I love this shitty right-wing meme for two reasons:
1) They think the movie is named after the year it took place in.
2) Spartans had a ludicrous amount of gay sex. It was encouraged by the commanders as a way of building unity. Newlywed Spartan wives shaved their heads and wore men’s clothing to make the transition to sex with women easier for their husbands. It was just that gay.
OKAY BUT LEMME TELL YOU A THING. THE GREEKS THOUGHT THAT WEARING PANTS WAS FOR SISSIES AND THOUGHT THAT THE PERSIANS WERE WEAK FOR WEARING LEG ARMOR INTO BATTLE. SO ACTUALLY THE GUYS ON THE BOTTOM WERE MANLY IN THE ANCIENT GREEK AESTHETIC.
this cuttlefish was NOT happy about this starfish trying to touch him
they shouldn’t be! Most starfish are predators and it would’ve eaten them if they were sick, injured or trapped!
It’s 1am and I’m finding out that starfish are predators.
here are some more things about that:
They don’t have teeth or jaws *in their mouths*, so the most common starfish feeding method is to simply cover their prey, usually a clam or a snail or something else very slow, and flip their own stomach inside-out to smother and digest the prey externally.
I specify “in their mouths” because in some starfish the entire body surface is blanketed in extremely tiny jaw-like structures, sometimes thousands of them. These can be purely defensive or they can be a means of making the starfish “sticky” to small prey such as shrimp.
While most sea stars simply rely on eating things slower than themselves – sometimes including healthy, but sleeping fish – there are also stars who form an ambush trap ike this. Small animals try to hide under this nice cave and then the starfish clamps down on them to do the stomach trick.
Also this isn’t related to them killing things but most sea stars have fully functioning eyes, almost invisibly tiny, at the end of each arm.
this was educational but also gave me slow-motion anxiety for that little cuttlefish
Don’t worry, cuttlefish are fast and intelligent. Certainly more intelligent than something with no brain. Plus, that looks like one of the scavenging species of starfish. It was probably just going in that general direction rather than trying to eat the cuttlefish.
That’s older than flowering plants, older than trees, 200,000,000 years older than dinosaurs, almost older than vertebrates or animal life on land, and far, far, far older than anything even remotely resembling a mammal.
They’ve survived three ice ages and the rise and fall of the great aquatic invertebrates, the primitive reptiles, the dinosaurs, the warm-water whales, and the mammalian megafauna that came just before us.
They’ve survived virtually unchanged since the dawn of vertebrate life, too. If you found a picture of a primitive shark and showed it to someone who knew nothing about marine life, they’d go “oh, yeah, that’s a weird-looking shark”.
And they are headed for extinction some time in the next century if we continue killing them at this rate. There is still hope, the numbers are lowering more slowly and there are increasing populations in well-managed fisheries, but the four-hundred-and-twenty-million-year-old tops of our food chains are dying out for no other reason than because killing them is profitable.
Spread the word, everyone. Education is the key to getting shark finning banned, to pushing (or forcing) methods of fishing that reduce bycatch, and to convincing people that sharks are not monsters.
Reminder NOT to use (un)scented lotions, topical medications, scented candles, incense, or essential oil diffusers on or around your pets unless instructed otherwise by your vet. If using a lotion or a medication, don’t touch your pet or anything your pet interacts with before washing your hands and letting the affected area dry.
Fumes from scented lotions and air fresheners can seriously irritate pets’ lungs. Because of the difference in lung structure and function, even one-time exposure can be potentially lethal for birds specifically. (x, x, x) This is because birds’ lungs push more oxygen (and any airborne toxins) into the bloodstream per breath, making the same concentrations of fumes more dangerous for birds than humans. Cats and dogs can have adverse reactions to some essential oils and air fresheners if they already have sensitive airways, (x), and can be even more dangerous if your pet drinks or eats the materials.
An open flame is also a terrible idea to have around any curious animal. Even if it’s ‘out of reach’, a determined animal will find a way. It’s easier not to give them the option. That’s just common sense.
If even a little cream gets on their skin, medicinal or not, it could cause a reaction, especially in animals with thin skin like parrots and amphibians. Regardless the toughness of their skin, most animalsWILL ingest it when they groom themselves.
The smallest amounts of zinc oxide (found in sun block, calamine lotion, rash creams, US pennies made after 1982, all metal zippers, some paints, and many rubber products, among other things) can cause vomiting and diarrhea in cats and dogs, sometimes to the point of internal bleeding. (x) In birds it can cause regurgitation, lameness, mental aberrations, and sudden death depending on the species (x), with exposure ranging from a few days to a few years.
Human medications are plenty dangerous for other reasons, and I’d list the risks if this post weren’t already so long. Instead, you can read about some of them here (x).
As a general rule: if you’re unsure about something, DON’T EXPOSE YOUR PET TO IT. Always talk to your vet first. If it can hurt a person at all, imagine what it could do to something smaller.
(I wasn’t able to find reliable sources on the effects on reptiles and small rodents, so if you have sources on those or any other animal, please add them!)
Let this article be a reminder to yall, while the forest services are refusing to pay volunteer firefighters as forest fire season becomes critical, this absolutely will harm inmates forced into prison labor.
california is not above abusing their power over prisoners.
The article calls these people volunteers. But their other options beside volunteering are making even less money and being even more restricted. The word “volunteer” becomes weighted.
There are no true choices in prison. It is slave labor.
they literally explicitly say they want the prison population as full as possible so they don’t run out of cheap firefighter labor. they don’t even have a euphemism for it. fucking murder these pigs
My nurse told me that after talking to me about my Toxic Shock Syndrome he did a bit of research, and found that a lot of the recently reported cases of TSS involved properly used tampons. That is to say, a lot recent TSS cases were not caused by tampons left in for more than x hours, but actually by new tampons.
I don’t know what data he was looking at, but I do know that I got sick within a few hours of putting in a new tampon. (One? Two? I’m not quite sure, but somewhere in that range.) I got TSS even though I followed the rules.
So I want to know WHY THE FUCK the fucking tampon boxes with all their warning labels DON’T EVEN BOTHER TO MENTION that you can still get TSS from tampons even if you follow all the rules on the warning labels.
Sorry, I’m just really frustrated by the fact that I ended up in the ICU because of a stupid fucking tampon, that I could have avoided all of this if I’d just switched to menstrual cups a few years ago like I meant to. I had to take an incomplete for my courses for this term, I had to take two and a half weeks off work, I have no idea what my hospital bills look like but I know that shit was expensive as fuck.
And every time I saw the little pamphlet about Toxic Shock Syndrome in my boxes of tampons, I thought to myself, “funny how that never happens anymore.” And then it happened to me.
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