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I learned to play chess by candlelight during a major freeze during Christmas break in Tampa Bay!

wait wait wait hold on

bonus: tell me how you learnt chess, if you DO know how to play it. i learnt from my older sister, who was in chess club in fifth grade and forced me to play against her.

Not to be a killjoy (though it is what I do best) but the unsafe and rough handling of a baby Pygmy hippo in a pretty substandard Thai zoo being meme-ed into something funny and cute really shows just how much groupthink plays into public perception of animal welfare.

Moo Deng shows avoidance, threat displays and stress around her keepers that are constantly man-handling her, blasting her with a hose and harassing her. The enclosure is mostly concrete, which is horrible for her soft feet. There looks to be some substrate but there doesn’t seem to be any areas for wallowing or deep water wading.

There’s also very easy access of this hippo to the public with no places to hide. I’d love if someone could shed more light on the enclosures but from what I’ve seen it’s not great.

Also the free contact and forcing into tubs that the keepers do is only going to create an avoidant and potentially aggressive and dangerous Pygmy hippo.

But the public happily overlook that because she’s cute. It’s a similar attitude with seals too.

Stop rewarding bad husbandry with clout. Baby animals deserve agency and respect and to grow up without getting harassed and feeling the need to defend themselves constantly.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "Past Tense, Pt. 1"

This!

Been working in pest control for 3 months now and i can confidently say that nobody on earth seems to understand that sometimes You Will See A Bugs and that's Normal if you live literally anywhere with oxygen

These sound just too perfect - are they from an alternate universe, and where can I find them?

kids i am obsessed with these peppers

meet the Habanada, an open-pollinated pepper that has that has all the fruitiness and intense aroma of a standard habanero but NADA of the heat (yessss puns)

i love watching people eat them for the first time because they always pause for a solid 5 seconds because they expect the heat to come and lord they are bracing for it but it never does 😂

@botaniqueer this seems like something up your alley!

Skating through Harar, Ethiopia

Courtesy of @ethiopian_girl_skaters

She is perfection!

IT HAS COME TO MY ATTENTION THAT SOME OF YOU ARE UNAWARE OF MY SOULMATE

BEHOLD!!!!

THIS IS MOO DENG HER NAME MEANS BOUNCING PORK SHES A BABY PYGMY HIPPO AT A THAI ZOO AND SHE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT

GIVE HER LOVE

(pics courtesy of her trainers. thank you @yellowwwcrayon for introducing her to me)

Unmute !

"German" cockroaches were named by the French, and in Germany they're called "French Cockroaches." =) Adult American cockroaches, however, are TWO INCHES LONG. (And they fly...) =( They live mostly outdoors, though.

Cockroaches are thigmotropic, which means being in tight spaces stimulates their growth. Cockroaches are taxonomically related to crickets.

I hope this is entertaining information for you. It's exciting to learn something new every day!

I have an irrational fear of cockroaches so if someone who really likes them wants to tell me positive things about them (roles they play in environments, cool features of specific species, etc.) I think that might help

Obviously no pressure on anyone, I just think that the fact that so much information that I can find about them is steeped in hatred and fear doesn't really help

If you're going to hate on cockroaches (or qny other bugs tbh) please don't do it here, this is not a space to hate them

This is so true!

She knows her part so well

What a lively new friend!

for the past few days I've been waking up to the sound of a small animal in my bedroom, messing with plastic bags and such on the floor, but in a way that I had literally no idea what it was. It sounds about the size of a mouse, but it doesn't scurry in bursts like a mouse - it moves continuously. when it walks over plastic, it sounds like slowly deflating an air mattress into a bag of tissue paper.

now that I own the house and I have to pay to fix this stuff, it's extra disturbing; especially since I can't find any evidence of damage in the rest of the house. a squirrel already destroyed some of the soffit to get into the roof earlier this week - what new horrible thing is here now?

friends, today I caught the animal:

https://twitter.com/profannieoakley/status/1357768408671027202

 This thread is gold… make your own here: https://htck.github.io/bayeux/#!/

Extremely good paragraph from an article exploring the concept of sentience in invertebrates

It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)

Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.

Lest we forget. 😏

“our teeth and ambitions are bared” is a zeugma

and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND