By Fomajc On Instagram. Im Losing My Shit Over This

by fomajc on instagram. im losing my shit over this

that article going around abt firefox's new ad program is annoying bc it's phrased as though "mozilla has finally TURNED on its people and is SELLING YOU OUT for cold hard cash!!" when. that's not what's happening. it is specifically being implemented to discourage tracking behavior, and literally all the data they are giving to advertisers is aggregate and anonymized, which is like, the opposite of what that post wants you to worry about, lol

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

Les Misératbles

art by The Baby Goat

It's weird how geological time works. Eras start and end bit by bit over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That sounds like a big uncertainty but that sort of timescale, on which the climate can overhaul itself completely and entire species rise and fall, is instantaneous compared to the age of the earth. Any hypothetical sentient creature would have no idea it was living through a major turning point. The Silurian slid into the Devonian as land plants became A Thing and insects started to wonder if 'pilot' might be a good career path, but there was no one moment when one thing ended and another began. That's not how that works...

... except for the Cretaceous. The Cretaceous had a Last Day and it was probably in April, and then the next day it was the Paleogene.

I see these fellows in my garden all the time during summer, in addition to the few resident hummingbirds! I can tell you with confidence that actual hummingbirds are significantly larger than the largest hummingbird moth you'll ever see (at least twice to three times as big).

Oddly enough, while there are hummingbird moths in Europe and North America, hummingbirds themselves are strictly New World animals. Any reports of hummingbirds outside of the Americas is either an escaped captive bird or, more likely, a hummingbird moth.

Bonus fun fact: here in NorAm we also have a different genus of moths with the same adaptations: the clearwing moths!

Have any of you ever heard of the hummingbird moths we get in Britain?

So, I thought I saw a hummingbird last year. It was much bigger than a bug could be, I thought, and it hovered around flowers and looked like it had feathers.

I got pretty close but it was never still enough to see clearly. Then, when I told my parents they said "oh! it was probably a moth!" and I was baffled for a long time. Like, how could a moth look like and act so much like a hummingbird?

Until I googled "hummingbirds in the UK" and this fucker comes up:

Everyone, meet the hummingbird hawk-moth; one of the weirdest and coolest cases of convergent evolution on this planet.

This is the kinda thing I'd see in fiction and go "oooh cool, bug hummingbird! Wish we had those on earth!" But we do. We really do have them on earth!! Isn't that nuts?!?!?