Poogona [he/him] @ Poogona @hexbear.net

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4 yr. ago

When I found out that leech saliva was antimicrobial I decided leeches are good and that disliking them is lookism

Even without a centralized brain, jellyfish can both learn from past events and change their behavior to preempt expected events.

No need to look for aliens in space when we've got plenty of them to make contact with underwater

I have very few resources to offer anyone in need, as it's really only by my basic unfair privileges as a cis white man that I even have a place to sleep, but I'm just trying to make it clear to the people I know that I have the space to house them/feed them if they are in crisis. Without much else to support them with it feels like the best I can do.

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it's very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

It's usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it's heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn't have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.

Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly "eusocial" mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.

Yeah the real issue in a way is that there's just so much evidence of evolution happening that it's hard to find a single shared pattern to study

Sometimes ants can't smell ants either and you get supercolonies

Unto Others has a great section about this. In a bunch of studied tribes who live generally pre-industrial lifestyles, the anthropologists were interested in how they "organize" big projects like building a house, and when they watched them, wondered what made them so willing to just do it.

Long story short, they saw how the kids watched them and subsequently "played" at doing things like building houses, carrying things together, etc. They essentially concluded that the "work" they did was understood more like play--that without any coercion to labor beyond meeting their needs, they were surprisingly eager to do that boring stuff because they made it into the day's activity rather than grinding "work."

TL;DR unalienated labor schniff and so on

Nobody goes nutting any more huh

Aussie magpies are ridiculously smart, love them as an example of convergent evolution since they are not corvids but rather songbirds that have evolved to be more crow-like to fill a similar niche to corvids