This is a pike livebearer! The gals get about as long and tall as a banana, the boys stay the size of the one in that person’s hand, and their fry are born alive (no eggs) and about the size of guppies. This is the largest livebearer fish we know of, and they will strongly attempt to swallow anything that’s not at least their size.
apparently it can go on for a lot longer than that if placed in saline solution and given oxygen
Why do you know this?
i’m allowed to have hobbies
Snakes will do this too.
Eels can continue to move hours after death. And I don’t just mean that they’re good at not dying, I mean you can kill an eel and chop it up and the pieces of eel will try to move around.
Really, though, any organ can last awhile if placed in saline and oxygenated. That’s basically lousy blood, after all.
a rare closeup of a black swift, found throughout north america and small parts of south america. swifts are rarely seen up close; they spend more of their life in air than any other species of bird – they eat, drink, mate and sleep while in flight. they are incapable of perching like other birds; they must cling to vertical surfaces.
I had to look this up because “sleep while in flight” ????
but yeah, apparently completely true. these birds stay aloft for as much as 10 months nonstop, feed on insects, spend more energy at night (when there aren’t warm thermals to ride) and at dawn and dusk climb to 10,000 ft altitude where the 30 min slow descent is probably when they catch their sleep.
they’re unusually long-lived for such active critters (20 yrs) and they may be limiting energy expenditure by being extremely aerodynamic and narrow bodied. Also a single bird travels the distance of about 7 roundtrip journeys to the moon in its lifetime (>3 million miles).
The butterflies love this Siam Weed bush.
The biggest ones are the migrating monarchs. The slightly smaller ones are queens who mimic the monarchs. The little brown and orange ones are snouts, who are roaming through the area because somewhere got too crowded and they’re looking for new spaces. There’s also a painted lady and a red admiral in there somewhere.
[description: a video moving back and forth over a large patch of a bush with small, blue, pom-pom like bunches of flowers, occasionally zooming in. At least 20 butterflies of varying types are fluttering about and landing on the flowers. Someone in the background is sarcastically pointing out that the butterflies might like this bush.]
Looks like, in the absence of things to move towards or away from, they’ve defaulted to the basic schooling fish “follow the nearest leader” instinct. Too bad we can’t also see it from underwater.
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