European eel! Did you know that World Eel Day is on the 19th of May this year?

(Watercolour painting)

love doing something I call ‘the big leaf test’ where I put my hand on a leaf and if the leaf is bigger than my hand I go damn that’s crazy

Tadpoles from one of Victoria’s most elusive amphibians, the giant burrowing frog, have been collected by Melbourne zoo and will be the subject of the first captive breeding program for the species.

‘They are a pretty striking frog when they choose not to be buried,’ biologist Deon Gilbert says.

Photograph: Rohan Bilney

Add the approximate number in the tags!! If you're wondering if something counts, drop a comment!

put where you're from in the tags too

acknowledgement that this is a poll about english dialects but like if your first language is not english you can tell your local word in whatever language or dialect as i find all languages and dialects interesting

you can reblog if you'd like although obviously this isn't scientific data so sample size aint actually a thing we need to be concerned about. just it would be nice and cool if you did reblog so we could all look at more responses thanks

Protect the environment good restore depleted habitats etc etc but I think the other thing non-wildlife gardeners (especially older ones) don't get is that in a lot of ways for our generation this IS the equivalent of Victorians bringing back strange exotic plants from colonised lands to show off in their greenhouses. You think I've ever seen a true wildflower meadow in person? To ethically get hold of some of the native plants in my garden I had to look up what plants were native to my area, go to a specialist dealer (online - most nurseries are only just now starting to sell wildflowers) and pay large amounts of money for a packet of 10 precious precious seeds, only 2 of which germinated because the instructions for sowing were unclear. I'd never seen their flowers before they bloomed in my garden and I possibly never will see them in the wild.

To you it's some boring old cowslip that you used to see everywhere as a kid. To me it's a rare and precious flower that I've never had the pleasure of seeing before. This is almost certainly the same way my ancestors felt when they saw a rhododenron for the first time, and the fact that it's reached the point where the rhododendrons bore me but the cowslip is new and exciting is really sickening

This is a permanent bags under eyes kinda post

Like & share if you have permanent bags under your eyes!!!

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it's the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed 'the Suicide Kid' at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he's found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he's exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he's half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn't know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa's transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, "Don't bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one's been there in a while."

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn't swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There's the man himself. Go grandpa!!

In the ongoing saga of Incy Upslapmeal Tries To Understand How People Categorise Food, here's the next instalment following from @likeadevils's original poll and my last poll - if you reblog please tag with where you're from!

ya’ll i am fucking sobbing at these photos of a horse catching a frisbee 

valid to eat frisbees

I try not to have too much disc horse on my dash, but I guess this is ok.

@laurelhach

today's funky frog of the day is Telmatobius gigas!!! unfortunately, these frogs are vulnerable to pollution and are currently listed as critically endangered. they live exclusively in the huayllamarca river in bolivia!

photo by Teresa Camacho-Badani

this advice is too late for the person I was going to give it to so I'll just say it in its own post

caffeine on a full stomach makes me feel the mirth and excitement of a noble who was challenged to a duel by a scrawny peasant (specifically, a peasant who does not know that royalty may select a champion in their stead)

caffeine on an empty stomach makes me feel like that noble's inbred son with every disease, Piotr the Bewitched, who everyone is independently trying to assassinate

ok wait so

mud friends