I love what fleas look like from above vs. from the side
I didn’t realize this was surprising to so many people!
This lateral flattening allows the flea to “swim like a fish” through fur, aided by the many backwards-facing barbs and hairs along their sides.
If you’ve ever tried to pick them off a dog or cat you’ve seen this in action, it really is like they’re gliding through a liquid environment and amazingly fast, hardly even using their legs to do it.
This is also why they don’t have wings, which would get in the way of this trick, but they compensated with incredible jumping ability that may as well be flight.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, though, fleas couldn’t jump and they were flattened top-down:
This is because fleas were originally parasites of dinosaurs, and while dinosaurs often had feathers, feathers have a different density and the “fur swimming” wouldn’t have worked yet.
The first fleas similar to today’s fleas probably began evolving towards the end of the dinosaur’s run, adapting to the increasing number of our ancestral mammals. Dinosaurs shrank into modern birds so rapidly, it seems, that their original fleas vanished entirely.
So basically whenever you get bit by a flea, you caught that from a dinosaur.
I was thinking about this again earlier and do that many people also know that a sperm whale’s mouth has the same flatness?
every single cartoon and game assumes they have this huge wide gaping maw because I guess you usually see a side view and just assume there’s more of a third dimension
ALSO IMPORTANT:
They have only lower teeth, no upper teeth, and a teeny tiny throat. This set up is for slurping up squids like pasta and nothing else.
Basically no big whale exists on our planet at all with the giant, open toothy mouth of Monstro.
Well, not any more. There used to be a considerably toothier sperm whale with a considerably less absurd and more terrifying face.
Man, skin isn’t fastened into one place at all, is it? You can just, like, massage on it with your fingertips and it moves around. Ear and nose cartilage isn’t fixed, either. All kinds of stuff is loose.
98% of the time: yes.
2% of the time: uterus wildcard!
normal!body: hello i would like some spinach i lack folate
period!body: I WANT EIGHT GREGG’S SAUSAGE ROLLS
me: you will make yourself sick, you can have like one maybe
period!body: I DEMAND CHOCOLATE
me: nice chocolate?
period!body: NO I WANT SHIT CHOCOLATE. LOTS OF SHIT CHOCOLATE. I DEMAND TO EAT OUT-OF-DATE DOUBLEDECKERS UNTIL I AM VOMITING
me: … that’s not happening either.
period!body: FRY ME EVERYTHING
me: um
period!body: GO OUTSIDE AND FRY THAT DOG
Your eye has something called “immune privilege” This basically means that the outside of your eye prevents your immune system from knowing about the inside of your eye. If it didn’t, your immune system would destroy your eyes.
It’s true, also gonads and fetuses are immune privileged. The brain used to be considered but I think the consensus on that has changed…
You are correct, the brain is no longer considered immune privileged. The fetus isn’t really either.
The immune system is basically Liam Neeson in Taken–a special set of skills and it WILL FIND ANTIGENS IF IT’S THE LAST THING IT EVER DOES
Menstration cycles are different to estrous cycles. During estrous cycles dogs may have some blood discharge. This is not a period or menstruating.
Estrous = eggs are being released, it is now time for babies.
Menstruation = inner lining of uterus is being shed to remove improperly attached eggs, it is time for NOT BABIES.
We’re a very unlucky species T_T Though maybe sentience comes with a curse, which doesn’t have to be logical bc it’s a fucking curse.
Humans menstruate because human pregnancies are very hard on the body. Humans have one, rarely two or three, comparatively massive babies, which take a long time and a great deal of energy to bring into the world. Menstruation happens because, since pregnancy is so hard, it’s vital to start out with a healthy fetus. Therefore, the wall of the uterus is difficult to attach to, to make sure that only strong embryos can latch on. If an embryo takes hold, menstruation stops. If no embryos take hold, menstruation occurs to remove any unfertilized eggs and dead (too weak) embryos from the wall of the uterus. I’d imagine it’s the same deal for the other mammals that do the same. By contrast, dogs and cats have many small, relatively easy babies, so it’s less of a problem if a weaker embryo attaches and then fails to gr ow to term, so there’s no need.
Honestly? Most of them wouldn’t even register it. In TF: Matrix particularly, they literally don’t have sexual organs in any way we’re recognize them, and vice versa. Gender and sex are functionally meaningless to a transformer who hasn’t been living on earth among humans extensively for some time, and they wouldn’t recognize any physical features by function. Not to mention, humans are like…always wearing pants. You wouldn’t ask a truck if they have five connection ports or three, would you? That’s rude af! It’s tucked away under your armor for a reason!
Not to mention that if you were to point at a Cybertronian’s crotch and be like “Okay, but what have you got there?” in most cases it’d be their T-cog (most frametypes have the T-cog stored in the pelvic cradle, where it’s heavily armored and at the base of the spinal chain. They probably assume humans have similarly vital organs in their own skeletal pelvis that need to be protected.
That is, assuming these cybertronians know enough about humans to realize that they’re wearing pants as opposed to just have naturally denium-clad legs.
Most cybertronians default to they/them when talking to humans because gender just isn’t a thing for them. Alternately, they may ask what a human’s pronouns are or if they’re feeling confident- they’ll make a guess based off what they know of social signals. It’s not a perfect science, but they can pick it up fairly quick- even though they often make the initial mistake of assuming that gendered pronouns are linked to profession rather than anything else (IE “All military individuals are He/Him” or “All caretakers of offspring are She/Her” to the chagrin of female soldiers and dads everywhere)
It’s worth noting that, as well, cybertronians interacting with humans will generally just adopt whatever pronouns humans first start using for them, save for a few rare instances- Starscream is initially referred to as “she” by Unit E before realizing that there’s a stigma to being seen as “female” by these particular humans, and only then do they insist that humans refer to them as male, versus Arcee who self-identifies as female in human terms, effectively adopting gender to include her, when otherwise she may be seen as genderless by others.
So, yeah. Cybertronians likely wouldn’t ask unless they were being polite, but 90% of the time they just straight up wouldn’t care or understand, or they’d just ask what to refer to you as. I mean, Cybertronian pronouns are a lot easier, you just gotta be like “yeah, the Red Truck over there.”
Emballonuridae is a family of bats commonly known as sheath-tailed or sac-winged bats. I’m surprised these bats aren’t better known, because they have very uniquely appealing little faces. I think it’s the perpetually upturned nose.
They also have a stunning variety of colors, from the pure-white northern ghost bat to the dark chocolate of the Hill’s sheath-tailed bat.
Among them are some excellent camoflaugers, such as the proboscis bat, which looks like a bit of lichen or damaged bark on a tree.
In fact, many species in Emballonuridae roost on the trunks and branches of trees, in broad daylight, depending on their camouflage to keep them safe. They like to do it in neat little lines.
Sometimes they also stack.
You may have noticed their short little tailed. They’re sometimes called sheath-tailed bats because these tails protrude out of the membrane between their back legs, which can be pulled up to “sheath” the tail. Here’s a video if you don’t quite understand what I mean.
As I mentioned earlier, they’re also called sac-winged bats. This is because they have special pouches near their wrists designed to release pheromones into the air when they flap their wings. Below is a close up of the pouch, closed and then opened.
For the most part these are very small bats, with weights as low as three to four grams- one of the smallest, the proboscis bat, can get caught in spiderwebs and eaten.
Aside from roosting in trees, these bats roost in caves, crevices, and occasionally, human-made structures like wells or stone tombs. Because of this, several species are known as tomb bats. They’re pretty adorable little harbingers of death if you ask me.
Photo credits:
Main set (species in photo caption): Bat Conservation Intl / Jasmine Vink / University of KwaZulu-Natal / Merlin Tuttle / Michael Penney
Emedded in text: Bateleur Nature Reserve / ARKive / Riley Pearce / PSUNHM / Christian Ziegler
that’s his eyeballs poppin’ into his mouth to squeeze his food down
Frogs have so much mouth that their head doesn’t have any room for both eyeball-controlling muscles and swallowing muscles, so their eyeball muscles have to double as both. Seems to be working pretty well for them so far.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 