the worst is wanting to create and create and create but being trapped in a body that is so so so so tired

Years ago I overheard (eavesdropped upon) a telephone conversation between a public parks official and a golf course owner.

Parks Official: No sir, you cannot

Parks Official: No. They are a protected species

Parks Official: You CANNOT shoot them

Parks Official: Or poison them, no. Or trap them

Parks Official: If you like, we can-- no, I'm it. I'm the ranking official here. There's nobody above me. My boss? You mean... the governor's office? Sure, I guess. Okay bye

After he hung up, he gave me this thousand-yard stare before answering my unvoiced question.

"There's a flock of flamingos at the 9th green disrupting golfers. He wanted permission to go out there with a shotgun and take care of matters, but sensed there might be... legal ramifications. So he called us."

I laughed. "Does that happen often?"

"Oh, we get calls like that a couple times a month."

Country clubs should be burned to the ground and their golf courses turned into community gardens i am 10000% serious

Was golf created for the sole purpose of hoarding ridiculously large amounts of land just to brag about how little they use it?

Spiders have different body language depending on species but one behavior is almost universal: the stress curl aka "I'm scared, please don't hurt me"

If the spider's legs are tucked up so tight you can't see the femurs (and it's not one of the few species who prefers resting in that posture), you can be pretty sure the spider thinks it's in mortal danger.

Here's how these spiders look when they feel safe:

Idk I just think that “I have empathy for the friends and family of those that were lost” and “based on everything we’ve learned, going down in that death-trap was an incredibly stupid decision and anyone could see that” and “it is ridiculous anyone would pay 250k to go see a mass grave, the wealth gap has gotten out of hand so I can’t find it in myself to shed tears for the men involved” and “it is heartbreaking a teenage boy was lost because he wanted to impress his father” are statements that can coexist.

Human emotions are grey.

I feel like Falanoucs should take the cake as “weirdest Euplerid” though…

Living Species, by the Numbers

Species of Mammals: ~5,500

Species of Birds: Between 10,000 and 20,000 (lots of disagreement)

Species of nonavian Reptiles: Between 10,000 and 20,000 (see above)

Species of Amphibians: more than 7,000

Species of "Fish": more than 33,000

Species of Echinoderms (star fish, sea urchins, etc.): ~7,500

Species of Arthropods: over 2,000,000 and growing (only 1,257,000 described but all researchers know that is a gross underestimate)

Species of Molluscs: > 100,000

Other Bilaterans (wormy things): ~85,000

Corals & Jellyfish: ~16,000

Sponges: ~11,000

Fungi: > 6,000,000

Plants: > 400,000 (plants species are weird)

"Protists": unknown, but more than 100,000 and is severely underestimated

"Bacteria": who the fuck knows. there are too many. Our bodies are half bacteria. possibly in the trillions.

This is what we mean by mammal bias: mammals are the smallest group on here, and yet, because we are mammals, they get the most research money, the most screen time, the most conservation funding, the most love, the most interest. That's ridiculous. That's patently nonsense. Mammals are not "more evolved" than anything on this list - we're all modern life and thus, equally evolved. The other groups of life deserve at least more attention, more care, more interest, even if we can never get it to be proportional. In fact, you can even see mammal bias in this list - because mammals are so well studied, that's the only species count that is NOT vague.

We rely on ALL of these creatures because we are part of a complex biosphere where all of these organisms work together to allow the flow of nutrients and energy through the system. We are all descendants of each biosphere that came before. Mammal bias - focusing only on things that we share the closest genetic ties to - is not only ignorant, its self defeating.

Kill the mammal bias in your head. Kill it now. Because its gross, its inaccurate, and mammals do not in fact rule the world. Bacteria do, and if we *must* give it to an animal, that animal would be Arthropods.

This has been a PSA. Please reblog to spread, because I'm tired of dealing with mammal bias in my own house.

bro you just triggered my deimatic display bro. I’m flaring my wings and bobbing my head while hissing at you bro. please be scared of me

I don’t know man I’m not convinced. Maybe if you clacked your beak…?

The Anzu Asexual Pride designs are now up on my Redbubble with more to come*

I’ll be drawing this series on a larger canvas than I usually do, so I can offer them on more products than just stickers this time!

As a reminder, this will be the lineup:

LGBTQ+ - Brontosaurus

Gay - Ankylosaurus

Lesbian - Parasaurolophus

Bisexual - Dilophosaurus

Pansexual - Stegosaurus

Asexual - Anzu

Aromantic - Sinosauropteryx

Demisexual - Spinosaurus

Trans - Microraptor

NB - Styracosaurus

*I just did ace stuff first cause I’m ace and I do what I want

Different options for dinosaur pride flag stickers, starring Asexual Anzu.

I put it to a vote on my paleoart Instagram, and the natural-colored dinosaur holding a flag won by a landslide, but I may do something with the heraldic designs as well if I have time…

Brontosaurus excelsus remains one of the most famous dinosaurs and, even with its somewhat controversial background, finally received validity in 2015 😉

Pride dino #3: Lesbian Pride Parasaurolophus!

She’ll stomp you to death with her hooves.

Pride dino #4: Gay Pride Ankylosaurus!

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Wanted to include this little known flag: the gay flag. While it’s usually thought that the rainbow flag represents gay men, it’s more recently been used an umbrella for the whole LGBTQIA+ community. So this flag was created in 2019 to specifically represent gay men.

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Sorry it’s taken me so long to get to this next one; I’ve been very busy. I know pride month is super over but I am going to continue making these until I’ve finished all the flags on my list! (It’s not like we cease to exist once July 1st rolls around, after all)

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Pride dino #5: Bisexual Dilophosaurus

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What can I say? Two crests. Bi-lophosaurus.

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End blood quantum now

Blood quantum is how much native blood you have in you and it needs to be a certain threshold to qualify you as a tribal member. Blood quantum varies from tribe to tribe.

It means my mom is a tribal member but because my dad is outside of my tribe... I don't have enough tribal blood to enroll. Neither does my daughter. Our "official" indigeneity ended with me.

My dad is still native tho. Just southern native. Others have two parents enrolled in separate tribes and can't enroll in either one despite being Full native because their parents were mixed with other tribes so they don't have enough blood of Any tribe to qualify.

And to what end are they doing this?

Under the treaties the US govt can lay no claim to native land. So how do they fix that? Get rid of the natives, of course.

And since they can't slaughter us in broad daylight anymore they did the next best thing. What the colonial government has ALWAYS done to us and other poc.

Made up a bunch of arbitrary laws to restrain and limit our power and numbers.

And this can't continue. We are the only race who needs to apply to be part of the community we were born into. The only race who needs to prove our blood.

And that's the thing: it's not even based on blood. Racist scientists defined who was a full-blooded native based on things like shoe size, head circumference, and skin pigment.

Not blood. And besides that it wasn't uncommon for outsiders to become part of a tribe!! You didn't need to be native by blood to be native! Blood quantum has made it IMPOSSIBLE for them to qualify and made it impossible for tribes to practice that long time aspect of our culture.

So please share this post. So many people legitimately think natives are extinct and even less are aware that we do more than just sit around drinking all day. Few people have good feelings about us and within that there are a few who actively help. Please be one of those few.

We need support and allies and for our voices to be heard. Please don't let this post just be me screaming into a void. We need people to know what blood quantum is, how archaic and harmful it is, and to help us spread awareness to people who otherwise would ignore us. Use your privilege.

blood quantum was designed to eliminate native americans while the one drop rule was intended to keep african americans slaves in perpetuity

utrecht, the netherlands ⋅ ph. utrechtalive 

The Spectacle(d Cormorant) - an informative post about an underrated extinct bird

(Artwork by me. Halfly based on the artwork by Joseph Wolf.)

Just something out of the ordinary from before. I am getting tired from posting all those comics and stuff on here, so here's a repost of my depiction of one of my all-time favorite extinct birds - the life, the moment, the spectacle itself - the spectacled (or Pallas's) cormorant, as well as a bunch of facts about it below this because I care about this bird so much and will protect it with all my life if it still existed.

You may ask, why am I so into this nerdy-looking bird? It's not like it's THAT special or anything - we still have at least 40 other cormorant species alive on earth - 3 of them in the same genus as the spectacled cormorant.

The reason is simple - no one ever talks about it or even has an idea on what it is, even though humans were the sole cause of its extinction. (And believe it or not, cormorant culling IS still a thing, but that's a different story for now.)

(Specimen kept at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands.)

Large, stupid, clumsy, ludicrous in looks. That was how others, including Georg Steller, the discoverer of the bird, described the spectacled cormorant. It was, perhaps, the largest of all cormorants known to exist, rivalling the Galápagos flightless cormorant in length, but was way heavier than the latter. Due to its large size, it was probably flightless, but studies of its wings have shown that it was more likely reluctant to do so due to its lack of natural predators (besides Arctic foxes) while residing in its former habitat - the Commander/Komandorski Islands in Kamchatka Krai of Russia. Occasionally, some of these birds would get lost and end up on the Kamchatka Peninsula, which led to its consumption by the locals.

However, it wasn't until the 1820s when their extinction was hastened. The Russian-American Company started to transfer Unangan (Aleut) people to the islands, and, to no surprise, they found this cormorant easy to hunt. As Steller said on his journey in 1741, the spectacled cormorant was also rather delicious, unlike most other cormorants. Along with how it was abundant on the Commander Islands, this was most likely the exact reason why the Unangan people consumed it whenever they could not catch enough fish to sell or feed their families.

That marked the end of the legacy of the spectacled cormorant. It vanished from the islands and the world in the 1850s, and was never heard from anyone ever again.

(Artwork by J. G. Keulemans.)

The reason why it might have been forgotten by man was probably due to there only being six known specimens of this bird collected (all apparently by the same person, Governor Kuprianof), and only one or two of those specimens are currently up for display in the whole world.

The spectacled cormorant died like the dodo, but unlike the dodo, it was quickly forgotten by the people who caused its rapid extinction. By the time we wanted to care about it, it was already gone.

170+ years have passed. People like me still remember this bird, wanting to do anything to bring it back to life, or just imagining it while it was still in its glory - plummeting into the cold seas to catch a mouthful of fish, as it clumsily swims back to the shore to dry its wings. A beautiful bird that met a rather depressing fate.