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.
This family’s boat ride turned into a dramatic whale rescue — and the whale spent an hour thanking them in the best way!
i’m actually crying and as a side note, fuck sea world
So, this is great, but The Dodo is a source that anthropomorphizes far too much. I don’t think the whale was trying to thank them by breaching for an hour on end. There’s no way she would understand that they liked that. More likely she was still hurting from the net and was trying to ease the discomfort, or she could have been playing because she was loose.
Ok since Godzilla is feeding from the Earth’s core’s radiations (so he doesn’t need to pray on living animals except maybe mutos n shit) AND that he uses echolocation wich means he is an acoustic creature, he can take free time to take care and communicate with other creatures right? LIKE WHALES MAYBE? Imagine humpback whales rubbing on his skin, orcas bow riding in front of him, or Godzilla diving with sperm whales and Cuvier’s beaked whales, or, my favorite, putting back big stranded whales in the water. Why not?
Even knowing they don’t want to eat people and that they’re asleep, because this is how they sleep, the idea of floating in an empty blue void with a bunch of a giant grey slab creatures just hovering around doing nothing is pleasingly frightening on a sort of primal existential level
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