Magic and Moonlit Wings

thedragonwoodconservancy on ig

laser gun gator boys

oh my god i didn’t realize this video had audio

Okay as adorable as this looks, I’m pretty sure that’s a distress sound?  A “mommy help me I’m scared come save me!” sound?

@why-animals-do-the-thing

This video is from Dragonwood Wildlife Conservancy, and they are yearling (last year’s babies) Cuban crocodiles. Good news for you, this isn’t actually a distress call! According to @kaijutegu​ (and her giant bookshelf full of reptile resources), the laser sounds are an affiliative social call that young Cuban crocodiles use to communicate with their parents. They normally stop making the noise at around two years old, which is approximately when they start dispersing from the family group.

See, Cuban crocodiles are a super social species - and one of the few where the fathers stick around and provide paternal care for the babies! In the wild, babies would regularly interact with both parents, including when they provide food. This call is basically the type of vocalization that the babies use to communicated with their parents.

These crocodiles are being hand-raised as part of a private-sector breeding and reintroduction program (because the parents are so protective of their offspring that if you left them the babies to raise, you’d never be able to safely get close to them), and so they’re responding to the guy in the video the same way because he’s constant known safe individual and also the provider of food. He’s not a threat - his presence is a good thing, and he’s worth interacting with because it normally means food. You can also tell from their behavior and body language that they’re not stressed: some of the crocodiles are actively climbing on him and interaction of their own volition, but the ones that aren’t don’t show any indicators of hyper-vigilance. If that were a distress call, every crocodile that heard it would be alert and on edge looking for the threat. Distress calls tend to only happen once or twice, because in the wild continuing to make noise makes a baby more vulnerable: so these crocodiles wouldn’t be continually vocalizing if they felt threatened. There’s no snapping or gaping or freezing, all of which would be behavioral indicators of distress or discomfort. (Here’s a video of a baby nile crocodile being harassed by photographers which will give you a visual reference for both freezing and gaping.)

So, hey, this is certifiably cute - and good for conservation!

ETHICALLY SOURCED LASER NOISES

dad dad dad dad dad dad dad dad dad

Humom had to go away for a week so I got to spend it at my vacation home (aka grandmas house!) it’s not so bad really.. look at all this clover I have to eat before she gets back! Hard work but someone’s got to do it!

Stay underwater with this One Weird Trick! Scuba divers HATE him!

Wahoo!

unrestrained summer fun

imagine if someone plucked you out of your kitchen table in the middle of having dinner and just held you out and described your fucking life

I want this man to have his own show. I always loved animal shows when I was a kid. I feel like younger me would have LOVED this.

(now me also thinks it's super neat!)

Ive never really met anyone that thought of ribs as interesting… that’s such a shame. Ribs and the things they do are fascinating…. I think about them everyday.

it would be hilarious if snakes re-evolved thousands of little legs

come to think of it, what evolutionary pressure would favor losing your legs in the first place?

It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer, but here are some things evolutionary biology is clear on:

- legs do not necessarily convey an advantage.

- leglessness is not a disadvantage.

- swimming and entering burrows are two good reasons to not have legs, but it’s very possible that this is trying to invent retroactive unicorns to justify the presence of hoofprints.

- sometimes pressures are not easy to identify, and traits become fixed by incremental advantage, or brought along as an incidental effect of a different benefit.

- many species from distant regions of the tree of life have similar body shapes to snakes, some also being legless - this means they evolved convergently - which implies that it’s more advantageous than you’d think. Limbless lizards like slow-worms, which are not closely related to snakes but are also legless reptiles, indicate that there are potentially many general factors that make it advantageous to lose legs. (This is not always true, but it’s a reasonable mindset to start with: characteristics that you find in multiple unrelated places across the globe and across the tree of life tend to be “general” advantages that convey lots of benefits in different situations. And the reverse is generally true; weird singular specialisations restricted to one or two animals in one or two places in all of history = a really niche combination of circumstances that probably isn’t an advantage as soon as the circumstances change. limbless elongated shapes are fairly common in nature, and found around the world, in both aquatic and terrestrial environments - that’s a selling point on Planet Earth.)

As a question, it’s a good one, but unlikely to have a single satisfactory factor we can put our fingers on and recite, like, “it was a bright sunny morning one day and snakes completely forgot to put on their fucking legs.”

Or, like, “there’s two ways to get legless. The first way involves forgetting your legs, and the second involves drinking a lot, which might lead to the first one, but in most cases if you want to get legless you still have to work out what you’re going to do with your genes, ha.”

What is of tremendous interest and genetic significance, however, is:

Copy-pasting ribs is not a normal thing to do, and yet on the journey to snakes becoming totally legless , they did the rib thing first and lost their legs afterwards. It wasn’t a case of a chubby short lizard suddenly losing its limbs, so it had to hustle and get really long to make its proportions more aesthetic. Snakes had already proceeded down an entire genetic plotline involving copy-pasting ribs, like this huge investment had already been made while they still had their legs nailed on. Not only do the ribs go past the lungs and around all of the organs, only stopping when the tail starts, but the vertebra themselves are replicated. Sure, you may know that snake have more spine-bones and rib-bones than you do, but have you really sat down with that? Most vertebrate animals have broadly similar amounts of spine and ribs. Humans have 12. Cats have 13. Snakes have “between 200 and 400.” That’s the weird bit!! That’s the weird bit!!!

And that’s what they did first. FIRST they got long and ribbed (and ribbed and ribbed and ribbed and ribbed). Early snake fossils are definitely clear about the long/ribbed choices. Then they gradually lost their legs, which possibly wasn’t particularly important, or lessened in importance over time. After all, as bio people will leap to tell you, some pythons still have vestigial leg bones - etc etc., left in the back pocket and forgotten about essentially - but there aren’t any snakes running about legless who forgot to get long.

Interestingly, studies of early snakes like Najash rionegrina show that other keystone skeletal characteristics of snakes, like their wide mouths and jaw hinges, were already developing while Najash still had legs. Najash was a robust, wide-mouthed, long creature, with a stressful amount of ribs, like an extended Komodo dragon. Evidence like this makes me think, personally, that legs and their presence/absence only seem like a huge deal and a huge question to us. We feel like legs shouldn’t be forgettable or trivial, we feel like their loss should be an Event and a Choice that defines a family. But in fact, legs are trivial in comparison to tiny little internal tweaks, like a particular specification of skull hinge, or a flick of paired genes on-and-off to add another unit of spine. The journey towards snakiness certainly suggests so. Perhaps legs can, in fact, just be left in a back pocket - or shrugged off forgettably, like an outgrown pair of genes.

I had a black rat snake which I thought hated me... until I saw them interact with an *unfamiliar* human. There was blood.

Love is a direction, not an emotion, and for some beings Love just looks like a lack of blood. congratulations I hope you were happy with them

Reptile hour!!!

Camilo’s holding a Crested Chameleon, which is endemic to Eastern coast Africa (not a Colombian species, but its coloration is pretty Camilo-esque!!) Antonio however has an Orinoco Crocodile, which IS native to Colombia and Venezuela (but is critically endangered currently).

post butternut squash moments

quinnie!!!! looking stunning

The way he slaps to the ground is killing me

For those, like me, who wondered! This is from the original vid posted by the owner’s roommate on YouTube a few years ago!

@yelling-in-the-void to brighten your day :)

The box turtle at one of the nature centers I work at won't eat her food unless you plate it like you're a chef at a Michelin restaurant.

I can tell someone fed her yesterday when I wasn't in but they didn't plate it artistically so she didn't eat it

Box Turtle Demands #Enrichment.

3045. Gator - Illustration

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