If I had mandibles I'd clack them together like tongs all the time
um. insects crustaceans molluscs and small fish in there?
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🦀 time for crab 🦀
today i summoned 6 crabs! i caught one 💰 of them. i became friends with 2 🌼 of them. 2 fell in love with me 💙
group picture!!!
🦀💙🦀💙🦀🌼🦀🌼🦀🦀💰
Sorry, really active today, but I just. I found an article, okay?
“A redescription of the leggiest animal, the millipede Illacme plenipes, with notes on its natural history and biogeography (Diplopoda, Siphonophorida, Siphonorhinidae)” by Paul E. Marek, William A. Shear, and Jason E. Bond
Now the word millipede means “thousand-footed” and see, the thing is, most millipedes don’t even come close. They’re part of the myriapods, which means “myriad-footed,” more literally 10,000-footed but as with the word’s current popular usage the Greeks also meant an unspecific fuck-ton. Myriapods were likely the first creatures that set foot on land and there’s convincing analysis that our earliest insect fossil might actually be a myriapod.
(Actually, side note, recent genetic studies have identified horseshoe crabs as arachnids. Not “related to arachnids” but actual fucking arachnids. Fuck.)
Anyway whatever this millipede was described early last century and then was never considered until it had to be redescribed by the above authors and it is… weird, even for one of these Lovecraftian myriapod fucks.
For one, it’s rare but also not exactly “exotic.” You would expect the “leggiest” detritivore (feeds on detritus like fallen leaves) to come from a rainforest but no, as far as we can tell it lives in one county of… central fucking California. My fucking backyard.
Also as for leggiest, it comes the closest to actually living up to the name millipede with just shy of 800. That’s more than double the closest runner up.
This thing is fucking MASSIVE. It’s basically a goddamned SNAKE.
See that scale bar in the bottom lefthand corner? It’s gotta be a fucking METER—
Wait… hold on—
This thing has more limbs than my extended family, the most legs of ANY species EVER, and it maxes out at THREE CENTIMETERS. SMALLER THAN MY FUCKING PINKY. It’s fucking half as long as a house centipede but has nigh on 80 times more legs.
Nature SUCKS. The more I learn about it the less sense it makes. This shit is for the birds, I am never reading about any animal ever again, I hate this so much.
When ants die, a few days later they emit oleic acid, which tells the living ants to dispose of their corpse.
A myrmecologist named Ed Wilson discovered this and dropped the chemical on a living ant. It was immediately carried off, despite the fact that it was still moving, and clearly not dead.
“I’M GETTING BETTER”
Bring out your dead. Eh, close enough.
IM NOT YET DEAD SIR
You grow up and you realise A Bug’s Life was the revolutionary Leftist masterpiece of our childhoods
I’m not even slightly kidding
Ants are the workforce doing the labour needed to survive, and they have to do it twice over to provide for both themselves and for a group of parasites who do nothing but consume the labour of others
The ants work themselves near to death trying to stay afloat
The grasshoppers don’t even need any food. They have tons
to spare but still insist on taking the food the ants worked for because they ‘deserve’ it, despite actually contributing nothing of value. The only reason this works is by threatening ants with force and degrading them so they feel weak and worthless, and insisting that the grasshoppers deserve a cut for some vague service they claim to provide to society
In reality Hopper is desperate to stop the ants from thinking for themselves, keeping them ignorant of the fact that he has subjugated ants through threats of power while the ants actually overpower the grasshoppers through sheer numbers.
And should the ants ever realise that the grasshoppers take from them while providing nothing and that revolution is possible, the class system they’ve installed will be finished.
tl;dr feed the 1% to birds
Science wasn’t actually certain how fungi like cordyceps “hijacked” their host’s behavior, and we always kind of assumed it was causing some simplistic damage to the brain.
As it turns out, it works much more elaborately and much MORE like the dramatized sci-fi horror parasites constantly inspired by it.
These fungi integrate themselves on the cellular level with the host’s tissues, actually seem to send signals to the host’s muscles and even alter the host’s genes with their own.
All the while, THE BRAIN ISN’T INVADED AT ALL.
These fungi, all along, have been converting their hosts into animal-fungal hybrids they control while the host’s brain and consciousness remain helplessly alive and largely unaltered.
noooooooOOPE
Frisbee eating an algae tab then remembering she’s a carnivore
For the love of god please tell Frisbee I love her
they’re known for eating insects. insects aren’t plants
all anyone on this site cares about is party rockin and isopods 😑
fuck you if you care about literally anything else
Giant isopods are so cool but what’s with the sexy funk music
most sexual motherfucker in the ocean.
