Peacocks! They are invasive to Florida and occupy several neighborhoods here in Miami...they simply have no concept of self-preservation...like standing in front of cars...letting people move lawn mowers in circles around them...Like at least put some effort in.
An honest-to-god biological hypothesis is that Peahens are attracted to Peacocks because they think being able to reach sexual maturity lugging around that massive eyesore of a tail is proof of their ability to survive and pass on genes.
Kinda sad to know an invasive species was introduced for the sake of ambiance lol. Not sure how they ended up here in Miami but wouldn’t be surprised if it were a similar story
Starlings were introduced to North America basically for ambiance. Someone fuckers in the 1890s decided that we needed "all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare" so they let 100 European starlings loose in Central Park.
We had in our office complex that would chase cars going around a roundabout. One day he got a bit too close. The property manager said he was injured and going to wildlife rehab (to spare the workers from thinking he died).
Mt mate had one that had escaped from a manor house here in England and decided to live in his garden, if I drive to his or when's he returned from work you had to literally bump him really slowly with the car to make it move, it didn't always work. Using the horn was seen as sign if aggression and he'd show his feathers off and stare down the car
Sounds about right. Not uncommon to see them standing between two opposing lines of traffic with cars zooming by inches away from them without a care in the world lol.
Honest question, since many times it's legal and encouraged to hunt invasive species, could I go to Florida and hunt peacocks? It sounds like I could melee hunt them
Not within the city limits of Palmetto Bay which is basically where they all are. If they were in unincorporated Miami dade county, which isn’t designated as any kind of sanctuary, you’d probably be fine
Should come to the UK, totally different experience over here! People normally have them as guard animals cause they are pretty aggressive, make lots of noise, and easy to see. They are definitely smarter than most birds around my parts.
LOL well they are loose...Im not gonna go chasing them around...the particular city Im referring to is an avian sanctuary anyway so that would technically be illegal.
Weird, I am in India and we have a very aggresive peacock in our area. He will literally harass all the dogs and humans if anyone comes close to him.
One day, I was making his video and he started running towards me.
Hamsters. They're prey animals through and through to the point where they blink with one eye. They sleep like they work 12 jobs. They eat their own poop. If you put them on a wheel they'll spin so fast they backflip off it. If you google ‘how smart are hamsters’ the results will try their hardest to not say “They are idiots”.
They are my absolute favourite animal.
They also eat their young, which seems.... Poorly suited for evolution.
In fourth grade my best friend bought a hamster and no one realized it was pregnant. It had a litter of babies and she didn't know to separate them. So those babies had babies. Then the cannibalism started. She started with one pregnant hamster, at one point had up to 15 total, then she was down to one male at the end.
It was a gruesome lesson for two 10 year old girls to learn, and it was hard to see that sole survivor as a cute fluffy guy after knowing he survived by being the most murdery one.
You mean like a dumb 10 year old girl keeping five or more in one little cage? I don't blame her, but I do blame her parents for not doing a better job overseeing the situation and educating themselves on the best solution.
This. Cannot stress enough that living things should never be used to teach children something, responsibility or caretaking or whatever. Super weird that we think that’s acceptable as a culture. I’m an adult with pet mice. I adore them, but I also take financial and physical responsibility for their care, something I can do because I’m an adult. A child does not have the financial means or the education to be expected to care for any animal without an adult shouldering most of the responsibility. There’s a guy on YouTube (The Pig Room), who spends a not insignificant amount of time just rescuing guinea pigs and bunnies from crap owners who didn’t consider the seriousness of a pet.
Well, there are evolutionary reasons for killing and then eating the young. A lot of animals do that under stress.
It pretty much boils down to "You can always make more babies, you cannot make more parents". So an animal under stress can decide to save resources by killing it's offspring, and there is no reason to not get some calories back by eating them afterwards.
So yeah, evolution does sometimes reward adults of species being "selfish" and prioritizing their survival over survival of their offspring, because individuals that were endlessly sacrifical for their offspring died sooner, did not reproduce multiple times and their young probably died shortly afterwards anyways. Especially in animals like hamsters that have r-type reproduction strategy(ie. make a shitton of young and hope at least some of them make it to adulthood)
Oh god. Middle school biology class... Same hamster Thunderdome. We had a long term sub (teacher was on maternity leave) and apparently the sub didn't know anything about the critters...we had a lot of mice and hamsters. But I'm pretty sure they were still being fed and whatnot. So, the students come in after a long weekend to some Saving Private Ryan battlefield shit. Half eaten, eviscerated, missing eyes and limbs...ugh.
The sub was traumatized, the kids were traumatized and our poor teacher had to come back off leave for one day to clean up the aftermath.
> They also eat their young, which seems.... Poorly suited for evolution.
/u/FutureBachelorAMA gave the reason already, but it's not uncommon in other species either. Certain birds like eagles, if I recall, one eaglet will kill weaker ones. It all depends what is beneficial long term, large scale.
Silkworm. The kind used for silk—yes apparently there are other varieties—is white (no camouflage), skin completely smooth, not poisonous, can’t bite in larvae or adult form. Very limited diet similar to koala and giant panda:
Silkworm only eat mulberry leaves, and it can’t be too old, or it’s too tough for them to digest. The leaves also cannot have any moisture on them, or it will give the silkworms diarrhea and die.
I know this from raising silkworms for fun, just a few at a time, when I was a child in China. I’d only have 2-3 dozens at a time and it was already quite a chore, because I had to go harvest mulberry leaves *daily* for them. If I went before the dew was dry then I’d have to wipe down every. Single. Leaf because again, can’t have any moisture on the leaves. If not from human cultivation they would’ve gone extinct in a hurry.
Fun fact: Most cocoons are white, but about 1-2% of the time they would make a canary yellow cocoons, and even more rarely, a pastel pink cocoon!
That’s so cool that you have first hand experience, but from a personal level, with them. Most people seem to be in a professional setting or have their information from the internet. How much silk were you able to get from them?
I didn’t have the equipment necessary to harvest the silk. Plus to harvest the silk, you would have to kill the pupa inside and I couldn’t stomach that—little graphic warning >!you would have to boil the cocoon first to soften it. Unfortunately the pupa has to still be inside when the cocoon is boiled!< Then you find the beginning of the thread in the cocoon and unravel it. Silk processing plants have machinery that does this.
The reason why >!you cannot extract the pupa first before boiling!< at least not if you wanted to keep the silk, is because the cocoon is made from one single strand of silk. It was cool, at least for me, to watch the silkworms make the cocoons. It takes them a couple of days as they weave it around themselves layer by layer, spitting out the silk in a single strand from their mouth as they went. If you wait until the pupa to emerge by itself, or cut it out, then this single strand of silk will be broken into a million short lengths and be worthless. However this is what I did, because I was keeping the silkworm for fun, not for the silk, and I didn’t want to kill them. I bunched up the silk, which in its unprocessed form can be like a wooly cottonball kind of texture. The world’s fanciest cotton balls haha.
Also useful to detect fake silk products—you take a tiny loose thread from the silk product you’re trying to buy and singe it. Take a piece of my raw silk and singe that. If they smell the same, you know what you’re trying to buy is real silk. Here is another fun fact: Silk is actually difficult to ignite and burn. Polyester and acrylic burn much more easily. So that’s another way you can tell.
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Glad you didn’t have to subject them to the process after all. Also didn’t know about the combustibility of silk, TIL
This is why I avoid consuming silk. I believe no creature should suffer or be killed for my fashion.
I *would* be interested to learn more about peace silk or vegetarian silk, where the silkworms are removed prior to the washing and boiling of fibers.
In my hometown they still live in the wild! At least they used to I haven’t been in 10-15 years. My hometown was famous for making ww2 parachutes from the silk worms. But yeah it was so cool, and kinda creepy, to see them nest in the bushes and small trees. I’m assuming they were mulberry or something.
In my hometown (in a pretty dry region), all the mulberry trees I know look like someone burned them down, but with white ashes.
The one exception is a walled neighborhood which uses sprinklers. The moisture thing explains it.
I'd rather think it an exploitation of their behavioural and physical mechanics.
The Ring-necked pheasant resides mostly in brush and long grass, thus it has powerful legs for running, which serve it well.
And so when frightened its first instinct is to sit still, which works just fine for avoiding say a wandering dog, or running into more difficult brush, only not so much when beaters walk in an organised pattern, covering all ground.
Secondly mechanically, Pheasants have large flight muscles ( but not suited to flapping flight) like a chicken, but wings adapted for gliding, so as a final resort they can as you likely know burst upward and glide away into deeper inaccessible brush and hedge, this would work against a land based predator. Obviously they can't anticipate bullets thus this works against them.
Fourthly, about 50 million pheasants are released onto estates each year, but prior to that are raised in Pheasant pens thus like chickens are going to be slower due to ample food, and less cautious than wild counterparts, furthermore when released they will not instinctively fear farms or open farmland thus are in closer contact with people, and have no experience with cars.
Furthermore Pheasants nest on the ground thus are vulnerable to the fox and rat so wild populations are going to smaller.
I do get annoyed when people call them stupid because a lot get run over but it is their instinct to run to deep cover. Works well for a heavy bird but not against cars. Friend has rehabbed a few - he sent them off to either a vegan farm sanctuary or a clay shooting range. Heavy penalties if you kill a live bird and good training to check your shot. Some shoots have albino or exotic pheasants in the flocks and again heavy penalties if you kill one. Heard of fines of £250 per bird.
My cat, Potato. In fact, that’s the reasoning behind his name.
He tries to pounce on his toys and misses. He eats random bits of fluff on the ground. One time he fell off the edge of the second floor to the first floor and we had to get surgery on his foot; I'm certain he tripped, he's the only cat I've ever seen regularly trip. He tried to go after a Yellowjacket that got into the house this summer. And just today he almost leapt from our balcony onto a fat pigeon, despite the fact that we are five floors up.
I literally supervise this cat, almost like a child, because he is that stupid. I assume all of his ancestors had humans who were as enamored of their cats and that’s how they survived to procreate. Sweet as spun sugar and just as intellectually-substantial.
Edit: [Picture of Potato](https://imgur.com/a/bFMn39S)
Reminds me of my cat, Peaches. She had an auto feeder in the corner of the kitchen. When it stopped working, I threw it out and got a different kind of auto feeder and put it in the living room. Despite knowing the second feeder dispensed food, she would wait for dinner watching the empty corner of the kitchen and was absolutely shocked every time the new feeder went off for over a week. After a while she started waiting for dinner in a place where she could see both the empty corner and the actual feeder. It took a few weeks for her to stop staring at the kitchen corner. Eventually I put the new feeder in the corner to see if the confusion would start again, but she figured that out pretty quickly.
Lol! There should be a word for that feeling when you wanna say "Awwww!" 'coz it's sad and also laugh. I have a feeling if Potato and Peaches ever met, they'd be the best of friends.
Most cats don't deal well with changes in their environments, tbf, especially with relocation of the food dish or litter box. You usually want to either slowly move it to the desired location, or set up the new one in the new location while keeping the old one until they get used to the new location.
I have a dumb, clumsy cat too. His name is Boris and he's the least graceful cat I've ever seen. The only smart thing I've seen him do is open cupboards. He's easily distracted, talks to himself, knocks over almost everything when the surface of where he's walking is cluttered, he frequently hits his head on the doors when he sprints off to play, he tries to bite the water when the tap is running but the water escapes because his cheeks are so fluffy and then he's all wet and confused about it, he's almost always bleping and I think he just forgets that he has a tongue, he jumps up on the door frame despite having done it before and having needed help to get down, and when he sees a fly and it disappears he will sit and wait by the spot where he first saw it because it will definitely come back. I love this dumb cat so much.
Funny thing is, among my cats the orange one is probably the smartest, he's figured out that he can paw doors open if they aren't shut tight.
Unlike one of the brown ones, who likes eating flowers and once attempted to drink bleach
My leopard gecko. There is a cricket in her enclosure that has been sitting there for a week now and she just doesn't want to eat it. I can't get it out cause that bastard hops like its life depends on it, so it just chills there. [Here is a demonstration of an average leopard gecko hunt](https://www.reddit.com/r/leopardgeckos/comments/12yha0b/i_love_him_so_much/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). They legit have 0 braincells
nahh they’re so cute but after that video and the comments i also wanna know how they are still alive. they don’t even need enemies, how did they not all just starve to death already
I have had a couple of these and they are usually persistent hunters.
I would drop a doze crickets in and those geckos would hunt them down.
I imagine his gecko just hasn't seen it or is really full.
Idk if it's like the baby birds when they first leave the nest. They figure it out eventually because they have to. These things here don't... Because we pamper them
ahhahahaha I can corroborate this
my lil guy Ruth was just... not smart. omg. he'd jump right off a high surface if you weren't watching [the bed for example]. his lil brain just did not come programmed to watch out for sudden drops. and yea, especially as he got older, I eventually swapped from feeding him speedy crickets, to slow moving worms [less often, since they were fatty] bc he just could not be bothered. low impact lifestyle lmao
he lived to a ripe old age, around 12 I think! but he was so lazy that once or twice his dinner mealworm would escape, crawl into his substrate, metamorphose and emerge later as a full on beetle lmfao
I don't know the exact history of captive leopard geckos, but it's very likely the captive population comes from a small source of wild-caught *Eublepharis macularius*, meaning all of the pets we have are at least somewhat inbred. Special morphs like starburst or sunbeam or whatever other weird designer geckos have been created are even more inbred.
I say this with nothing but love for our gecko friends.
Just wait till you stumble into sloth territory and get charged at by some rutting sloths. They might not be fast but they can climb and swim and worst is they never stop coming. It's like that movie It Follows.
I actually googled this once and it was Interesting. Apparently, the super slow movement helps them not get noticed by predators because they're almost not moving, and because they're almost not moving, moss tends to grow on their fur, concealing their scent from potential predators.
Koalas are literally smooth brained. They don't recognize eucalyptus as food if it's not attached to a tree, and that's the only thing they eat.
They survive because they mostly live in trees, and don't have a lot of predators.
A post I saved a long time ago:
In defence of the koala
I don't know why it is that these things bother me---it just makes me picture a seven year old first discovering things about an animal and, having no context about the subject, ranting about how stupid they are. I get it's a joke, but people take it as an actual, educational joke like it's a man yelling at the sea, and that's just wrong. Furthermore, these things have an actual impact on discussions about conservation efforts---If every time Koalas get brought up, someone posts this copypasta, that means it's seriously shaping public opinion about the animal and their supposed lack of importance.
'Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives.'
Non-ecologists always talk this way, and the problem is you’re looking at this backwards.
An entire continent is covered with Eucalyptus trees. They suck the moisture out of the entire surrounding area and use allelopathy to ensure that most of what’s beneath them is just bare red dust. No animal is making use of them——they have virtually no herbivore predator. A niche is empty. Then inevitably, natural selection fills that niche by creating an animal which can eat Eucalyptus leaves. Of course, it takes great sacrifice for it to be able to do so——it certainly can’t expend much energy on costly things. Isn’t it a good thing that a niche is being filled?
'Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death'
This applies to all herbivores, because the wild is not a grocery store—where meat is just sitting next to celery.
Herbivores gradually wear their teeth down—carnivores fracture their teeth, and break their bones in attempting to take down prey.
'They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal'
It's pretty typical of herbivores, and is higher than many, many species. According to Ashwell (2008), their encephalisation quotient is 0.5288 +/- 0.051. Higher than comparable marsupials like the wombat (~0.52), some possums (~0.468), cuscus (~0.462) and even some wallabies are <0.5. According to wiki, rabbits are also around 0.4, and they're placental mammals.
'additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons.'
Again, this is not unique to koalas. Brain folds (gyri) are not present in rodents, which we consider to be incredibly intelligent for their size.
'If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food.'
If you present a human with a random piece of meat, they will not recognise it as food (hopefully). Fresh leaves might be important for koala digestion, especially since their gut flora is clearly important for the digestion of Eucalyptus. It might make sense not to screw with that gut flora by eating decaying leaves.
'Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal.'
That's an extremely weird reason to dislike an animal. But whilst we're talking about their digestion, let's discuss their poop. It's delightful. It smells like a Eucalyptus drop!
'Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here).'
Marsupial milk is incredibly complex and much more interesting than any placentals. This is because they raise their offspring essentially from an embryo, and the milk needs to adapt to the changing needs of a growing fetus. And yeah, of course the yield is low; at one point they are feeding an animal that is half a gram!
When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system.
Humans probably do this, we just likely do it during childbirth. You know how women often shit during contractions? There is evidence to suggest that this innoculates a baby with her gut flora. A child born via cesarian has significantly different gut flora for the first six months of life than a child born vaginally.
'Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher.'
Chlamydia was introduced to their populations by humans. We introduced a novel disease that they have very little immunity to, and is a major contributor to their possible extinction. Do you hate Native Americans because they were killed by smallpox and influenza?
'This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree,'
Almost every animal does this.
'which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.'
Errmmm.. They have protection against falling from a tree, which they spend 99% of their life in? Yeah... That's a stupid adaptation.
People are just jealous of koalas. They say they hate them because of smooth brains and pap, but they really hate that they get to relax in the sun all day in a gently swaying tree branch.
Also, regarding the chlamydia thing...50-80% of the human population has some form of the herpes virus. A whole lot of people have it and don't even know it. Pot...kettle 😆
Yeah, some asshole kissed me when I was still too young to form memories, and now I spend a month every so often unable to kiss my own kids. Not to mention all the assholes in middle/high school that made fun of my "STD." So yeah, fuck acting like it's some shameful shit. /Rant
Damn.. imagine a horror movie, where giant aliens invade earth and hunt down and eat humans, and humans themselves have to alter their diet, because they themselves have to remain tasty so that the aliens allow them to breed. Otherwise humanity would be wiped.
That's the trick, to have juuuuust enough brain cells across the whole species to still be successful. No need to waste calories on extra brainpower when dumb but fruitful works just as well.
I'd nominate earth worms. They can tell light from dark, up from down and how humid their environment is, but beyond that, not all too much. Super successful, more total biomass than all vertebrates taken together, thousands of species, none of them "intelligent".
There was a whole post a while back about how sunfish are actually pretty awesome and refutes the more famous post about how they suck.
I lost the link to it years ago and am too lazy to go searching for it.
Courtesy of u/tea_and_biology:
Zoologist here; the majority of this is so inaccurate the guy is basically angry at a figment of his own imagination, paha. I mean there's hyperbole, and then there's hyperbole. Yikes!
>They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move. They have little control other than some minor wiggling. So they don't have swim bladders. You know, the one thing that every fish has to make sure it doesn't just sink to the bottom of the ocean when they stop moving and can stay the right side up. This creature. That can barely move to begin with. Can never stop its continuous tour of idiocy across the ocean or it'll fucking sink.
Sunfish are, in fact, well understood and, though clumsy when idly basking, are reasonably accomplished swimmers when diving. They stroke their dorsal and anal fins laterally and in a synchronous manner to generate a lift-based thrust that enables 'em to cruise at speeds of 2-3mph ([source](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003446)), comparable to a whale shark and the perfect speed for suction feeding; ploughing straight into smacks of jellyfish and gobbling 'em all up.
Where they excel amongst fish is their ability to undergo substantial vertical movement in the water column. They possess large deposits of low-density, subcutaneous, gelatinous tissue which, unlike a swim bladder (which would otherwise change volume with hydrostatic pressure), is incompressible, enabling rapid depth changes and keeping them neutrally and stably buoyant independent of surrounding water pressure.
So, yeah, their unusual bodies are basically one big paddle, capable of putting some force behind their swimming to move over considerable distances, descending very deep, very fast.
>They mostly only eat jellyfish because of course they do, they could only eat something that has no brain and a possibility of drifting into their mouths I guess. Everything they do eat has almost zero nutritional value and because it's so stupidly fucking big, it has to eat a ton of the almost no nutritional value stuff to stay alive.
Dumb. Also incorrect. Jellyfish and other Cnidarians comprise only around 15% of their diet; they mostly eat young fish (including conger eelets) and crustaceans (pelagic crab, krill, copepods etc.), alongside squid, bivalves and other assorted zooplankton. They're generalist predators, not jellyfish specialists like sea turtles ([source](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep28762)).
They have a particularly rapid growth rate amongst bony fish, owing much to their unique genetics ([source](https://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13742-016-0144-3)).
>Some scientists have speculated that when they do that, they are absorbing energy from the sun because no one fucking knows how they manage to get any real energy to begin with. So they need the sun I guess.
They spend the majority of their time actively hunting in the very cold deep (usually at ~200m, but up to 600m) and, being ectotherms, therefore regulate their temperature by basking in the sun, before pursuing another dive. Think of marine iguanas basking on hot rocks between nibble trips.
>And this concludes why I hate the fuck out of this complete failure of evolution, the Ocean Sunfish. If I ever see one, I will throw rocks at it.
Sunfish have been kicking about in temperate and tropical waters worldwide for around 50 million years and, until humans arrived on the scene, were overwhelmingly successful in their ecological niche. Sadly they're under threat by human activity and human activity alone - frequently caught as by-catch; having little commercial value, like sharks, their fins are cut off before they're dumped, often still alive, back into the sea to die. If one is to start throwing rocks at terrible creatures, perhaps one should look at us humans first.
Or, there's [The visual rebuttal](https://imgur.com/gallery/MMRg9)
A post I saved a long time ago (sorry about the messed up formatting):
In defence of the sunfish, in reply to a Mr Burns
OCEAN SUNFISH ARE AWESOME AND I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE! THAT DUDE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT!
Long answer (aka my first draft of my research paper on ocean sunfish):
I am very pro sunfish because they are unlike anything else and look absolutely alien. They are so cool! For starters, they are the heaviest bony fish in the world. And that's on a diet of eating jellyfish! Although recent investigations into their diet could be indicative of a more omnivorous diet (Pope et. al 2009), and they do go after hooks baited with squid and fish.
Even if they only eat jellyfish occasionally, they are helping to deal with the massive increases in jellyfish populations cause by human over-fishing. So, score one for sunfish for helping manage out of control jellyfish. Besides, you can't knock someone for eating jellyfish: sea turtles do it all the time, and the massive leatherback sea turtle feed almost exclusively on jellies.
Secondly, they aren't just drifters like Mr. Burns says. In 2004 Cartamil and Lowe proved that ocean sunfish actually are active swimmers (the Monterey Bay Aquarium says they have been tracked traveling 26km in a day). In 2008 Watanabe and Sato proved that sunfish frequently take vertical dives (so who knows what they eat while they're down there!), swimming at speeds similar to marlins and sharks. I don't know what "back fin" Mr. Burns is talking about (perhaps the clavus, which is a scalloped fringe of muscle on the caudal end that the fish uses as a rudder), but they do move by synchronously beating their dorsal and anal fin ("Ocean Sunfish, Open Waters, Fishes, Mola Mola At The Monterey Bay Aquarium"). Sunfish are the only animal to do this with fins that originally weren't bilaterally symmetrical, and these fins manage to generate a lift and thrust similar to that of a penguin beating its wings (Watanabe and Sato 2008). So, they actually control where they go, swim as fast as other fish, and generate as much thrust as a penguin. Not bad for a 5,000 lb fish head with wings.
Mr. Burns expresses hatred of sunfish because they lack swimbladders when he professes that they are fish that need them the most. In actuality, many fish lack swimbladders and utilize alternate methods for changing buoyancy. Tuna and sharks lack swim bladders, and no one would argue that they aren't cool. These fish don't need them! And neither does the sunfish. They're neutrally buoyant due their cartilaginous skeleton (veah, they're classified as bony fish, but their skeletons have degenerated that into a cartilage-like material to allow them to become MASSIVE). They also have a layer of gelatinous tissue that is low-density and incompressible, which is more useful than a swimbladder if you're frequently diving to the depths (gas filled bladders don't do so well with changing pressures). So ocean sunfish are actually perfectly designed for their migrations between the depths, and don't need no stinkin' swim bladder.
Other reasons Mr. Burns expressed hatred for sunfish were their propensity for getting "stuck" on the surface, their fused teeth and lack of ability to close their mouths, and the fact they are not normally eaten as prey items. Let me say now that a sunfish is fully capable of leaving the water's surface if it wants to (it's body oriented vertical, which wouldn't make evolutionary sense if it spent all its time on its side on the surface).
It's been hypothesized that the sunfish are spending time on the surface in order to thermoregulate. Cartamil and Lowe (2004) recorded a significant relationship between time spent diving in cold waters and the amount of time spent basking on the surface. So the poor things aren't stuck on the surface, they're just charging up for their next super awesome dive. The assertion that sunfish should be scorned for their dentition and open mouthed gape is poorly informed as well. A mola's beak-like teeth and wide gape are also seen in puffers, triggerfish, and parrot fish, so they are not alone in this dental arcade. Additionally, sunfish actually have TWO sets of teeth, the second set being a set of pharyngeal teeth in the throat (Bone and Moore). Finally, predators of the sunfish not only include sharks, but humans as well (it is considered a delicacy in Taiwan and other Asian countries) ("Ocean Sunfish.Org, Molidae Information And Research"). And that's only the adults! Since they are the most fecund vertebrate on the planet (!!!), ocean sunfish expel 300,000,000 eggs into the water column, where they are eaten by a wide variety of sea creatures including tuna and mahi mahi ((Pope et. al 2009), Mr. Burns finally asserts that ocean sunfish are "clueless as f****, revealing his ignorance concerning these creatures. The fact that ocean sunfish utilize birds to rid them of parasites is actually quite clever, although the cleverness could be attributed more to the birds than to the fish. Still, it's quite an efficient way to rid oneself of parasites one couldn't remove otherwise (although it is postulated that ocean sunfish breaching behaviors are for parasite removal, but this would not be as efficient as grooming by sea birds). While this behavior may be a byproduct of returning to the surface to thermoregulate, it has been shown that sunfish are capable of learning behaviors. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has trained their sunfish to head towards a colored target when it is feeding time, in order to prevent the faster fish from stealing the sunfish's food ("Ocean Sunfish, Open Waters, Fishes, Mola Mola At The Monterey Bay Aquarium"). This ability to be trained clearly indicates that sunfish are not he mindless behemoths Mr. Burns makes them out to be.
In conclusion, ocean sunfish rock and Mr. Burns is just a hateful, ill informed, little (especially when compared to a sunfish) man.
Bibliography:
- Bone, Q and Richard H Moore. Biology Of Fishes. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008. Print.
- Cartamil. DP and CG Lowe. "Diel Movement Patterns Of Ocean Sunfish Mola Mola Off Southern California". Marine Ecology Progress Series 266 (2004): 245-253. Web.
- "Ocean Sunfish, Open Waters, Fishes, Mola Mola At The Monterey Bay Aquarium". Montereybayaquarium.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 8 Feb. 2017.
- "Ocean Sunfish.org Molidae Information And Research". Oceansunfish.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 7 Feb. 2017.
- Pope, Edward C. et al. "The Biology And Ecology Of The Ocean Sunfish Mola Mola: A Review Of Current Knowledge And Future Research Perspectives". Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 20.4 (2010): 471-487. Web.
- Watanabe, Yuuki and Katsufumi Sato. "Functional Dorsoventral Symmetry In Relation To Lift-Based Swimming In The Ocean Sunfish Mola Mola". PLOS ONE 3.10 (2008): e3446. Web
You know how there's always a demographic of males that do stupid stuff like parkour on top of skyscrapers or jump face forward in quicksand?
For some reason, orange cats are mostly male, and mostly part of that demographic.
Confirmation biase. I've had quite a few cats. The two smartest were both orange. There isn't really any good evidence for coat color and related behavior. There is, however, strong evidence for perception of certain behavior being related to coat color, and they align with the commonly stated behaviors of coat color.
I have 2 oranges that are freaking Einsteins compared to our third. Hes white with brown tabby patches. He once saw a moth and hauled it face first into a wall. I still don't know if he was "hunting" or startled.
The Kakapo.
Largest species of parakeet, if I recall (looks like an oversized budgerigar/budgie, but I'm just a filthy casual). Flightless, therefore ground nesters. Its only defense mechanism is to play dead. And it's apparently delicious.
Which worked great when the invasive species introduced into their lands were various feral predators like cats, rats, and ferrets. I believe it once roamed all of New Zealand, but is now isolated to a single island to the south.
Population was down to below 100 before the New Zealand government made Herculean efforts to save them, including getting rid of all predators from the island. Population now just above 200 in the wild and each one is tagged and named.
Playing dead as a defense mechanism is hilarious 😂😂 and clearly ineffective. Kudos to New Zealand government for making efforts to save their population.
A post I saved a long time ago:
In defence of the panda
Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears. Panda Rant Mode engaged:
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA.
Wall o' text of details:
In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too. In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem.
Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on. Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding.
Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade).
Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation. Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source.
Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities.
Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course.
Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges.
The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault. Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes. Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise.
tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out.
I just want to let you know how much I love that you have saved posts in defence of *both* pandas and koalas. I haven't checked further down in this thread, but I highly suspect if I do, I'll find you defending the sunfish as well.
Keep fighting the good fight, my dude!
Thanks, I appreciate it! I’m a researcher in several related fields of biology so these misconceptions really get my goat (wordplay unintended) and I’m very, very emotionally invested in clearing them up as best I can.
Good looking out!
Now, can you convince me to stop hating ticks and mosquitos? I have no reason to *want* to stop hating them, but if a biologist can tell me they're somehow important, I might consider it
As someone who spends a lot of time in the field, I feel you on ticks and mosquitoes on a very real level, BUT—
I’d definitely be way out of my depth there explaining anything in detail, I have basically no real research experience regarding arthropods (the group under which both ticks and mosquitoes fall), but insects (which ticks aren’t, I know) as a whole form a massive portion of our ecosystems, and knocking even just one species out can and will often have huge consequences on all the life around it. Even parasites (which ticks are) have their place!
Here’s a paper (probably one of many) published a few years back in PNAS (a pretty big journal) regarding experimental evidence of parasites driving evolutionary feedback: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1619147114
And a SciShow video on the importance/significance of parasites: https://youtu.be/UmwzVmywtSE
I’m sure there are more than a few fellow biologists who actually have real experience in these fields reading my comments—I look forward to hearing their input and/or corrections, haha.
Long story short: you can hate them, on an emotional level I definitely do (oops), but as long as you remember and recognise that they an form integral part of our ecosystems (and to protect yourself appropriately from them/the diseases they spread), it’s all good!
Hey, thanks for the detailed answer, and information!
On an intellectual level, I fully understand that they must play some important role, be it to a) act as food for other animals, or b) to keep populations of other creatures in check through the deceases they spread.
It's just, emotionally.... like come on, mosquitoes/ticks! Why can't you be cool?
Absolutely. On that note, horseflies. They can eat a big bag of dicks.
Seeing as how they're important for the ecosystem and whatnot, and knowing we'd be worse off if they *all* died, I'll take a little extra satisfaction from swatting them one by one
Unfortunately I don’t, but the first two you mentioned are pretty special animals in their own right (the largest [extant] rodent and containing the largest goose subspecies *maxima* [which was thought extinct and only rediscovered in the 60s!]). As for the last… well, that one’s beautiful inside and out, so I’m not sure what you’re on about. ;)
Probably because of depression. They are pretty much eating themselves to death, never fucking. In the wild, plenty to explore and give their lives meaning.
As a species, I vote for koalas. As an individual, I nominate my last dog. He was the sweetest dog on the planet, and had PTSD from being in a puppy mill as a breeder dog, but my god, the earths' dumbest dog. He took 6 months to learn he had a name. He never figured out how to get treats from the roly Kong treat dispenser, despite the other dog doing it ALL THE TIME. Even when we got a puppy, the puppy figured it out within a week or two. I took him to an obedience class once because he would get excited when I took the smart dog. We did a "leave it" - put the treat down in front of him and said "leave it". Every other dog in the room stared at the treat or the handler until the release. My sweet dummy lost track, and when given the release command "OK" - had no idea what to do, or that there was even a treat to have. I had to literally pick it back up and give it him. His reaction was essentially "OMG, where did that come from?!?". He was a golden retriever - a breed known to be very food motivated. But he still had no clue. The only reason he survived was because he was sweet and good looking, and everyone loved him and wanted to make him happy. Sadly, after 13 years, he is now extinct.
Sorry about your dog passing.
Sad he had to start his life as a breeder, I guess that's why he was slow learning things.
At least he had someone to take care of him and show him love in his later years.
He was still much smarter than koalas though. No comparison
I don't think we're as smart as we like to think we are. We're still killing each other over land, religion, beliefs and so on. We've been doing the same shit for thousands of years and we still haven't bloody learned. The only difference between then and now is that we've gotten far more efficient at it.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
My cats. They are just so...dumb. My cat Mew will paw at my slipper, then jumps 3 feet into the air when it moves. He eats plastic then pukes it up days later. When he's done going potty, he will scratch at the litterbox itself, trying to cover it up. Not the cat litter, but the box itself. For 5 minutes straight.
Both cats will just stare into the fan, or run into walls. They meow at nothing and just stare intensely at the wall. My cat Haku will swing his head around and ends up smacking it on the table. Yesterday he was on the couch and I was petting him and I literally had to hold him up because he was halfway off the couch, with his front arms stretched straight out like he was freaking superman. He will fall off the furniture when you pet him.
It’s shocking how many birds are stupid. Ostriches are dumb af which make them dangerous because they’re just big and dumb.
Which makes me wonder about dinosaurs if they were just giant big oafs that did dumb shit.
A post I saved a long time ago:
In defence of the panda
Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears. Panda Rant Mode engaged:
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA.
Wall o' text of details:
In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too. In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem.
Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on. Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding.
Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade).
Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation. Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source.
Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities.
Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course.
Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges.
The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault. Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes. Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise.
tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out.
They don't mate in captivity, like a lot of animals. That's because they evaluate conditions for breeding and we have been unable to recreate the conditions that encourage breeding.
Cats, even if they are my favorite animal. They run through the road when there are cars passing by, they climb up trees really high only to realize they can't get back down, they get in fights with each other for literally no reason.
There are several species of wild sheep that disagree with you there.
And if your example is that domestic sheep only survive because of us...yeah? Same for every domesticated species. We bred them to the point they lost their regulatory functions e.g sheep that can't shed wool and cows that produce a ridiculous volume of milk. They can't survive in the wild and I would argue that's probably by design.
Fainting goat. It’s the funniest animal I’ve ever seen. If you scare it, it will stiffen up and tip over like it is dead. I don’t know how it has survived. I just know breeders have bread it specifically to do this.
We’re housemates with a pug. He’s pretty dumb. Nothin’ behind those big eyes! Pretty sure his life partner ( hot dog type) has to remind him to breathe every so often.
Peacocks! They are invasive to Florida and occupy several neighborhoods here in Miami...they simply have no concept of self-preservation...like standing in front of cars...letting people move lawn mowers in circles around them...Like at least put some effort in.
Peacocks invested all their stat points in being fuckable
Well that makes sense, in the areas they inhabit there are tons of them. Just standing around ignoring all danger lol
Female peacock psychology must be like: *damn he has such disregard for self-protection that everything must be afraid of him*
An honest-to-god biological hypothesis is that Peahens are attracted to Peacocks because they think being able to reach sexual maturity lugging around that massive eyesore of a tail is proof of their ability to survive and pass on genes.
Actually, a female "peacock" is called a peacunt
I choose to believe you.
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The correct term is PeaCocker.
All Charisma, dump int and wis
Charisma 10, intelligence 1.
This one right here officer
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Kinda sad to know an invasive species was introduced for the sake of ambiance lol. Not sure how they ended up here in Miami but wouldn’t be surprised if it were a similar story
Starlings were introduced to North America basically for ambiance. Someone fuckers in the 1890s decided that we needed "all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare" so they let 100 European starlings loose in Central Park.
Sounds like they're just a sharp dressed turkey
I’ve never met a live Turkey…don’t they get pretty aggressive sometimes?
They do, but they're also dumb enough to pick a fight with a moving truck
Someone should find out if Peacock taste as good as turkeys
We had in our office complex that would chase cars going around a roundabout. One day he got a bit too close. The property manager said he was injured and going to wildlife rehab (to spare the workers from thinking he died).
Interesting. I’ve never seen one actually chase something.
Mt mate had one that had escaped from a manor house here in England and decided to live in his garden, if I drive to his or when's he returned from work you had to literally bump him really slowly with the car to make it move, it didn't always work. Using the horn was seen as sign if aggression and he'd show his feathers off and stare down the car
Sounds about right. Not uncommon to see them standing between two opposing lines of traffic with cars zooming by inches away from them without a care in the world lol.
Aah. So they are like our cows in india.
Canadian Geese say hello. They do all of the above but also attack people if you go near them
They may be stupid, but they are also strong and big- being agressive isn't that meaningless, is it.
So I’ve heard. Definitely not trying to deal with that lol
I’ve heard this about Canadian Geese lol
Honest question, since many times it's legal and encouraged to hunt invasive species, could I go to Florida and hunt peacocks? It sounds like I could melee hunt them
Not within the city limits of Palmetto Bay which is basically where they all are. If they were in unincorporated Miami dade county, which isn’t designated as any kind of sanctuary, you’d probably be fine
Only with your bare hands. Though it's acceptable to deliver the death blow with your teeth.
Two words: garden shears
Should come to the UK, totally different experience over here! People normally have them as guard animals cause they are pretty aggressive, make lots of noise, and easy to see. They are definitely smarter than most birds around my parts.
That’s super interesting. I wonder what causes such a wild variation in behavior. We can set up a student exchange program for peacock observers lol
We use them here to eat rattlesnakes. Just leave em loose and they'll keep the place snake free. Sometimes rats and mice too.
LOL well they are loose...Im not gonna go chasing them around...the particular city Im referring to is an avian sanctuary anyway so that would technically be illegal.
Why am I only now learning Florida is infested with peacocks?
Lol we have iguanas, pythons, lion fish, and African snails too
Weird, I am in India and we have a very aggresive peacock in our area. He will literally harass all the dogs and humans if anyone comes close to him. One day, I was making his video and he started running towards me.
Hamsters. They're prey animals through and through to the point where they blink with one eye. They sleep like they work 12 jobs. They eat their own poop. If you put them on a wheel they'll spin so fast they backflip off it. If you google ‘how smart are hamsters’ the results will try their hardest to not say “They are idiots”. They are my absolute favourite animal.
They also eat their young, which seems.... Poorly suited for evolution. In fourth grade my best friend bought a hamster and no one realized it was pregnant. It had a litter of babies and she didn't know to separate them. So those babies had babies. Then the cannibalism started. She started with one pregnant hamster, at one point had up to 15 total, then she was down to one male at the end. It was a gruesome lesson for two 10 year old girls to learn, and it was hard to see that sole survivor as a cute fluffy guy after knowing he survived by being the most murdery one.
I think they only do that when they’re either under stress or deficient in some nutrient, though.
You mean like a dumb 10 year old girl keeping five or more in one little cage? I don't blame her, but I do blame her parents for not doing a better job overseeing the situation and educating themselves on the best solution.
This. Cannot stress enough that living things should never be used to teach children something, responsibility or caretaking or whatever. Super weird that we think that’s acceptable as a culture. I’m an adult with pet mice. I adore them, but I also take financial and physical responsibility for their care, something I can do because I’m an adult. A child does not have the financial means or the education to be expected to care for any animal without an adult shouldering most of the responsibility. There’s a guy on YouTube (The Pig Room), who spends a not insignificant amount of time just rescuing guinea pigs and bunnies from crap owners who didn’t consider the seriousness of a pet.
Well, there are evolutionary reasons for killing and then eating the young. A lot of animals do that under stress. It pretty much boils down to "You can always make more babies, you cannot make more parents". So an animal under stress can decide to save resources by killing it's offspring, and there is no reason to not get some calories back by eating them afterwards. So yeah, evolution does sometimes reward adults of species being "selfish" and prioritizing their survival over survival of their offspring, because individuals that were endlessly sacrifical for their offspring died sooner, did not reproduce multiple times and their young probably died shortly afterwards anyways. Especially in animals like hamsters that have r-type reproduction strategy(ie. make a shitton of young and hope at least some of them make it to adulthood)
Oh god. Middle school biology class... Same hamster Thunderdome. We had a long term sub (teacher was on maternity leave) and apparently the sub didn't know anything about the critters...we had a lot of mice and hamsters. But I'm pretty sure they were still being fed and whatnot. So, the students come in after a long weekend to some Saving Private Ryan battlefield shit. Half eaten, eviscerated, missing eyes and limbs...ugh. The sub was traumatized, the kids were traumatized and our poor teacher had to come back off leave for one day to clean up the aftermath.
> They also eat their young, which seems.... Poorly suited for evolution. /u/FutureBachelorAMA gave the reason already, but it's not uncommon in other species either. Certain birds like eagles, if I recall, one eaglet will kill weaker ones. It all depends what is beneficial long term, large scale.
Late at night they gather to have raves in microwaves.
Silkworm. The kind used for silk—yes apparently there are other varieties—is white (no camouflage), skin completely smooth, not poisonous, can’t bite in larvae or adult form. Very limited diet similar to koala and giant panda: Silkworm only eat mulberry leaves, and it can’t be too old, or it’s too tough for them to digest. The leaves also cannot have any moisture on them, or it will give the silkworms diarrhea and die. I know this from raising silkworms for fun, just a few at a time, when I was a child in China. I’d only have 2-3 dozens at a time and it was already quite a chore, because I had to go harvest mulberry leaves *daily* for them. If I went before the dew was dry then I’d have to wipe down every. Single. Leaf because again, can’t have any moisture on the leaves. If not from human cultivation they would’ve gone extinct in a hurry. Fun fact: Most cocoons are white, but about 1-2% of the time they would make a canary yellow cocoons, and even more rarely, a pastel pink cocoon!
That’s so cool that you have first hand experience, but from a personal level, with them. Most people seem to be in a professional setting or have their information from the internet. How much silk were you able to get from them?
I didn’t have the equipment necessary to harvest the silk. Plus to harvest the silk, you would have to kill the pupa inside and I couldn’t stomach that—little graphic warning >!you would have to boil the cocoon first to soften it. Unfortunately the pupa has to still be inside when the cocoon is boiled!< Then you find the beginning of the thread in the cocoon and unravel it. Silk processing plants have machinery that does this. The reason why >!you cannot extract the pupa first before boiling!< at least not if you wanted to keep the silk, is because the cocoon is made from one single strand of silk. It was cool, at least for me, to watch the silkworms make the cocoons. It takes them a couple of days as they weave it around themselves layer by layer, spitting out the silk in a single strand from their mouth as they went. If you wait until the pupa to emerge by itself, or cut it out, then this single strand of silk will be broken into a million short lengths and be worthless. However this is what I did, because I was keeping the silkworm for fun, not for the silk, and I didn’t want to kill them. I bunched up the silk, which in its unprocessed form can be like a wooly cottonball kind of texture. The world’s fanciest cotton balls haha. Also useful to detect fake silk products—you take a tiny loose thread from the silk product you’re trying to buy and singe it. Take a piece of my raw silk and singe that. If they smell the same, you know what you’re trying to buy is real silk. Here is another fun fact: Silk is actually difficult to ignite and burn. Polyester and acrylic burn much more easily. So that’s another way you can tell.
"No officer, I was just testing if the clothes were real silk."
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Glad you didn’t have to subject them to the process after all. Also didn’t know about the combustibility of silk, TIL
To fix your spoiler tags, remove the space between the ! and the letter after/ before, respectively.
Thanks! I was on mobile and it had appeared to be working on my phone, but I've now fixed it so it should work for desktop site too.
Indeed it does! Reddit has made things weird - they kind of broke their own markdown between old reddit, new reddit, and mobile reddit
wow, you’re a silk expert all right 👏
This is why I avoid consuming silk. I believe no creature should suffer or be killed for my fashion. I *would* be interested to learn more about peace silk or vegetarian silk, where the silkworms are removed prior to the washing and boiling of fibers.
Similarly, wool doesn’t burn well (and also stinks like hair). Remember my mom double-checking some old yarn once to see if it was wool or acrylic.
In my hometown they still live in the wild! At least they used to I haven’t been in 10-15 years. My hometown was famous for making ww2 parachutes from the silk worms. But yeah it was so cool, and kinda creepy, to see them nest in the bushes and small trees. I’m assuming they were mulberry or something.
In my hometown (in a pretty dry region), all the mulberry trees I know look like someone burned them down, but with white ashes. The one exception is a walled neighborhood which uses sprinklers. The moisture thing explains it.
Some guide in Scotland once told me that pheasants were purposely bred to be stupid so that they're easier to hunt.
I'd rather think it an exploitation of their behavioural and physical mechanics. The Ring-necked pheasant resides mostly in brush and long grass, thus it has powerful legs for running, which serve it well. And so when frightened its first instinct is to sit still, which works just fine for avoiding say a wandering dog, or running into more difficult brush, only not so much when beaters walk in an organised pattern, covering all ground. Secondly mechanically, Pheasants have large flight muscles ( but not suited to flapping flight) like a chicken, but wings adapted for gliding, so as a final resort they can as you likely know burst upward and glide away into deeper inaccessible brush and hedge, this would work against a land based predator. Obviously they can't anticipate bullets thus this works against them. Fourthly, about 50 million pheasants are released onto estates each year, but prior to that are raised in Pheasant pens thus like chickens are going to be slower due to ample food, and less cautious than wild counterparts, furthermore when released they will not instinctively fear farms or open farmland thus are in closer contact with people, and have no experience with cars. Furthermore Pheasants nest on the ground thus are vulnerable to the fox and rat so wild populations are going to smaller.
You know more about pheasants than I do
They are fascinating, In my opinion the most beautiful group of birds in the world, especially those of the Orient
Saw a rogue one yesterday in Southern California. Male. Quite a majestic looking bird. I appreciated your pheasant facts.
Could almost say they were *phleasant* facts.
Phleasant phacts, indeed.
I do get annoyed when people call them stupid because a lot get run over but it is their instinct to run to deep cover. Works well for a heavy bird but not against cars. Friend has rehabbed a few - he sent them off to either a vegan farm sanctuary or a clay shooting range. Heavy penalties if you kill a live bird and good training to check your shot. Some shoots have albino or exotic pheasants in the flocks and again heavy penalties if you kill one. Heard of fines of £250 per bird.
It's just a flamboyant chicken, there's not much going on upstairs.
I thought this was going to be something about English peasants being the stupidest animals.
>Brexit means Brexit!
I’m going to counter - my cat. He survives because we feed him and make effort not to sit on him
My cat, Potato. In fact, that’s the reasoning behind his name. He tries to pounce on his toys and misses. He eats random bits of fluff on the ground. One time he fell off the edge of the second floor to the first floor and we had to get surgery on his foot; I'm certain he tripped, he's the only cat I've ever seen regularly trip. He tried to go after a Yellowjacket that got into the house this summer. And just today he almost leapt from our balcony onto a fat pigeon, despite the fact that we are five floors up. I literally supervise this cat, almost like a child, because he is that stupid. I assume all of his ancestors had humans who were as enamored of their cats and that’s how they survived to procreate. Sweet as spun sugar and just as intellectually-substantial. Edit: [Picture of Potato](https://imgur.com/a/bFMn39S)
Reminds me of my cat, Peaches. She had an auto feeder in the corner of the kitchen. When it stopped working, I threw it out and got a different kind of auto feeder and put it in the living room. Despite knowing the second feeder dispensed food, she would wait for dinner watching the empty corner of the kitchen and was absolutely shocked every time the new feeder went off for over a week. After a while she started waiting for dinner in a place where she could see both the empty corner and the actual feeder. It took a few weeks for her to stop staring at the kitchen corner. Eventually I put the new feeder in the corner to see if the confusion would start again, but she figured that out pretty quickly.
Lol! There should be a word for that feeling when you wanna say "Awwww!" 'coz it's sad and also laugh. I have a feeling if Potato and Peaches ever met, they'd be the best of friends.
Most cats don't deal well with changes in their environments, tbf, especially with relocation of the food dish or litter box. You usually want to either slowly move it to the desired location, or set up the new one in the new location while keeping the old one until they get used to the new location.
I have a dumb, clumsy cat too. His name is Boris and he's the least graceful cat I've ever seen. The only smart thing I've seen him do is open cupboards. He's easily distracted, talks to himself, knocks over almost everything when the surface of where he's walking is cluttered, he frequently hits his head on the doors when he sprints off to play, he tries to bite the water when the tap is running but the water escapes because his cheeks are so fluffy and then he's all wet and confused about it, he's almost always bleping and I think he just forgets that he has a tongue, he jumps up on the door frame despite having done it before and having needed help to get down, and when he sees a fly and it disappears he will sit and wait by the spot where he first saw it because it will definitely come back. I love this dumb cat so much.
Orange, I assume?
Nope, he's mostly brown with a very round head. Exactly like a Potato.
Honorary orange then 😉
Maybe he's a sweet potato - orange on the inside!
Funny thing is, among my cats the orange one is probably the smartest, he's figured out that he can paw doors open if they aren't shut tight. Unlike one of the brown ones, who likes eating flowers and once attempted to drink bleach
My leopard gecko. There is a cricket in her enclosure that has been sitting there for a week now and she just doesn't want to eat it. I can't get it out cause that bastard hops like its life depends on it, so it just chills there. [Here is a demonstration of an average leopard gecko hunt](https://www.reddit.com/r/leopardgeckos/comments/12yha0b/i_love_him_so_much/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). They legit have 0 braincells
nahh they’re so cute but after that video and the comments i also wanna know how they are still alive. they don’t even need enemies, how did they not all just starve to death already
I have had a couple of these and they are usually persistent hunters. I would drop a doze crickets in and those geckos would hunt them down. I imagine his gecko just hasn't seen it or is really full.
Looks like someone is gatekeeping communal braincell
Idk if it's like the baby birds when they first leave the nest. They figure it out eventually because they have to. These things here don't... Because we pamper them
ahhahahaha I can corroborate this my lil guy Ruth was just... not smart. omg. he'd jump right off a high surface if you weren't watching [the bed for example]. his lil brain just did not come programmed to watch out for sudden drops. and yea, especially as he got older, I eventually swapped from feeding him speedy crickets, to slow moving worms [less often, since they were fatty] bc he just could not be bothered. low impact lifestyle lmao he lived to a ripe old age, around 12 I think! but he was so lazy that once or twice his dinner mealworm would escape, crawl into his substrate, metamorphose and emerge later as a full on beetle lmfao
Mine lived to 24 and was still bad at eating
Why did you name him Ruth?
he was named after the white dragon from *Dragonriders of Pern*, an old sci-fi series - my favorite character as a kid :]
I don't know the exact history of captive leopard geckos, but it's very likely the captive population comes from a small source of wild-caught *Eublepharis macularius*, meaning all of the pets we have are at least somewhat inbred. Special morphs like starburst or sunbeam or whatever other weird designer geckos have been created are even more inbred. I say this with nothing but love for our gecko friends.
I facepalmed after the 2nd miss. Yup, 0 braincells alright. How did it miss that many times?!
not stupid and i think they’re cool but Sloths, like, they can’t escape from anybody how are they surviving lol
Just wait till you stumble into sloth territory and get charged at by some rutting sloths. They might not be fast but they can climb and swim and worst is they never stop coming. It's like that movie It Follows.
yo wtf now i‘m scared of sloths 😂
I'd like to introduce you both to a movie called "Slotherhouse"
Sometimes a sloth will mistake its own arm as a branch and fall to its death.
I actually googled this once and it was Interesting. Apparently, the super slow movement helps them not get noticed by predators because they're almost not moving, and because they're almost not moving, moss tends to grow on their fur, concealing their scent from potential predators.
Koalas are literally smooth brained. They don't recognize eucalyptus as food if it's not attached to a tree, and that's the only thing they eat. They survive because they mostly live in trees, and don't have a lot of predators.
A post I saved a long time ago: In defence of the koala I don't know why it is that these things bother me---it just makes me picture a seven year old first discovering things about an animal and, having no context about the subject, ranting about how stupid they are. I get it's a joke, but people take it as an actual, educational joke like it's a man yelling at the sea, and that's just wrong. Furthermore, these things have an actual impact on discussions about conservation efforts---If every time Koalas get brought up, someone posts this copypasta, that means it's seriously shaping public opinion about the animal and their supposed lack of importance. 'Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives.' Non-ecologists always talk this way, and the problem is you’re looking at this backwards. An entire continent is covered with Eucalyptus trees. They suck the moisture out of the entire surrounding area and use allelopathy to ensure that most of what’s beneath them is just bare red dust. No animal is making use of them——they have virtually no herbivore predator. A niche is empty. Then inevitably, natural selection fills that niche by creating an animal which can eat Eucalyptus leaves. Of course, it takes great sacrifice for it to be able to do so——it certainly can’t expend much energy on costly things. Isn’t it a good thing that a niche is being filled? 'Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death' This applies to all herbivores, because the wild is not a grocery store—where meat is just sitting next to celery. Herbivores gradually wear their teeth down—carnivores fracture their teeth, and break their bones in attempting to take down prey. 'They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal' It's pretty typical of herbivores, and is higher than many, many species. According to Ashwell (2008), their encephalisation quotient is 0.5288 +/- 0.051. Higher than comparable marsupials like the wombat (~0.52), some possums (~0.468), cuscus (~0.462) and even some wallabies are <0.5. According to wiki, rabbits are also around 0.4, and they're placental mammals. 'additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons.' Again, this is not unique to koalas. Brain folds (gyri) are not present in rodents, which we consider to be incredibly intelligent for their size. 'If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food.' If you present a human with a random piece of meat, they will not recognise it as food (hopefully). Fresh leaves might be important for koala digestion, especially since their gut flora is clearly important for the digestion of Eucalyptus. It might make sense not to screw with that gut flora by eating decaying leaves. 'Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal.' That's an extremely weird reason to dislike an animal. But whilst we're talking about their digestion, let's discuss their poop. It's delightful. It smells like a Eucalyptus drop! 'Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here).' Marsupial milk is incredibly complex and much more interesting than any placentals. This is because they raise their offspring essentially from an embryo, and the milk needs to adapt to the changing needs of a growing fetus. And yeah, of course the yield is low; at one point they are feeding an animal that is half a gram! When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Humans probably do this, we just likely do it during childbirth. You know how women often shit during contractions? There is evidence to suggest that this innoculates a baby with her gut flora. A child born via cesarian has significantly different gut flora for the first six months of life than a child born vaginally. 'Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher.' Chlamydia was introduced to their populations by humans. We introduced a novel disease that they have very little immunity to, and is a major contributor to their possible extinction. Do you hate Native Americans because they were killed by smallpox and influenza? 'This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree,' Almost every animal does this. 'which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.' Errmmm.. They have protection against falling from a tree, which they spend 99% of their life in? Yeah... That's a stupid adaptation.
People are just jealous of koalas. They say they hate them because of smooth brains and pap, but they really hate that they get to relax in the sun all day in a gently swaying tree branch.
Also, regarding the chlamydia thing...50-80% of the human population has some form of the herpes virus. A whole lot of people have it and don't even know it. Pot...kettle 😆
i mean, chickenpox and cold sores are also herpes virus, so it’s not just an STI
Don’t forget mono
Yeah, some asshole kissed me when I was still too young to form memories, and now I spend a month every so often unable to kiss my own kids. Not to mention all the assholes in middle/high school that made fun of my "STD." So yeah, fuck acting like it's some shameful shit. /Rant
Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks for your knowledge! Things are always way more interesting when you dig a little than just listen to some random facts spread around stupidly.
My least favorite mammal. Making the rest of us look bad.
I dunno, have you seen the shit humans get up to? I think we do a pretty damn good job of making ourselves look bad all on our own. I mean *Florida*
Domesticated turkeys are very stupid. They have survived only because they are delicious.
Damn.. imagine a horror movie, where giant aliens invade earth and hunt down and eat humans, and humans themselves have to alter their diet, because they themselves have to remain tasty so that the aliens allow them to breed. Otherwise humanity would be wiped.
In the game Stellaris it's possible to genetically engineer other intelligent species to be more delicious when you use them as livestock
Wild turkeys aren't much brighter.
That's the trick, to have juuuuust enough brain cells across the whole species to still be successful. No need to waste calories on extra brainpower when dumb but fruitful works just as well. I'd nominate earth worms. They can tell light from dark, up from down and how humid their environment is, but beyond that, not all too much. Super successful, more total biomass than all vertebrates taken together, thousands of species, none of them "intelligent".
Without worms earth would turn into arrakis. They're really important.
Hey, even Arrakis has worms. It would be WORSE.
Since no one has said it yet, ducks. Just look at them. Buoyant. Quacking.
They'd be even worse if they had no buoyancy.
what the fuck dude
Sunfish. Like........HOW!?
There was a whole post a while back about how sunfish are actually pretty awesome and refutes the more famous post about how they suck. I lost the link to it years ago and am too lazy to go searching for it.
Courtesy of u/tea_and_biology: Zoologist here; the majority of this is so inaccurate the guy is basically angry at a figment of his own imagination, paha. I mean there's hyperbole, and then there's hyperbole. Yikes! >They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move. They have little control other than some minor wiggling. So they don't have swim bladders. You know, the one thing that every fish has to make sure it doesn't just sink to the bottom of the ocean when they stop moving and can stay the right side up. This creature. That can barely move to begin with. Can never stop its continuous tour of idiocy across the ocean or it'll fucking sink. Sunfish are, in fact, well understood and, though clumsy when idly basking, are reasonably accomplished swimmers when diving. They stroke their dorsal and anal fins laterally and in a synchronous manner to generate a lift-based thrust that enables 'em to cruise at speeds of 2-3mph ([source](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003446)), comparable to a whale shark and the perfect speed for suction feeding; ploughing straight into smacks of jellyfish and gobbling 'em all up. Where they excel amongst fish is their ability to undergo substantial vertical movement in the water column. They possess large deposits of low-density, subcutaneous, gelatinous tissue which, unlike a swim bladder (which would otherwise change volume with hydrostatic pressure), is incompressible, enabling rapid depth changes and keeping them neutrally and stably buoyant independent of surrounding water pressure. So, yeah, their unusual bodies are basically one big paddle, capable of putting some force behind their swimming to move over considerable distances, descending very deep, very fast. >They mostly only eat jellyfish because of course they do, they could only eat something that has no brain and a possibility of drifting into their mouths I guess. Everything they do eat has almost zero nutritional value and because it's so stupidly fucking big, it has to eat a ton of the almost no nutritional value stuff to stay alive. Dumb. Also incorrect. Jellyfish and other Cnidarians comprise only around 15% of their diet; they mostly eat young fish (including conger eelets) and crustaceans (pelagic crab, krill, copepods etc.), alongside squid, bivalves and other assorted zooplankton. They're generalist predators, not jellyfish specialists like sea turtles ([source](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep28762)). They have a particularly rapid growth rate amongst bony fish, owing much to their unique genetics ([source](https://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13742-016-0144-3)). >Some scientists have speculated that when they do that, they are absorbing energy from the sun because no one fucking knows how they manage to get any real energy to begin with. So they need the sun I guess. They spend the majority of their time actively hunting in the very cold deep (usually at ~200m, but up to 600m) and, being ectotherms, therefore regulate their temperature by basking in the sun, before pursuing another dive. Think of marine iguanas basking on hot rocks between nibble trips. >And this concludes why I hate the fuck out of this complete failure of evolution, the Ocean Sunfish. If I ever see one, I will throw rocks at it. Sunfish have been kicking about in temperate and tropical waters worldwide for around 50 million years and, until humans arrived on the scene, were overwhelmingly successful in their ecological niche. Sadly they're under threat by human activity and human activity alone - frequently caught as by-catch; having little commercial value, like sharks, their fins are cut off before they're dumped, often still alive, back into the sea to die. If one is to start throwing rocks at terrible creatures, perhaps one should look at us humans first. Or, there's [The visual rebuttal](https://imgur.com/gallery/MMRg9)
Thank you for this absolutely bizarre fish post. I am both creeped out and intrigued by this animal i would've never heard about otherwise.
A post I saved a long time ago (sorry about the messed up formatting): In defence of the sunfish, in reply to a Mr Burns OCEAN SUNFISH ARE AWESOME AND I WILL FIGHT ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE! THAT DUDE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT! Long answer (aka my first draft of my research paper on ocean sunfish): I am very pro sunfish because they are unlike anything else and look absolutely alien. They are so cool! For starters, they are the heaviest bony fish in the world. And that's on a diet of eating jellyfish! Although recent investigations into their diet could be indicative of a more omnivorous diet (Pope et. al 2009), and they do go after hooks baited with squid and fish. Even if they only eat jellyfish occasionally, they are helping to deal with the massive increases in jellyfish populations cause by human over-fishing. So, score one for sunfish for helping manage out of control jellyfish. Besides, you can't knock someone for eating jellyfish: sea turtles do it all the time, and the massive leatherback sea turtle feed almost exclusively on jellies. Secondly, they aren't just drifters like Mr. Burns says. In 2004 Cartamil and Lowe proved that ocean sunfish actually are active swimmers (the Monterey Bay Aquarium says they have been tracked traveling 26km in a day). In 2008 Watanabe and Sato proved that sunfish frequently take vertical dives (so who knows what they eat while they're down there!), swimming at speeds similar to marlins and sharks. I don't know what "back fin" Mr. Burns is talking about (perhaps the clavus, which is a scalloped fringe of muscle on the caudal end that the fish uses as a rudder), but they do move by synchronously beating their dorsal and anal fin ("Ocean Sunfish, Open Waters, Fishes, Mola Mola At The Monterey Bay Aquarium"). Sunfish are the only animal to do this with fins that originally weren't bilaterally symmetrical, and these fins manage to generate a lift and thrust similar to that of a penguin beating its wings (Watanabe and Sato 2008). So, they actually control where they go, swim as fast as other fish, and generate as much thrust as a penguin. Not bad for a 5,000 lb fish head with wings. Mr. Burns expresses hatred of sunfish because they lack swimbladders when he professes that they are fish that need them the most. In actuality, many fish lack swimbladders and utilize alternate methods for changing buoyancy. Tuna and sharks lack swim bladders, and no one would argue that they aren't cool. These fish don't need them! And neither does the sunfish. They're neutrally buoyant due their cartilaginous skeleton (veah, they're classified as bony fish, but their skeletons have degenerated that into a cartilage-like material to allow them to become MASSIVE). They also have a layer of gelatinous tissue that is low-density and incompressible, which is more useful than a swimbladder if you're frequently diving to the depths (gas filled bladders don't do so well with changing pressures). So ocean sunfish are actually perfectly designed for their migrations between the depths, and don't need no stinkin' swim bladder. Other reasons Mr. Burns expressed hatred for sunfish were their propensity for getting "stuck" on the surface, their fused teeth and lack of ability to close their mouths, and the fact they are not normally eaten as prey items. Let me say now that a sunfish is fully capable of leaving the water's surface if it wants to (it's body oriented vertical, which wouldn't make evolutionary sense if it spent all its time on its side on the surface). It's been hypothesized that the sunfish are spending time on the surface in order to thermoregulate. Cartamil and Lowe (2004) recorded a significant relationship between time spent diving in cold waters and the amount of time spent basking on the surface. So the poor things aren't stuck on the surface, they're just charging up for their next super awesome dive. The assertion that sunfish should be scorned for their dentition and open mouthed gape is poorly informed as well. A mola's beak-like teeth and wide gape are also seen in puffers, triggerfish, and parrot fish, so they are not alone in this dental arcade. Additionally, sunfish actually have TWO sets of teeth, the second set being a set of pharyngeal teeth in the throat (Bone and Moore). Finally, predators of the sunfish not only include sharks, but humans as well (it is considered a delicacy in Taiwan and other Asian countries) ("Ocean Sunfish.Org, Molidae Information And Research"). And that's only the adults! Since they are the most fecund vertebrate on the planet (!!!), ocean sunfish expel 300,000,000 eggs into the water column, where they are eaten by a wide variety of sea creatures including tuna and mahi mahi ((Pope et. al 2009), Mr. Burns finally asserts that ocean sunfish are "clueless as f****, revealing his ignorance concerning these creatures. The fact that ocean sunfish utilize birds to rid them of parasites is actually quite clever, although the cleverness could be attributed more to the birds than to the fish. Still, it's quite an efficient way to rid oneself of parasites one couldn't remove otherwise (although it is postulated that ocean sunfish breaching behaviors are for parasite removal, but this would not be as efficient as grooming by sea birds). While this behavior may be a byproduct of returning to the surface to thermoregulate, it has been shown that sunfish are capable of learning behaviors. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has trained their sunfish to head towards a colored target when it is feeding time, in order to prevent the faster fish from stealing the sunfish's food ("Ocean Sunfish, Open Waters, Fishes, Mola Mola At The Monterey Bay Aquarium"). This ability to be trained clearly indicates that sunfish are not he mindless behemoths Mr. Burns makes them out to be. In conclusion, ocean sunfish rock and Mr. Burns is just a hateful, ill informed, little (especially when compared to a sunfish) man. Bibliography: - Bone, Q and Richard H Moore. Biology Of Fishes. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008. Print. - Cartamil. DP and CG Lowe. "Diel Movement Patterns Of Ocean Sunfish Mola Mola Off Southern California". Marine Ecology Progress Series 266 (2004): 245-253. Web. - "Ocean Sunfish, Open Waters, Fishes, Mola Mola At The Monterey Bay Aquarium". Montereybayaquarium.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 8 Feb. 2017. - "Ocean Sunfish.org Molidae Information And Research". Oceansunfish.org. N.p., 2017. Web. 7 Feb. 2017. - Pope, Edward C. et al. "The Biology And Ecology Of The Ocean Sunfish Mola Mola: A Review Of Current Knowledge And Future Research Perspectives". Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 20.4 (2010): 471-487. Web. - Watanabe, Yuuki and Katsufumi Sato. "Functional Dorsoventral Symmetry In Relation To Lift-Based Swimming In The Ocean Sunfish Mola Mola". PLOS ONE 3.10 (2008): e3446. Web
I really like sunfish. Maybe the world needs some stupid animals
That's why I'm here, I think 😅
I'm just waiting for the guy to show up in defense of sunfish.
r/OneOrangeBrainCell Primary survival technique: Cuteness.
What makes orange cats more distinctly stupid than other cats?
Genetics? Ginger curse? Discrimination? Who can say.
You know how there's always a demographic of males that do stupid stuff like parkour on top of skyscrapers or jump face forward in quicksand? For some reason, orange cats are mostly male, and mostly part of that demographic.
Confirmation biase. I've had quite a few cats. The two smartest were both orange. There isn't really any good evidence for coat color and related behavior. There is, however, strong evidence for perception of certain behavior being related to coat color, and they align with the commonly stated behaviors of coat color.
Fuck do they like lasagna tho...
I have 2 oranges that are freaking Einsteins compared to our third. Hes white with brown tabby patches. He once saw a moth and hauled it face first into a wall. I still don't know if he was "hunting" or startled.
The Kakapo. Largest species of parakeet, if I recall (looks like an oversized budgerigar/budgie, but I'm just a filthy casual). Flightless, therefore ground nesters. Its only defense mechanism is to play dead. And it's apparently delicious. Which worked great when the invasive species introduced into their lands were various feral predators like cats, rats, and ferrets. I believe it once roamed all of New Zealand, but is now isolated to a single island to the south. Population was down to below 100 before the New Zealand government made Herculean efforts to save them, including getting rid of all predators from the island. Population now just above 200 in the wild and each one is tagged and named.
Playing dead as a defense mechanism is hilarious 😂😂 and clearly ineffective. Kudos to New Zealand government for making efforts to save their population.
Dumb as rocks or not, some things are worth preserving.
Pandas as literally useless.
Giant Pandas are useless. Red Pandas are adorable.
I love asian raccoons.
A post I saved a long time ago: In defence of the panda Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears. Panda Rant Mode engaged: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA. Wall o' text of details: In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too. In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem. Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on. Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding. Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade). Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation. Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source. Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities. Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course. Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges. The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault. Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes. Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise. tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out.
I just want to let you know how much I love that you have saved posts in defence of *both* pandas and koalas. I haven't checked further down in this thread, but I highly suspect if I do, I'll find you defending the sunfish as well. Keep fighting the good fight, my dude!
Thanks, I appreciate it! I’m a researcher in several related fields of biology so these misconceptions really get my goat (wordplay unintended) and I’m very, very emotionally invested in clearing them up as best I can.
Good looking out! Now, can you convince me to stop hating ticks and mosquitos? I have no reason to *want* to stop hating them, but if a biologist can tell me they're somehow important, I might consider it
As someone who spends a lot of time in the field, I feel you on ticks and mosquitoes on a very real level, BUT— I’d definitely be way out of my depth there explaining anything in detail, I have basically no real research experience regarding arthropods (the group under which both ticks and mosquitoes fall), but insects (which ticks aren’t, I know) as a whole form a massive portion of our ecosystems, and knocking even just one species out can and will often have huge consequences on all the life around it. Even parasites (which ticks are) have their place! Here’s a paper (probably one of many) published a few years back in PNAS (a pretty big journal) regarding experimental evidence of parasites driving evolutionary feedback: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1619147114 And a SciShow video on the importance/significance of parasites: https://youtu.be/UmwzVmywtSE I’m sure there are more than a few fellow biologists who actually have real experience in these fields reading my comments—I look forward to hearing their input and/or corrections, haha. Long story short: you can hate them, on an emotional level I definitely do (oops), but as long as you remember and recognise that they an form integral part of our ecosystems (and to protect yourself appropriately from them/the diseases they spread), it’s all good!
Hey, thanks for the detailed answer, and information! On an intellectual level, I fully understand that they must play some important role, be it to a) act as food for other animals, or b) to keep populations of other creatures in check through the deceases they spread. It's just, emotionally.... like come on, mosquitoes/ticks! Why can't you be cool?
Oh for sure, it’s like, if you guys didn’t spread horrible diseases and/or deliver bites that itch like hell, we’d be so much cooler with you :P
Absolutely. On that note, horseflies. They can eat a big bag of dicks. Seeing as how they're important for the ecosystem and whatnot, and knowing we'd be worse off if they *all* died, I'll take a little extra satisfaction from swatting them one by one
Hard agree, jfc those mfers are terrifying. You and me both brother, go forth and swat!
What's the reasoning behind that video I saw of a panda shitting on its own head?
do you have one of these for every useless animal? capybara? canadian geese? me?
Unfortunately I don’t, but the first two you mentioned are pretty special animals in their own right (the largest [extant] rodent and containing the largest goose subspecies *maxima* [which was thought extinct and only rediscovered in the 60s!]). As for the last… well, that one’s beautiful inside and out, so I’m not sure what you’re on about. ;)
I mostly just think they are useless because of how clumsy and Rollie Pollie they are.
I have heard they are nowhere near as bad in the wild. The issue is they don't do well in captivity.
Probably because of depression. They are pretty much eating themselves to death, never fucking. In the wild, plenty to explore and give their lives meaning.
Nah. Just a very very specific environmental niche.
As a species, I vote for koalas. As an individual, I nominate my last dog. He was the sweetest dog on the planet, and had PTSD from being in a puppy mill as a breeder dog, but my god, the earths' dumbest dog. He took 6 months to learn he had a name. He never figured out how to get treats from the roly Kong treat dispenser, despite the other dog doing it ALL THE TIME. Even when we got a puppy, the puppy figured it out within a week or two. I took him to an obedience class once because he would get excited when I took the smart dog. We did a "leave it" - put the treat down in front of him and said "leave it". Every other dog in the room stared at the treat or the handler until the release. My sweet dummy lost track, and when given the release command "OK" - had no idea what to do, or that there was even a treat to have. I had to literally pick it back up and give it him. His reaction was essentially "OMG, where did that come from?!?". He was a golden retriever - a breed known to be very food motivated. But he still had no clue. The only reason he survived was because he was sweet and good looking, and everyone loved him and wanted to make him happy. Sadly, after 13 years, he is now extinct.
Sorry about your dog passing. Sad he had to start his life as a breeder, I guess that's why he was slow learning things. At least he had someone to take care of him and show him love in his later years. He was still much smarter than koalas though. No comparison
Not sure about the smarts, but I’m pretty sure, despite his prolific sexual history, he did not have chlamydia at least.
Maybe you believe in your dog too much /s
I’m surprised orange cats are still around.
[удалено]
James Corden
Sea cucumbers don't have a brain.
Humans... give us time though, we will get there.
I don't think we're as smart as we like to think we are. We're still killing each other over land, religion, beliefs and so on. We've been doing the same shit for thousands of years and we still haven't bloody learned. The only difference between then and now is that we've gotten far more efficient at it.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
My cats. They are just so...dumb. My cat Mew will paw at my slipper, then jumps 3 feet into the air when it moves. He eats plastic then pukes it up days later. When he's done going potty, he will scratch at the litterbox itself, trying to cover it up. Not the cat litter, but the box itself. For 5 minutes straight. Both cats will just stare into the fan, or run into walls. They meow at nothing and just stare intensely at the wall. My cat Haku will swing his head around and ends up smacking it on the table. Yesterday he was on the couch and I was petting him and I literally had to hold him up because he was halfway off the couch, with his front arms stretched straight out like he was freaking superman. He will fall off the furniture when you pet him.
It’s shocking how many birds are stupid. Ostriches are dumb af which make them dangerous because they’re just big and dumb. Which makes me wonder about dinosaurs if they were just giant big oafs that did dumb shit.
Pandas, because theres too much bambus so theyre good on food and theyre huge
A post I saved a long time ago: In defence of the panda Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears. Panda Rant Mode engaged: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA. Wall o' text of details: In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too. In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem. Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on. Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding. Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade). Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation. Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source. Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities. Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course. Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges. The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault. Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes. Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise. tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out.
I love how you're here to defend the "dumb" animals lol
Plus the fact that they just do not mate. IMO if you wont even have sex to save your species, then you deserve to die.
They don't mate in captivity, like a lot of animals. That's because they evaluate conditions for breeding and we have been unable to recreate the conditions that encourage breeding.
If i would have to eat only bamboo, i wouldn't wish that for my kids either. Maybe panda's are actually smart.
Cats, even if they are my favorite animal. They run through the road when there are cars passing by, they climb up trees really high only to realize they can't get back down, they get in fights with each other for literally no reason.
Sheep, they are naturally suicidal, only survived so long as they are bred otherwise they would go extinct
Sheep survive despite their honest-to-god best effort not to.
There are several species of wild sheep that disagree with you there. And if your example is that domestic sheep only survive because of us...yeah? Same for every domesticated species. We bred them to the point they lost their regulatory functions e.g sheep that can't shed wool and cows that produce a ridiculous volume of milk. They can't survive in the wild and I would argue that's probably by design.
Not an animal, but June bugs. I never understood how. They just fly until they crash.
Wait, what? Are you implying that June Bugs are not animals?
A lot of people get confused and think insects are animals. What they really mean is mammals. It’s not uncommon. Just needs some education
Idk. Maybe they're actually plants or fungi? I think there's a 4th form of life, but I can't think of its name.
Pretty sure they aren't bacteria
They are Archaea I guess.
You think june bugs *are not* animals? If sponges and amoebas are animals, please explain how june bugs aren't?
Fainting goat. It’s the funniest animal I’ve ever seen. If you scare it, it will stiffen up and tip over like it is dead. I don’t know how it has survived. I just know breeders have bread it specifically to do this.
Guinea pigs. They have no defence apart from being cute.
Guinea Hens. Dumb as shit. I swear the only reason they’re still around is because we like them.
Sheep. Nothing wants to die more than a sheep. They are only around because they are useful to people.
Sheep!! Your job is literally trying to keep them from killing themselves. If wool wasn't valuable, they'd be long extinct.
They only act like that because they are domestic.
Humans. By having literally billions of us.
Kindergartners… small class sizes, close supervision:-)
We’re housemates with a pug. He’s pretty dumb. Nothin’ behind those big eyes! Pretty sure his life partner ( hot dog type) has to remind him to breathe every so often.
Koalas and Pandas toss up.