god + angels can't see into the bathroom but they do know when you bring your phone in there

you are suggesting that god is less powerful than apple

you’re very special to me *gives you this*

take them i have plenty more

They are so shaped

one of the animals ever for sure

Babe, you okay? you reblogged “and we were nice to each other” like 12 times again

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

….. Didn’t know most of that

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

requested by anonymous:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: 'The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: 'The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

Source: 'Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’

Boy Wher Me got Dam Portado Chipps Is

certified iconic post

this video means everything to me

i love gaboon vipers why do they move like that

me when im walking

@catadromously how could you leave this important comment in the tags etc.

That’s the truest thing about this creature that anyone has said, ever

this animal is so travel

breaking news! gaboon viper actually just an 8 year old scooching around in a sleeping bag

thorsty

I love this webbed site

I did this necropsy last night. Reproductive issues is unfortunately THE MOST COMMON cause of death in female lizards. Things can go downhill really fast in these types of cases. This girl had an egg lodged in her pelvis. Reptiles only like one hole for everything, so having a stuck egg means that she’d be unable to get rid of waste as well, leading to rapid infection, organ failure, and shock.

What really gets me is the fact that the owner thought she was a normal shape even though they were aware of the fact that most captive reptiles are fed incorrectly. This lizard didn’t quickly become that shape, as if it was due to being gravid. She’s been obese for a long time. So many lizards I see posted on Facebook are overweight, as are so many large constrictors and even milk snakes where people seem to use the excuse of “they’re naturally thicker bodied” to turn their snakes into snausages the same way people like to claim their giant breed dogs aren’t fat “they’re just large dogs!”

This seemed to amaze some people the most of the insect facts so to further clarify: Ants and termites have some of the same social adaptations right down to the seasonal “mating flights” by a special, winged reproductive caste, yet ants and termites have no direct relation to one another at all. Ants evolved from wasps and can still be considered a type of wasp. Termites evolved from cockroaches, and were previously considered their own separate order, but it was eventually proven that they are still full blooded roaches just a few short years ago! You can see that evolution did a whole lot more to termites than it did to ants, though. An ant at least still looks almost exactly like a wasp.

Smithsonian: “Termites are moving in with cockroaches, taxonomically”

I take it as such a given, I forgot again that the ant wasp connection would really be new information to people and was just thinking the termite cockroach one was novel.

Besides the same body shape, ants also have the same kind of stingers as other wasps and bees, and having a little venomous butt needle (a modification to egg laying equipment!) Is absolutely unique in all the world to this one insect group! People think of it as an almost “generic bug thing” and put it on fictional species never considering it was invented only by a wasp ancestor! (Bees are also wasp derived)

oh oh the roach-termite connection is really cool, tho.  It had some serious ramifications in the reptile-keeping hobby.  

in 2010, the American population of Acheta domesticus (the brown house cricket) suffered a HUGE crash.  This little cricket was the backbone of pretty much the entire reptile industry; almost everyone fed their reptiles these little guys and it vanished almost entirely overnight.  What happened was Acheta domesticus densovirus, a form of cricket paralysis virus, had reached American shores. 

The house cricket was especially vulnerable to this virus.  It spread quickly and had an almost 100% fatality rate.  It wasn’t even identified until like 2015 (and the fact that it’s a densovirus was ALSO super important because it meant almost no one was using the proper decon methods but that’s another post entirely).  I can’t overstate how devastating this was for the bug industry.  In addition to being fed to reptiles, crickets were also an essential scientific organism for tests and the only insect approved for human consumption.

But this left reptile hobbyists with a big problem: we didn’t have anything else to feed our little buddies.  Some reptiles can be SUPER picky when it comes to their food; if they aren’t introduced to a wide variety of insects at a young age, some will just flat-out not recognize other insects as food (eg, a leopard gecko fed only mealworms might not recognize crickets).  Some pet stores started stocking the Jamaican field cricket, which was a HUGE mistake.  These guys are super aggressive as far as bugs go.

Enter the cockroach.  Specifically, Blaptica dubia, the dubia cockroach.  These guys had already been getting popular within the hobby.  They’re a fairly slow growing cockroach that thrives in tropical conditions, so they’re a low escape risk in most of the US.  They can’t climb slick plastic or glass, they can’t really fly, they don’t stink, they’re quiet, and super easy to raise.  They were the ideal feeder insect.  I’ve been keeping them for almost 10 years now.  Honestly, I think they’re kinda cute. 

Their popularity exploded.  In captivity, the average dubia roach has a lifespan of about 2-3 years.  They begin breeding at around 6 months, each female producing around 20-30 babies per month.  But I noticed that my colony wasn’t quite thriving.  Sure, my females were breeding, but they were dropping dead at around a year and a half.  I reached out to other hobbyists and they were having similar problems.  We compared a lot of notes: we had the right temps, the right humidity, everything seemed just about perfect.  A lot of people didn’t care TOO much.  After all, their females were still keeping up with the demand.  The only meal that really mattered was the final one, right?

No one thought much about it seriously, honestly, until reptile hobbyists started noticing our reptiles getting kidney problems.  Specifically, gout and uric acid build-up, primarily among reptiles being fed mostly dubia roaches.  This was a HUGE deal in the hobby.  Like Allen Repashy was in on this, since a lot of the dying roaches were being fed on his bug burger formula. 

The problem was, bug burger was designed to be a high protein diet.  It was designed for crickets and no one really considered reformulating it for roaches.  Why would they?  Roaches eat anything, right? 

In crickets, a high protein diet is perfect.  It’s what they thrive on.  But roaches… they’re more like termites.  I think it was in 2017 that someone finally started delving into how termites digest wood and realized that these guys EXCEL at extracting protein from all kinds of sources.  What’s a low protein diet to anyone else is Just Right for them.

And that’s when people started thinking about uric acid build-up in roaches again.  We realized that it was the high protein diet that was seriously fucking up our bugs and, by extension, our reptiles.  This roach-termite connection COMPLETELY changed the way we fed our roaches.  It’s no longer recommended to feed them fish flakes or cat food.  Repashy was one of the first people to redo a bug formula specifically for roaches and call attention to this issue. 

A friendly lizard

The resignation…