Hey I want you to look at some Pikeblennies (the genus Chaenopsis). At first they just look like neat long boys:
But then! Look at those big ol’ branchiostegal rays! (Those are the bony rays under the jaw).
And they scream!
So small! So much rage!
Anyway I think they look like little duck-snake-dragon hybrids and I love them very much.
That last two are ‘yelling’ at mirrors. That’s a territorial display meant to impress. They are Very Determined to be impressive.
These photos are great. In addition, a territorial fish that sees a mirror image, flares at the image, and stops seeing the image, like if you take the mirror away, thinks it’s won. It’s probably satisfying as heck for them.
That’s a whale of some sort, clearly, a baleen (filter-feeding) whale. If you watch, there’s a ring of bubbles that pops up shortly before the whale does. That’s a bubble net, a ring blown by the whale to herd the small fish into a school. Going by that, it’s a humpback whale. They’re more predatory than other baleen whales, going after larger fish and intentionally corraling them, but still only eat small fish. You can see all the little fish jumping when the whale comes up- those are what it’s after.
if you managed to get yourself into the whale’s mouth, it would open its mouth and let you out. Their throats are only about as big around as an orange, they can’t swallow you. Unlucky birds, sure, but not humans. They occasionally catch sea lions by mistake and just spit them out.
In short, the maw rising from the water to engulf several thousand fish is horrifying, but harmless.
A truly massive amount of biodiversity was lost in this event, with 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species disappearing. Some marine ecosystems seemed to rebound fairly quickly, but overall it may have taken at least 5-10 million years for anything close to full recovery. Terrestrial vertebrates may even have taken up to 30 million years to regain previous levels of diversity.
Or it might have been a result of multiple causes at once, events that wouldn’t have been so severe individually but became disastrous in combination. This is known as the “Murder on the Orient Express Model”: maybe they all did it.
But there’s also a secondary element to today’s mystery. In the aftermath of the Great Dying, a small dicynodont synapsid briefly took over the world. For the first few million years of the Triassic, around 95% of the Earth’s population of terrestrial vertebrates were all Lystrosaurus – no other genus or species of animal has ever dominated to such a degree.
Why did these squat little dog-sized animals survive and thrive when everything else was struggling? They might have been opportunistic generalists able to deal with changing conditions better than other groups, the extinction of most large predators may have allowed their population to explode, or it might simply have been a matter of luck.
We just don’t know.
Vultures!
A rac.coon got run over in the road early this morning, and I went and got it out of the road so the vultures wouldn’t get run over trying to eat it. Here they are as photographed from the window facing the street.
Image descriptions and general narration below, bird IDs in the captions.
[image: two large, glossy black birds with naked grey heads+necks standing next to a heap of guts and striped fur]
These are the first arrivals, they turned up right after each other. Two adult black vultures, I think potentially a mated pair.
[image: the same birds, both with their heads raised, one standing up tall, looking in the same direction]
I opened the window and made a generic bird “wheep! wheep!” alarm call to get their attention, and their heads went up. I left them alone after that, just took pics from the window.
[image: a similar bird, but slightly smaller and with less glossy feathers, standing on a sidewalk. It shows that the birds have long legs and white feet. ]
This is the next arrival. Another black vulture, I think younger than them. The older two wouldn’t let him eat until they were finished.
[image: the same three birds as before, plus a new arrival. The new bird is slightly larger and dark brown, its feathers marked with small pale flecks along its wings. Its head is pink and the feathers come up along its neck to the back of its head. The two glossy birds are eating from the carcass, the younger black bird is watching, and the brown bird is inspecting the dry grass nearby.]
That’s a turkey vulture. Ended up with two more turning up later, but didn’t get good pics of them. The black vultures wouldn’t let him eat either, he had to wait.
[image: the four birds, but spread out, showing that a road is about 6-8 feet behind the carcass. The brown bird is far away, to the left, and on the other side of the road. The younger black bird is in the center of the image, standing in the road, and the two older black birds are still eating.]
There were still some gut bits in the road, so the turkey and the younger black vulture went out there when there weren’t any cars coming and picked up some guts. They got honked at a lot.
[image: the brown bird in flight, near the road. The underside of one wing is visible and is pale grey. The front steps of a church are visible in the background, as is the church sign, though the letters have been covered over in a program like Paint to prevent identification.]
Covered the sign and didn’t show the entire church to prevent my location being identified, it’s a pretty distinctive building. This is the turkey vulture mid-flight after a car got too close. Not pictured: the turkey vulture perching on the church sign itself to watch the others.
All six birds got to eat some amount or another, but they had to wait for the first two to eat. I turned the carcass over after these pics to let the vultures get easier access to the guts, and they’re perched in nearby trees waiting for it to stop raining. Once they’re done eating, I’m going to go and see if I can get any salvageable bones from the rac.coon. The lower jaws might be in good enough shape to use for crafts, and the paws, I think, are intact. May be able to get the bones from the paws.
If i remember correctly, they’re mini-swarming to warm that fucker up and make him die of heat stroke
They literally heat him up to about 1 degree less of the temperature that they can die from. Thank you college lol
Alright, this is really cute, but they’re not “avenging” anything. The scent of a killed honeybee makes the others go into defensive mode against the threat, that’s why they all start moving fast. Bees don’t exhibit care for each other.
And yes, they’re going to cook the hornet to death. They vibrate themselves and produce heat, and the hornet, trapped under their weight, slowly dies of heat stroke.
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