearted glass frog, is the first species of glass frog to be discovered in Costa Rica since 1973. It was found by Dr Kubicki and his colleagues from the Costa Rican Amphibian Research Centre, and its addition makes 14 known species of glass frog in Costa Rica.
It is a nocturnal amphibian, with striking white eyes and horizontally-shaped black pupils that resemble Kermit’s. Even Kermit himself remarked that “Googly eyes run in our family” (read the interview here: http://bit.ly/1Ene7EP). It is one of 149 species in the Centrolenidae family, which is characterised primarily by translucent abdominal skin. H. dianae and its closest relatives within the genus Hyalinobatrachium seem to have the most transparent undersides of all glass frogs, allowing almost complete visibility of its internal organs. This lack of ventral pigmentation amongst the family remains a mystery to scientists.
Dr Kubicki's biggest supporter, who encouraged his lifelong interest in natural history, was his mother Diane, who he honoured when naming this little guy.
Ash
Source credit: http://bit.ly/1Q1iMju Source credit: http://bit.ly/1HRRslh Image credit: http://bit.ly/1Q1iMju, Dr Brian Kubicki et al Image credit: http://bit.ly/1Q1iMju, Dr Brian Kubicki et al Image credit: https://flic.kr/p/aYL76D
GeoTrivia: Augen – The Eyes Have it If you’ve ever been looking at a metamorphic rock in the field and have the distinct impression that it is staring back at you, it’s most likely that you’ve found augen gneiss. “Augen,” the German word for “Eyes,” refers to a kind of rock deformation structure that is, not surprisingly, eye-shaped. It is formed when a more competent clot of denser minerals gets stuck within a band of flowing minerals (yes, this happens in temperature-pressure conditions high enough to make rocks flow). When augen are found in a rock, it leaves no doubt as to the rheological environment in which the rock formed. It also leaves no doubt about which way the rock around it was flowing: just like it looks, the rock was flowing around the large part of the eye and towards the streamlined end. Most common to gneiss, augen are also found in other rock types that are deformed in sufficiently awful conditions such as, in this photo, amphibolite. This particular “eye” was found staring at us from a zone where a large piece of oceanic lithosphere was mushing up and over an old continental margin at relatively high temperature ~900C. Note: Due to the rheological conditions of flowing rocks, there will only be right eyes or only left eyes, but no pairs of eyes, so never any crossed eyes. If augen wink at you, you’ve been out in the field too long. Annie R. Photo: Amphibolite sole, Liagouna Pindos. If you really need references, start here: http://www.maden.hacettepe.edu.tr/dmmrt/dmmrt66.html http://mrdata.usgs.gov/geology/state/sgmc-lith.php?text=augen+gneiss http://www.tekphys.geo.uni-mainz.de/publications_PDF/12-PasschierSimpson86.pdf
Trippy This photo is actually a little hard to look at. This is part of the forest that was leveled by the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. The forest is regrowing, but something unusual is happening; all the branches are symmetric. Turns out, this is a technique used by logging companies. If they prune the trees properly, it produces a higher-quality wood free of knots. In addition, it gives a really trippy photo of trees to look at. Image credit: Matt Read, via EPOD: http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2014/02/theres-nothing-wrong-with-your-eyes.html
