I Do Have To Admit In Retrospect,, That Was Probably A Big Part Of It As Well. And, The Purple. And-Character

I do have to admit in retrospect,, that was probably a big part of it as well. And, the purple. And- Character design...vibes... I am a sucker...

“B-but you didn’t even finish watching the last couple of shows you were obsessed with that had sinister adoptive dads!”

“Hehe evil mask man say ‘Subarashi’ a lot.”

This whole thing is making me laugh so hard for several reasons but mainly because off the top of my head, if you’ve ever read Moby Dick, there actually is no outright sex scene. BUT. It’s literally one of the most blushingly homoerotic pieces of literature I’ve ever read in my life.

Without exaggeration, Melville crammed it brimming full of cheeky (Very intentional) innuendo enough to make a nun faint. There’s literally one scene that takes its sweet, descriptive time to visually lay out a whole circle of sea men squeezing and wringing the “sperm” (as in the sperm whale grease) out of a harvest, you know all ruggedly and rapturously and sensually, as one does with the sailor homies. I lied actually, it’s not a scene. It’s an entire chapter titled “A Squeeze of the Hand” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) …

Not getting into the “strangers sharing a hotel bed to unofficially married speedrun” bromance between Ishmael and Queenqueg because we’d be here all day.

brandon sanderson fans

Okay am I stupid or are there actually no papers on this?

I'm writing an essay for a neuroendocrinology course and decided my topic to be olfactory detection of predators.

Basically my thinking was "what if prey animals... Just... Smell their enemies coming??? Wouldn't that be extremely advantageous???" And it turns out that there's been a number of studies on rats and mice that prove: Yes, they can smell predators and those odours actually induce a quick fear response in the rats/mice!

Weird? No, not really. Detecting predators from afar is very useful. It's why prey animals often have eyes on both sides of their head: to scan the horizon for predators in almost all directions.

Point is that predator and prey are locked in a co-evolutionary arms race: if prey adapts to predator, predator in turn has to adapt as well. Your prey can detect you from a yards away? Just slap on some camouflage. Your preys ears are like satellite dishes? Just develop specialised feathers that make glide silently through the air. Or, what some predators decided to do, ignore all the beautiful innovations from your prey and just... team up with yo frens and circle your meal...

But if your prey has a keen sense of smell??? What can you do? You could mask your scent some way or another (olfactory camouflage) or leave fewer scent marks on your territory... I guess...

But I've never heard of such a strategy. Nor can I find papers on the matter...

Rats and mice rely on their sense of smell almost more than anything... And they can smell odours from foxes clearly. So then why do foxes still secrete those odours??

TLDR; rat smell fox, fox do not use deodorant, why??

EDIT: ppl keep reblogging this but it's worth it to look in the notes because people have been providing answers to this

Footnote: This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing both lil series!

Creacher Feature Friday 2: Ode to the Opossum

Oh, you marvelous, misaligned, misunderstood marsupial, how I salute you~

Introducing a classic North American underdog and everyone’s favorite garbage gobbler, the Virginia Opossum! Not, of course, to be confused with the Australian common possum.

Ngl, the more I’ve come to learn about these funky lil fellas throughout my years, the more they solidify their spot as my favorite animal, but also the more their bad rep absolutely befuddles me.

Going by the pop culture representation of the poor things you would think they were just rat-tailed raccoons. But they’re so flipping unique and underrated.

Getting the obvious out of the way, not ratty at all! Not even remotely rodent. That’s all pouch-baring marsupial, baby, like kangaroos and bandicoots and mongooses. They’re also the ONLY marsupial native to the United States. And just like the cobra-eating mongoose, they also happen to share a high resistance to snake venom! We love them down in the south where they’re a fearless and very successful predator of copperheads, water moccasins, and rattlesnakes. They also help keep Lyme disease in check each year. They rarely catch it and/because they eat most ticks that latch onto them, making them not a key reservoir species for the pathogen.

You know what else they love eating? Slugs and snails the sorts that otherwise wreck gardens left unchecked. They call them rabid pests? Why, opossums are straight up free pest control! And the “rabid” thing is the most ridiculous part.

Like, can someone seriously, please tell me how on earth THIS little guy becoming the poster boy for rabies jokes makes any ounce of sense? I mean, other than for the hilarious irony when you realize a little known fact:

Virginia opossums have a natural resistance to contracting the rabies virus, too. No joke. They’re probably near the very bottom of the list of animals you’d have to fear the disease from. While any mammal certainly can become rabid, it’s phenomenally rare for opossums be reported as active carriers of rabies, and this comes down to the simple trait that is their curiously low body temperature.

Most mammals like to keep their innards in a cozy range of about 97°F to 104°F (~36 °C to 40°C), the Virginia Opossum enjoys a comfortable homeostasis all the way down to about 94°F (~ 34 °C). As luck would have it for them, rabies has a hard time being able to incubate at such a low temperature under normal circumstances.

Got a hunch, but maybe the “vicious/rabid” stereotype comes from the way they act when humans do happen to encounter them up close. They’re horribly near-sighted, slow moving little wanderers (big reason they get roadkilled so often), so they don’t really have fleeing in their set of options when facing down a threat. When an opossum gets frightened, the first thing they know to do is…. Bluff. Open up their mouths real wide and hiss and growl as convincingly scary as they can manage. I think it looks really goofy tbh, like

“:V”

The thing being, while this is pretty a intimidating act, it’s not much anything more than that. I’ve never actually learned about a wild mammal LESS willing to commit to defending itself. They’re complete cowards that seldom ever attack or bite people. There’s videos out there of professionals being able to handle wild females WITH babies on board and the things never actually go for a bite.

And this is mostly because their plan B after the bluff isn’t working out is, well… you know, playing possum. It’s not even something they choose to do. It’s actually an involuntary reflex due to shock. They curl up, keep that mouth wide open, and basically pass out on the spot. To make the corpse audition even more “convincing” they additionally secret a foul odor from their anal glands, so they can smell as dead as they look. The hope is that whatever was spooking them so badly just looses its appetite and moves on, leaving the opossum unscathed.

⚠️Important note that this is of course NOT an endorsement to try your luck for yourself by picking up or petting the first one you see. No wild animals are 100% predictable, especially when cornered, and even if these are relatively docile, dealing with them should be left to the licensed professionals (who do still wear gloves when they do, just in case) and any kind of unnecessary contact is going to be extremely stressful to them. We understood? Ok 👍🏻

Really, unless you’re a chicken farmer there’s really no reason to be so darn afraid of them. All they mostly do is just bumble along trying to mind their own business. Look at these super moms, mad respect.

This is seriously what they do for a while after the babies are too big to chill in here pouch, and it makes me smile very widely.

Not to mention the babies themselves are drop-dead adorable. Check out this lil punk and his fingerless gloves! This teeny silly billy and his prehensile tail?

Stupendous and gorgeous. Hats off to the common opossum, please keep being yourselves. We know you’re trying your best.

And that will be all until next Friday. I promise, pinky out and everything, I will definitely fill you in by then on the whole “mind-control fungus that turns cicadas into bisexual zombies” thing I mentioned last time. Just sit tight.

Footnote: Feel like seeing more rambles n' stuff? This is my current blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as future write-ups!

Creacher Feature Friday 6: I Found a Tragedy and a Rarity in the Ferns 🪺

~Ah, brood parasitism, one of my favorite forms of symbiosis. Brilliant tactic, evolutionarily speaking. Why invest precious resources and time into raising your own offspring, when you can just entirely hijack the parental instincts of another species? The cuckoo bird is one of the most well known and famous examples of this reproductive strategy, never building their own nests, but happy to drop their eggs into the clutches of other birds to raise as their own.

*(fun fact: this is actually the origin of the slang words “cuckold” and “cuck”, from an old French term for the cuckoo bird.)

Today I would, however, love to talk to talk about the brown-headed cowbird, another parasitic avian species, common to the United States.

The reason why is because I found a lucky, incredible sight while watering my Aunt’s ferns once:

If you don’t immediately get why I was so excited when I realized what this was, this is a photo I took of an inactive house finch nest I had been keeping my eyes on last summer.

For some reason every year, they love to set up nests inside the hanging plants. A cowbird must have also decided it seemed like a lovely spot, and left behind one of its own eggs in the nest. Now I didn’t see the brood up close myself until the family had already moved on, and I snapped this picture when the time came to remove the nest, having no idea it had even been parasitized. And what was left behind is evidence of a little-known phenomenon called

Egg capping!

What makes parasitism like the This destructive to the original nest is that one cowbird hatchling usually dooms its adoptive siblings. They grow much faster than their host species and they immediately outcompete the other fledgelings in the nest due to their size for the host parents’ attention and feeding. I think you can see why they need all they can get. Exhibit A:

Another way they have of reducing competition in the nest, it’s been theorized, is to literally prevent their “clutchmates” from hatching at all- by “capping” one of the original eggs with its own eggshell. This is not something that the hatchling does on purpose, but with a little bit of luck, in the fact that they often hatch and develop faster than the hosts, this can happen by pure chance as the shell gets tossled around with the other eggs. And evidently, this is extremely rare to happen under normal circumstances, what with chicks synchronizing their hatching, the parents usually then removing the shells from the nest.

So, it’s a fortunate evolutionary bonus for these home-wrecker cowbirds that this is another way they manage to gum up the works.

An Extra note: though it is potentially upsetting news that Brown-headed cowbirds are detrimental to their host nests, they are still a native and federally protected species in their home range. It is illegal to remove or tamper with their eggs the same way it is illegal to disturb their hosts’, and upon finding a parasitized nest in your yard, remember that it is best to let nature take its course. Cowbirds are still part of this beautiful ecosystem, even if they are mooching free-loaders :)

But, there is a nasty little twist to the story in my nest photos. The cowbird chick probably didn’t find success either. You see… house finches were actually a really poor choice for the mother cowbird who decided to drop her offspring here.

While the majority of local songbirds here (brown headed cowbirds included) require insects in their diet to develop well and strong, house finches are a special exception- they are almost exclusively herbivores. The cowbird that capped this finch egg probably didn’t fare well under its unsuspecting parents, muscling out its competition in vein. I hope those finches have a better run next year, but I am very thankful I got to see some really neat ecology in action, and right outside the front door!