In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

lions are like transgendering lol

Explain

LOL theyre just transgedering :)

Game over, Republicans

TRANS PRIDE

This is trans chicken erasure culture

If something happens to a hen’s ovary and it ceases to function for whatever reason, the other gland will turn on, producing male sex hormones. The hen will grow longer and prettier feathers, a claw on their feet, a bigger comb, and they will begin to crow. Some, especially if they are influenced by other roosters, will begin to act aggressive, and protective over hens. The only way you can really tell if they were born a hen at that point is if you notice the rooster isn’t impregnating any females and by doing a blood test. Some people also say that their trans roosters tend to be a little bit sloppy at being a rooster if they didn’t have any roosters to teach them.

The Chicken are what

TRANS CHIMKEN

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ぼくは狸派

tanuki and raccoon user manual

Footage suggests they are able to store oxygen and then breathe it while they’re underwater, behaviour that has never been documented or even seen in lizards before.

By Cassandra Jean

When my husband went to work at the north, I felt very lonely. So the evenings, I started to play guitar and sing outside. Little by little my music attracted all the cats from our neighborhood. They were captivated by my music. I thank the Virgin of Zapopan for this big company I have now.

I was coming back from the market and saw a pair of dogs that cornered two cats in an alley. The cats’ hair stood up, and they didn’t know where to run. I quickly grabbed them and ran away, and the dogs ran after us. I thank Saint Quiteria for we got into the church before the dogs attacked us. So I saved the cats, with the help of the saint to whom I dedicate this retablo.

Pearl, the deaf and blind dog, plays with her best friend, Pete.

I really like this video. Not only is it cute, but it’s a great example of how dogs with physical disabilities are still capable of engage with other fully-abled dogs - and you can also see to some degree how innate play behavior is, since Pearl is still giving off entirely appropriate social signals even though she may never have been able to see well enough to observe them in other dogs. (This last is an educated guess - although I don’t know this dog’s specific hisotry, double merle dogs that are totally white are frequently born entirely blind and deaf.) 

The white dog - the blind and deaf double-merle - is reflexively falling back into play-bows when she’s not sure where they other dog is. You can see that at first, Pete is a little bit unsure what’s going on (there’s some lip-licking and displacement sniffing from him) but he’s then happy to engage with Pearl when she initiates play behavior. Her behavior is very measured, for all that it’s energetic, and she’s stopping frequently and reassessing the situation and letting Pete re-engage with her. 

althought I wanted to finish these while it was winter , it’s still snowing here so have here, some warmly dressed folks!

I WILL SURVIVE

it’s time to talk about a weird animal again here at bunjywunjy dot tumblr dot com (my house), and what better way to begin the new year than with an inspirational survivor to motivate us all with its sheer bullheaded tenacity?

you see, this animal has been around a very, very, very, VERY long time. 

it’s called the Coelacanth, and it’s your grandma.

SEE-la-kanth. say it right sonny, my ears aren’t what they used to be

Coelacanths are the oldest form of lobe-finned fishes on the planet. their  relatives first appeared 400 million years ago, and immediately made themselves famous by being the very first vertebrates to wiggle onto dry land. (they immediately wiggled right the fuck back into the water, as they had forgotten to evolve lungs first)

these fishes later evolved those weirdly buff fins into actual legs and developed into the first true land animals, though tragically they lack the Coelacanth’s roguish sense of style.

there’s a lot of stumpy little legs in this picture

while these lobe-finned fish did go on to become literally all land-dwelling vertebrates ever INCLUDING YOU, the Coelacanth was content to retain its fishy shape and continue on as it always had. for 400 fucking million years. 

they probably barely even noticed all those major extinction events. meteor who?

it’s coelaCAN, not coelaCAN’T.

today, Coelacanths are still more closely related to you than they are to most other fish. think of it as the weird cousin that never gets invited to the mammal family reunion.

the Coelacanth’s relationship to land vertebrates has long been known from fossils, but Science believed it had gone extinct sometime in the Cretaceous period more than 60 million years ago. so imagine Science’s surprise when a live Coelacanth was pulled up by a fishing trawler in 1938, off the coast of South Africa.

surpriiiiiiise! bet you thought you’d seen the last of me

this makes them the first ever example of a Lazarus Taxon (which is an absolutely badass phrase that would make a damn good name for a rock band), meaning it’s an evolutionary line we thought was extinct but they lived, bitch.

today, the Coelacanth is known to live in the Indian and South African oceans, where they thrive in deep water far away from the prying eyes of their nosy hairless ape relatives. 

they are mostly active at night and can grow to be 6 and a half feet long, and live more than 60 years. they don’t have much personality, but BOY are they tenacious.

I make up for it with my stunning good looks

Coelacanths mostly drift with the current, eating whatever happens to pass by that’s smaller than they are. this just goes to show that laziness does pay off in the long run! 

it’s a valid survival strategy, MOM.

Coelacanths don’t have many natural predators, as they taste completely disgusting. sharks are pretty much the only predator who will give it a try, but sharks also eat outboard motors and license plates so that’s really not saying much.

all that aside, these ancient fish can motivate us to face the challenges of the new year. just remember, if a weird fish with demi-legs can survive for 400 million years on the benefits of laziness and just being kind of weird and disgusting, so can you!

coelaCAN, AND SO CAN YOU!

its weird to think horses were ever ‘prey animals’ because what fucking predator looks at a 8 foot tall ENORMOUS beast with pitch black devils eyes, terrifying teeth and extremely powerful legs and think ‘yeah lets go attack that one’

well moose are still prey animals so

thats fucked up, a moose is like a horse with extra weapons

Would you rather they be predators

SHIT SHIT SHIT IM SO SORRY

Herbivores are terrifying. Just because an animal doesn’t want to eat you doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to hurt you.

This Armadillo girdled lizard biting its tail looks like a mini dragon

You’re not in trouble, Bandit. Those are for you!

which cryptid is this???

He’s a Gentle Hellhound

the good folk you meet on desert highways

Totally bizarre facts about the star-nosed mole

Source: Experimental Biology 2017

A quarter-century of research on the star-nosed mole has unearthed startling insights into the evolution of animal behavior and the limits of physiology. Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University will present a new synthesis of remarkable anatomical findings about the star-nosed mole at the American Association of Anatomists annual meeting during the Experimental Biology 2017 meeting, to be held April 22-26 in Chicago.

“Star-nosed moles are truly amazing animals,” said Catania, a neuroscientist who’s interest in the creature was first piqued while working as an undergraduate research assistant at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. “Obviously they are among the weirdest looking creatures on the planet. But when I began trying to understand the star, the mole’s brain organization, and its behavior–that’s when things got really surprising.”

Here are some highlights:

They eat faster than any other mammal on Earth.

Star-nosed moles can identify and eat food (bugs, mostly) in less than two-tenths of a second, taking a mere 8 milliseconds to decide whether an item is edible or not. They perform this feat in part due to the extremely efficient operation of their nervous systems, which convey information from the environment to the animal’s brain at speeds approaching the physiological limit of neurons. It also helps that…

…Their star is the most sensitive known touch organ in any mammal.

The distinctive star organ on the mole’s snout contains more than 100,000 nerve fibers–five times the number of “touch” fibers in the human hand, all packed into a space smaller than your fingertip. “The star skin is so sensitive that we have not been able to determine the lowest threshold for activating neurons,” said Catania, adding that studying the star could provide insights that improve our understanding of the human sense of touch.

From a neurological perspective, their sense of touch mirrors our sense of sight.

At the center of the star organ is a small area called the touch fovea that the mole uses for all of its most detailed explorations. Although the mole’s actual eyes are essentially useless, the touch fovea is neurologically organized in a way that is strikingly similar to the organization of a highly developed visual system. As the mole moves through its environment, it constantly shifts the star to reposition the fovea on areas of interest, just as we shift our eyes while reading the words printed on a page, for example. “These parallels suggest there are common strategies by which evolution ‘builds’ high-resolution sensory systems, whether they are based on sight or on touch,” Catania said.

Read more via EurekAlert 

Photo credit: Ken Catania 

Today I learned that cuttlefish experience REM sleep, and that it makes their skin flash random colors. This is the cutest thing ever.

The electric eel at my aquarium has a voltmeter attached to his tank, and whenever he pumps out a burst of electricity–either when he’s navigating his tank or getting fed–the meter lights up and makes noise. Sometimes, I’ll walk past him when he’s snuggled up and totally motionless on his log, and see the voltmeter going crazy.

I am left to assume that he is dreaming, and is sleep-zapping at the things in his dreams.

I am absolutely delighted to learn that electric eels dream of kicking ass.