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.
Anyone else remember playing the Legend of Zelda as a kid and being seriously spooked by those hand monsters that would drop from the ceiling, Wallmasters I think they were called? I hated them back then, but I kind of love them now, and that’s what I was thinking of when a ‘Disembodied hand monster’ was requested for this Fantasy Biology post.
Most fantasy species are at least superficially similar to a real, living or extinct species from which to draw inspiration and scientific understanding. A ‘hand’ that crawls around on its own, eh, not so much.
Unless we stretch what we know of biology quite a bit.
Viewing our hand monster from the outside, which is really all we have to start with, we find five limbs (fingers and thumb) and a body (the palm and wrist in some cases). Even if you consider the ‘thumb’ to be some sort of tail-like-limb, it doesn’t really resemble the anatomy of any vertebrate species. It’s barely even bilaterally symmetrical, it’s actually closer to radial symmetry.
And the Earth does have a handful of radially symmetrical creatures. The jellyfish and anemone being some.
Yes, I’m going to argue that the Hand Monster is some sort of very distantly evolved land jellyfish.
electricity tickles the meat so that different slimes come out. sometimes the slime feels good sometimes bad. some people make more bad slime than good slime. that’s called clinical depression.
okay putting aside the fact that you are blatantly transphobic despite how much you say “i’m not transphobic” and also putting aside the fact that while peter parker does develop muscle definition he is still known for being very small and lean even after being bitten by the spider, let’s just take a look at some trans guys who will never be able to have the physique of superheroes or of strong men in general:
and that’s just a few of the many trans guys in this world, some of which are fat, or skinny, or curvy, or muscular as fuck – you know, like any other human being. can cis people stop acting like they know shit about what trans people look like.
Anon apparently has never googled what trans men look like before god damn.
Surprise, anon. Hormones make people’s bodies change.
There’s something really terrifying about the concept of being pursued by something that can only walk slowly after. Just slooowly following. You can chill for a while if you get far enough away but it’s still coming.
That’s called “persistence hunting” and it’s how humans hunted all sorts of megafauna to extinction, as well as what let our species become so disperse and so numerous. Our existence is a horror story told from the monster’s perspective.
So you’re telling me zombie is absolutely a valid career path
Watch the movie on Netflix called “ It Follows” lol
Basically our hunting super power is that we are really smart, good at tools and can walk/run forever.
If my roommate ran 20 miles twice in one day (possible if she does one in the morning and one in the afternoon) she would out travel a horse.
She is not FASTER than a horse, but if a horse was walking away from her for 8 solid hours, Kait could catch up to it. She could probably also walk after it for an additional 5-10 miles after the run and then stab it when it got too tired to go on.
But kait’s athletic.
I, on the other hand, am a fatty fat who weighs 210 and never exercises ever.
I once, completely spontaneously because i had no money for the train, walked 17 miles in the winter from one end of Chicago to the other. I had also not eaten and was wearing a backpack. It took me 3 hours, but I accomplished it with ease. If i wasn’t a chub goddess, and had eaten and it was summer and I wasn’t wearing a backpack with a laptop in it, imagine how far and fast I could have gone.
Now. Horses can only sustain a run for about 15 miles ( at 8-10mph it takes them a little over an hour).
If my fat ass was walking towards a horse for 3 hours and it was literally running away from me. It would become exhausted after 15 miles and unless it can recover completely in 2 hours for another lengthy sprint, I can reasonably catch up to it and stab it. (not that i would ever stab a horse. horses are terrifying and should be regarded with suspicion, respect and fear)
The longest run ever was 350 miles over 80 hours without sleep.
there’s so much homophobia happening in this ask but like, lowkey i’m most offended by the characterization of me as a biochemist
I’m a biophysicist thank you very much
also, get fucked asshole
I love when ignorant jackasses try and say this shit because then I get to tout out one of my favorite natural phenomena: The Whiptail Lizard. Several entire species of lesbian lizards that have sexual interaction with each other to trigger self-fertilization.
So, no. There are actually multiple species that are entirely gay that are doing just fine! Teiidae is just one example. Any species capable of parthenogenesis, which includes insects, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and some birds, could sustain an entirely gay population, and some already do.
There are also plenty of species that engage in same-sex mating more often than male-female mating that are doing absolutely fine. Like giraffes, most cetaceans, most primates, and most damsel and dragonflies.
Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.
Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.
You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.
Frankentrees.
As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.
On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.
But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:
I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be
I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.
I need to be more like tree
I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.
what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?
Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).
As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “
including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”
It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.
Shit’s tight yo.
Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.
Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.
HOLY SHIT
THE LAST ONE
Solarpunk as fuck!!
Reblogging for “I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.”
Bluestreak wrasses can also remember if the most recent interaction with
one of its hundred-plus clients was positive or negative. If it
previously mistreated a valuable customer —a big fish with lots of
parasites, for example — the wrasse will offer an apology in the form of a more pleasant cleaning with an added fin ‘massage.’
So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body.
If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.
But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:
DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.
Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.
Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.
(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)
headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.
Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.
fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!
here is a fact:
during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.
So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.
Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it.
Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever,
So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense.
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