Latest Posts by leafyfern - Page 5

Just ordered screenprinted shirts of this design… IM SO NERVOUS AND EXCITED :0000

School’s been super busy guys, I’m so sorry for the lack of posts!! To make up for it, here’s a funky guy I saw at Bass Pro Shop!! -Arty

One of the most beautiful scenes of a nature documentary I saw years ago…

Footage of a dying deer and the eye slowly freezing…

moodboards i did earlier 2day :)

-

ok 2 use w/ credit

night time is babey time

my love language is simple. i *hands you a mushroom sticker* *hands you a rock* *hands you a rock* *hands you a dried flower* *hands you a mushroom sticker* *hands you a twig* *hands you a leaf* *han

no talk me im angry

he’s transparent

Living Decay

Curled in the heart of the forest lie an elk

still and quiet, he waits

in the shadows of nightfall, 

and lets the cold embrace his stationary form. 

When dawn comes

he remains, rooted to the ground

warming the earth where he lay,

nourishing the soil.

As weeks pass his soft exterior

gives way to a brittle and unforgiving interior

yet still

a family of small mammals find their way into his ribcage

and bring life back into his

hollow body.

Generations of forest creatures will come to know

his body as a beacon of being,

and a symbol of home. 

Found two "poems" that I wrote when I was like... 17? l.p. stands for 'lux permanet'. Who the f did I write the first poem about, my imaginary bf? Hahahaha

These two pictures are of a peahen (top photo from April 2019, and bird on the left in the bottom is the same bird in November 2019) that is currently going through a transformation from traditional hen plumage to cock plumage- which I suppose makes him a peacock now! The bird is 17 years old and while this sort of transformation is not unheard of (called “henopause” because it usually happens to older hens), it’s not usually such a stark difference. This bird went all out though!

[Source]

Extremely brachycephalic toy persian cat named Moonpie’s skull compared to my normal cat Lucky’s skull. Limited time preorders for a cast of Moonpie’s skull are available now by clicking here.

Source

forest aesthetic

im really drinkin my love and respect reptiles+amphibians juice today, so if u have a pet of the reptilian or amphibious type, rb and add pics pls

A Newspaper Publication in 1912 Predicting the Effect of Burning Coal on the Warming of the Planet.

The idea of the Greenhouse Effect goes back even further than this - and in fact, is something that we should all be thankful for as without Greenhouse Gases, the Earth would be a chilly -14C (0F).

Joseph Fourier, known for his famous Fourier Transform as well as his theories of heat exchange, questioned why it is that the Earth stays warm even when the Sun has set for the night. If the Sun was the only source of heat, wouldn’t it rapidly become unbearably cold? This was all the way back in 1822.

From there, Swedish Scientist Arrhenius theorised in 1896 that a rise in CO2 concentration within the atmosphere would cause a warming of the globe.

@imbasicallyshakespear They babies!!! Tiny!! Round!!

concept: my home is completely overgrown. vines have made a nest around my backyard. i lay in dappled sunlight and share stories with a stray cat

Brachypelma hamorii’s first feeding at home. Look at dat cute lil’ booty!!!!

gynandromorphism in spiders

a gynandromorph is an organism that exhibits male and female characteristics. bilateral asymmetry can occur wherein one “side” of the animal is female and the other is male, mosaicism can occur wherein the characteristics are distributed in patches. in spiders, this phenomenon can present itself through presence of both testes and overies and split colouration. cases can also occur where, although parts of the spider are clearly male or female, the divisions can be less definite; certain reproductive organs like the palps and epigyne may be very poorly developed or completely absent. these individuals are referred to as intersexes. gynandry and intersexuality can occur in the same individual.

pictured: lampropelma nigerrimum, pamphobeteus sp. mascara, poecilotheria ornata, thyene imperialis.

tarantula by Linda De Volder on Flickr

“What If Our Pets Were Bugs??”

Would you have guessed that just 20 miles off the coast of Georgia, the seafloor looks like this?

This is Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary protects a vibrant live-bottom reef, which harbors an abundance of invertebrates and more than 200 species of fish!

Learn more about the sanctuary and the research conducted there in our video:

Gorgeous inveterate enclosures!

Arright so i saw something really cool in Texas, the kind of thing you read about but don’t expect to actually encounter

I flipped over a rock and found a tarantula sharing its burrow with a tiny narrowmouth toad

This is a symbiotic relationship where the tarantula provides protection and affordable housing, while the toad feeds on ants that could harm the tarantula or its eggs. Other small frogs, lizards etc. are just prey to tarantulas, but they instinctively recognize and welcome narrowmouth toads for their ant-eradication abilities.

Basically, tarantulas keep tiny toads in their home for the same reason humans domesticated cats. This sort of went viral as a piece of trivia a while back, but there’s not a lot of actual photos showing it.

This isn’t the only case of this I saw either. I saw two other burrows with toads in them, including a massive tarantula that had at least 4-5 toads, but they hopped deeper into the burrow before I could take pics.

Anyway here’s some better quality photos I took of both animals during the day. The toad is Gastrophryne olivacea and the tarantula is an Aphonopelma species (probably hentzi but their taxonomy is a clusterfuck)

Inktober 2019 - Day 19 - “Sling”

please look at this ridiculous fuckign flic-flac spider. this is normal behavior for them apparently

anyway though stop being rude please we just like animals

what's your opinion on handling tarantulas?

Oh man, you’re gonna make me open this can of worms?

It depends.

For Old World species (or Psalmopoeus or Tapinauchenius species) the answer is no, no, no, absolutely not, why would you even want to do that? That’s a great way to needlessly land yourself in a lot of pain (or the hospital) and the hobby in a lot of legal trouble. For quick, flighty, jumping-prone species (probably most arboreals) the answer is also mostly no, simply because you could so easily drop or lose your tarantula.

If you want to even consider handling your tarantula get a species that is good for handling (a slow, calm, terrestrial New World species). Even then you should take precautions, such as carefully observing the tarantula’s mood, gradually getting it used to handling/human contact, not handling too often, and only holding it over a solid surface.

Now, there are people that think even this kind of handling is needlessly risky and without benefits. Those people are absolutely welcome to their opinion (I think this is a decision each keeper must make for themselves), but I would like to address some misinformation that often gets thrown around in this debate.

1) “Tarantulas cannot learn or become accustomed to handling”

As someone with a degree in both psychology and biology this is simply not true. Pretty much any organism that is capable of registering pleasant/unpleasant stimuli and remembering it can learn. There are even studies suggesting that plants can remember and become desensitized to recurring stimuli. Scientists repeated the famous “Pavlov’s dog” experiment with cockroaches and the results were pretty much identical. Although they have very different nervous systems from ours invertebrates can absolutely learn.

Firing up the body’s flight/flight systems takes a lot of energy so if something frightening occurs repeatedly without anything actually bad happening it is in an organism’s best interest to stop reacting fearfully to that stimulus (or at least to dampen the reaction).

When socializing future education tarantulas I’ve watched them go from standing on as few legs as possible the first time they walk on your hand (what I call “tiptoes”) because they don’t like the texture of human skin to crawling over a hand as if it were just another familiar part of their environment. Some tarantulas also seem to show a marked preference for familiar human hands over unfamiliar ones; it’s been proven that hissing roaches can recognize individual humans and will not hiss when someone familiar picks them up (I would love to see a study like this done with tarantulas). 

2) “A tarantula always perceives being picked up the same way it perceives being attacked/grabbed by a predator”

If you handle your tarantula correctly (using what I call the “be the ground” technique) then picking it up should not resemble a predator’s attack. There is no tarantula predator on earth that gently scoops the spider up from below. Spiders hate being breathed on and generally dislike being grabbed from above because those stimuli resemble something they would experience when being attacked by a predator (and so trigger their fight/flight alarm systems very strongly).

However scooping from below does not resemble a predator attack (assuming you’re not looming over the tarantula and breathing on them) and once they are in your hands most tarantulas will treat the hand as an inanimate surface not as a predator or even part of a larger animal. They don’t really have the senses or cognitive abilities to think “a giant animal is holding me”. More like “the ground moved and now I am standing on a weird new surface in a different place”.

The reality is that the handling of appropriate species is an enormously useful tool in educating people about tarantulas and dispelling fear. Can you educate people about tarantulas without handling them? Yes. But as someone whose full time job is to care for and educate people about arthropods I can tell you with 100% certainty that it does not have even close to the same effect.

Where I work we have dozens of beautiful, naturalistic enclosures displaying gorgeous rare tarantulas from all over the world. But the thing that gets people excited, wide-eyed, and asking questions is the highly-trained docent handling one of our well-socialized education tarantulas. There is something about seeing a person interact with the tarantula outside of a cage that makes it real for people. They ooh and aww and adults that were shrieking about how much they hate spiders while walking through the facility will say things like “I never realized how pretty they are up close” or “her feet look so dainty and gentle”.

So, while I respect every keeper’s right to decide what their comfort level and policies are when managing their own animals, I work at a facility where we handle some calm, well-socialized tarantulas and I (gently, occasionally, and with lots of precautions) handle one of mine. But it is certainly not something that people should do willy-nilly with any tarantula and without putting a lot of thought into doing it properly.