I usually try to be tolerant of anachronisms in books, particularly ye olde medieval generic swords and sorcery type books, but I think I broke the sound barrier with how quickly I just shot out of my immersion in this book when ye olde ancient archivist in the ye olde fantasy-england castle's library tells the protag where to find a certain book by giving him its dewey decimal number.

Today in an arthurian retelling set in pre-saxon britain I encountered a character who said he was going to quit drinking "cold turkey," which I think puts him roughly a thousand years prior to European awareness of the existence of turkeys, and the dissonance had barely registered in my mind before I remembered the medieval lending library run on the dewey decimal system and decided a chronologically misplaced poultry idiom wasn't worth noticing in comparison.

official library post

Mothman!

I’m just an easy mark for dumb pilot humor. Today the captain was like “we’re now at altitude, feel free to move around, my one rule is you must stay inside the plane” and I lost it. It’s funny because you would die a horrible death akin to standing unencumbered on Pluto

i love 'bumfuck' as an intensifier

Middle of bumfuck nowhere....... cus Yeah we're really lost... anal sex style 😞

emboidered wall hanging

Dogs are machines that turn normal toys into wet yucky toys

My first post in the new year

Commison open

Ref

This thing is so funny I love it

It was made by ZheLong Xu!!!

8 colors

He gets up like nothing happened . he doesn't even care

You can pinpoint the exact moment he turns to liquid

I always love the cows with the hangy-down horns.

Gogmazios rising from below

A quicky from last November to get Gog out of my head

I hope this happens in Chapter 5 and then never comes up again

Do y’all ever think about how absolutely bananas Lake Baikal is? It’s the world’s largest lake by volume. It’s the world’s deepest lake. It’s the world’s oldest lake. It contains nearly a quarter of the planet’s surface freshwater. It’s a rift lake, caused by the earth’s crust literally coming apart at the seams. It would be deeper than the Mariana Trench except the bottom is covered in a sediment layer that is miles deep. There are trains that have sunk to the bottom because Russia tried to build a railroad over the ice. The entire lake surface freezes for half the year. The lake is a focal point of multiple indigenous cultures. The lake has its own species of seal, which is the only exclusively freshwater pinniped in the world. There are unique ice formations formed by convection from the depths of the lake. There are 330 inflowing rivers.

I dunno, Lake Baikal sure is a thing.

a truly unique and magnificent Feature on our planet, as singular and fascinating as Jupiter's Great Red Spot

in the words of farmboy, as you wish

the lake is quite cold, and as a result, these seals are very loaf

the babbeez are white poofs with lil eyebrowses

it is incredibly deep, and over a thousand species of plant and animal live ONLY there

weaving a little web to attract beautiful women

uh i mean an average sized web. a normal web.

pom pom crabs are some of the most unethical animals in the ocean

this man is a serial abuser

His pom poms are two sessile invertebrates he holds in his hands and starves so he can punch stuff with anemones who are so desperate to eat that they’ll use maximum sting on anything that gets close to him. When they starve to death he just finds more

ACTUALLY, IT IS WORSE

The crabs will force the anemones to clone themselves if one dies OR steal others’ anemones if both die

They haven’t found these anemones in their free-living form, so, as far as we know, this anemone species is these crabs’ slave species—it’s only known in association with pom pom crabs

Cool paper on this: Schnytzer, Y., Giman, Y., Karplus, I., & Achituv, Y. (2017). Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft. PeerJ, 5, e2954. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2954

So if I understand this right, "slave species" is a biology term only used for this ONE SPECIFIC CREATURE OF ALL THE COUNTLESS LIVING ORGANISMS ON THIS ENTIRE PLANET?!

Oh, the slave species thing is outdated information from the original study in the 90’s. To be fair, that study is still very very respected, it was just wrong about this specific thing.

Their anemones aren’t a unique species, they are only visually distinct because the crab farms them in a very specific way - making a fragment of a larger hawaiian anemone, or finding a newly spawned one. When they carry it around, they force the anemone to adapt to an entire new lifestyle. The crab’s nocturnal behavior slowly kills the anemone’s photosynthetic symbionts, from which it gets its color. After that, the crab can control how much food the anemone actually gets by using it to mop up food off the sea floor, and take excess out of its mouth. Since it doesnt have to reach for sunlight, or reach to catch food, this encourages dense, but short tentacles.

The shortcoming of this study was just that its very hard to get the anemone away from the crab without killing both, and its equally hard to get an anemone to bounce back from this state.

Due to their introduction into home aquaria, we now know any anemone they take will end up in this state, (bubble tips, aipistasia, haitian anemones, the list goes on) and we also know they are not bound to carrying anemone’s specifically. They’ve been seen collecting zoanthids, palythoa, and euphyllia (though euphyllians usually don’t survive).