@terrible-tentacle-theatre / tentacletheatre.com
Jaggedhead gurnard (Gargariscus, Armored searobins or armored gurnards)
Photographer and Fisherman: Roman Fedortsov
The reason they call this group “sea robins” is because the .ore commonly encountered species look more like this one:
The armored ones live deeper, and they also come in weirder shapes!
A diagram of the egg-placing technique of the Idiosepius pygmaeus paradoxus squid from American malacological bulletin v.10 (1993).
Full text available here.
Can’t argue with that.
Transcript:
Yo this flat boi got WORMS <- look at em all
How do you feel about the gumboot chiton
sometimes an animal can be so shaped
commerson’s dolphin looks like malayan tapir looks like commerson’s dolphin
If you put either one of these guys in the others environment, they turn into the other guy
Hi I'm Siscar and I'm broke again after a recent grocery run and need money to buy more groceries in the future
If you can't donate please reblog
Thank you
Sorry to reblog this again but I'm trying to save money to move out
My current living conditions are abysmal
The house is literally falling apart around me, there is no hot water and barely any water pressure
There's mold growing on the walls and a hole in the ceiling outside my bedroom that goes straight through the roof
Please get me out of here
I need to emphasize the fact that the mold has eaten all the way through their roof.
PLEASE help us get Si outta here.
I thought it would delight you to know that ants do have a sort of funeral mound for their dead
yes there is a name for this! necrophoresis is a process with social insects where the bodies are taken to a specific location on the outside of ( or within ) the nest - ants tend to keep them all in the same place, and the way an ant is signaled to be "dead" by its other members is through the release of a chemical called oliec acid
theres even been a few experiments where live ants were coated in the same chemical and other ants treated the live ants....exactly as though they were dead and tried dragging them into the pile
That's a crinoid! Also called sealily or hairstar (at least in german) . They are like an evolutionary step between starfish and sea urchin. There are so many different types of these! It's so cool!
Oooh
to look upon this, and know it is Animal. That it is nearer to us, in spite of everything, than a mushroom, or a plant.
sometimes I think about how red is the first color in the visible light spectrum to be absorbed in ocean water
and how many deep-sea creatures evolved to be red as a stealth adaptation, making them near invisible when there’s little to no light present
and it makes me think. If there’s never any visible light present in these animals’ lifetimes, if no ROV shines a little flashlight in depths that would otherwise not have light, would these animals ever get the opportunity to actually be red? that might be a stupid question.
imagine being a little deep sea creature and having no idea you’re red until something comes along and shines a light on you except you still wouldn’t be able to tell because you’re probably colorblind. anyway. I don’t know where I was going with this post
Is color relative? Or inherent? Or both???
Like is color physiological and determined by the shape of whatever pigment cells that will always absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others?
or is color meaningless if there’s no light to absorb and reflect?
Is it completely relative because the way we percieve color is subjective, how even within our own species there are so many different kinds of ways people can observe color?
makes you think
Red light doesn’t make it to the deep ocean from the sun, but that doesn’t mean red light doesn’t exist at that depth!
The stomiidae, which include the viperfish, dragonfish, and loosejaws, are one example of a deep sea animal that evolved to perceive and produce red light because it isn’t naturally present in their environment and most other organisms never hit on that adaptation. In most of this group, tiny red lights can be switched on and off throughout their skin to communicate with their own kind in secret. More threateningly, some of them have high-powered “floodlights” of pure red just beneath their eyes; almost no other deep sea fish emit actual BEAMS of light to illuminate what they’re looking at because that’d make them a shining beacon to every larger predator in the area, but since it’s red, the only risk ends up coming from their fellow red-light hunters and those remain just uncommon enough to be worth the chance. In many members of this group, most of all the loosejaws (hence the name), almost the entire skull can naturally detach from the rest of the body on specialized stalks at lightning speed so that their long, hooked jaws can grab prey in an instant, almost the same exact motion as the arm of a preying mantis:
If you were a little fish in this scenario you would see absolutely nothing but darkness around you and possibly feel pretty safe, because maybe you’ve evolved to blend in perfectly with the surrounding void and you can’t see any blue or yellow or green lights coming to get you. You have no idea that there’s been a spotlight right on you all along until its owner’s face flies off to impale you and shove you whole into its giant throat all in less than half of a second :)
someone explain why deep sea creatures are so fucking scary like is there a logical reason was god like hey that’s deep and dark so I shall create absolutely terrifying creatures who will haunt humans in their dreams
Think about the predators up here on land; bigger eyes, longer teeth and bigger mouths. We know these things indicate something that can harm us, or stalk us in the dark. Now you multiply that the farther you go down the ocean. If it’s darker, then they need bigger eyes. If it’s a LOT darker, then their eyes need more and more specialized anatomy nothing could ever possibly need up here in the sun, so by necessity they do not have the kind of eyes we know:
And food is so far between, the predators need even longer teeth, to make sure those rare meals they encounter really can’t escape:
And because it’s dark AND food is scarce, they need big, expandable jaws and bodies that are almost all stomach, to guarantee they can take advantage of more meals and don’t have too much more body to have to nourish:
effervescent c:
How are these even real????
Most of these look pretty reasonable imo but I’ve never heard of the loosejaw before and I gotta say, it looks like it has a puppet for a head, which is quite unsettling and seems like it shouldn’t be practical. Also, is that a second mouth behind its skull? Or does it have to reattach its head to swallow, and it’s just coincidence that the biomechanical structures behind its skull look like a mouth?
I’m glad people asked!!! The loosejaw does have extra teeth back there to help keep prey from escaping, and the head structure all folds back together:
The most surprising thing about these features, however, is that they’re already present in many of the fish people are familiar with! The loosejaw pushes it to an extreme, but you can see how these freshwater carp also “unfurl” and “throw” their jaw structure:
The loosejaw just doesn’t have a skin covering this structure, because that allows it to fling the jaw even faster through the water with no resistance! …And it’s also quite normal for all kinds of everyday fish to have additional teeth or a functional secondary set of jaws in the back of the throat:
not to cyberbully lepidodendrons when they went extinct 300 million years ago and aren’t here to defend themselves but throwback to when lepidodendrons grew up to 100 feet tall and were ruling the prehistoric landscape but could only make new branches in perfect symmetrical dichotomous pairs off the tips of older branches instead of making one branch and letting the other branch keep growing off the side of said branch (like every single modern day plant) so they would grow really big but eventually the ends of the branches would get so thin the vascular bundles couldnt get water or food up there and they didn’t have any sizable branches left that far out (because they’d all been split into like 901480543 other branches) and would have literally no choice but to die
not to cyberbully lepidodendrons on main but throwback to when lepidodendrons could only make reproductive organs at the ends of their branches which, again, were literally the only other places they could branch from so immediately after fucking they would have no choice but to die, having literally nerfed themselves with their horniness
not to cyberbully lepidodendrons in general but throwback to what the saplings looked like
a lepidodendron personally came to my home and tried to murder me with it’s tiny dichotomous prong hands but ran out of usable vascular tissue before it could branch down all 100 feet to get to my throat and just fucking died in my family’s backyard, shedding scales over 8 houses and nutting massive spores from it’s infuriatingly perfect exponential number of branch tips
Hello. Are they any animals that look like they've been hit in the head with a hammer?
that’s a great question! have a surinam toad.
dont be FUCKING rude
top five most fucked up looking birds imaginable. just absolutely thrashed. complete garbage cans with wings
This was a ton of fun and the result of an hour long phone call with @elwingflight, narrowing down the Worst Birds. We’ve tried to skip over the most obvious selections (Ocellated Turkey, Jabirou, Shoebill, all vultures, Marabou Stork, Frogmouths, and Potoos) for some truly underrated garbage creatures. As usual, sources are linked:
4. Capuchinbird
We kept on going back to the pictures of helmeted hornbills because we couldn’t believe how utterly hideous they are.
16/08/2020 Garlic plants clone themselves. When a plant grows bulbs at its root, they’re just pieces of the parent plant, with the same genes, and if they are split off and planted, they grow into the same plant again. Garlic also grows little bulbils in flower heads. Those are clones too. There are maybe a hundred or so garlic plants in the world, copying themselves endlessly. If you buy a head of Rocambole garlic at the grocery store, it’s not a breed. It’s one plant. You buy and eat a piece of the same plant, every time.
We eat the same plant upon which the light of the Great Comet of 1882, brighter than the moon, fell. The same plant remnant mammoth populations rooted up with their tusks. The plant that knew the Year Without A Summer. The plant that felt the New Madrid earthquake, when the Mississippi river ran backwards, and the Carrington flare, when auroras danced in the tropical sky and telegraphs sent ghost messages after their operators disconnected the power supplies. The same plant, unborn and undying, just split into small pieces and regrowing itself, again and again, over thousands of years.
Vampires are not wrong to fear the stuff.
We don’t know where garlic came from. We don’t know which wild allium it was made from, or made itself from. It’s difficult to determine the genetic origin of a sterile plant, and the most similar-looking wild garlic is also sterile and self-cloning, which does not provide any useful information whatsoever.
For centuries, we had only the garlics that created themselves. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists figured out how to actually breed garlic. If the plant has bulbils, it will direct its energy to developing them, and the flowers never mature. But if you remove all the bulbils from the flower head, the garlic might, reluctantly, flower, accept visiting bees and pollen from other garlic plants, and make seeds combining their genes.
As for us, we became preoccupied with whether or not we could, but we got so excited about making new garlic we forgot about whatever the rest of the quote says. I’m sure it’s fine.
It takes about an hour to gently pry all the bulbils from a flower head with tweezers, leaving as many flowers as possible. The bulbils are solid and sturdy, and the flowers are pressed up against them on wispy, fragile stems. It was like playing jenga except half the pieces are pebbles and the other half are squares of toilet paper.
We de-bulbed eight flowerheads, three Tibetan garlic and five Georgian Fire garlic. No idea whether we’ll have done well enough to get seeds on the first try.
If you don’t hear from us again, at least we got to meddle with powers we didn’t understand.
A group of coelacanths
Excuse me mr bogged leech but why do jellyfish need such unbelievably potent venom? Especially that one extremely tiny jellyfish whose poison makes you feel the worst pain possible for days on end and has a symptom along the lines of "makes you feel impending doom." What evolutionary factors could there be for such a tiny creature to evolve a toxin that makes you feel like Death is personally coming for you
It is Precisely just because they prey on fish! A fish is a highly active vertebrate that evolved for lightning fast movement and reflexes through deep, heavy water, so more than half of a fish’s body is a dense hunk of proportionately high-powered, dense muscle all the way through! Look how little space is devoted to organs in even just an anchovy, muscle and bone fills ALL the remaining space:
That’s muscle for escaping sharks and dolphins! Muscle that can fight currents stronger than hurricane winds! But a jellyfish evolved for an extreme conservation of resources: just barely enough tissue to hold it together, which allows it to grow and multiply on barely a sliver the resources it takes to make a vertebrate, a high efficiency approach to building, growing, and multiplying a living body that has allowed jellyfish to keep thriving in the harshest conditions and through global extinction events.
So, relative to one another, a fish is practically built like a cheetah, a stallion or an ox while a jellyfish is built like...a cobweb, a snowflake or a latex balloon. The only way a latex balloon can possibly hunt oxen for a living is with sheer firepower alone, or some kind of magical instant-death-touch, so that is exactly what evolution resulted in. While box jellies prey on fish seldom larger than themselves, a single sting delivers venom potent enough to kill a THOUSAND little fish in an instant, or completely wreck an entire massive human. The venom equivalent of a point-blank shotgun blast.
