A Tiny Finnish Island in Four Seasons
This is around Rovaniemi, Finland.
By Jani Ylinampa, whose Instagram account is just magical. Here’s another picture. Looks like a highly detailed miniature.
This is around Rovaniemi, Finland.
By Jani Ylinampa, whose Instagram account is just magical. Here’s another picture. Looks like a highly detailed miniature.
Don’t know if these are shopped but this is amazing.
Also known as Pesquet’s parrot or the vulturine parrot.
The Dracula parrot is a large, heavy bird, stretching to almost half a metre from beak to tail and weighing in at almost a kilogram. It maintains all that bulk by feeding almost exclusively on figs, which researchers suspect is why it ended up with its strange semi-bald head.
Just as vultures lost the feathers on their head as an adaptation for feeding on bloody carcasses, it’s thought that the Dracula parrot did the same in response to its diet of sticky fruits – the lack of feathers around its beak and eyes mean it’s able to avoid turning its face into a matted mess.
It’s such a perfect solution to the parrot’s syrupy diet that Matt Cameron, an Australian parrot expert, asks, “If avoiding soiled and matted head feathers is a significant advantage to individuals, it is surprising that bald-headedness is not more widespread among the other fruit-eating parrots.”
via Deepu.
Dark Brown or Black: Nocturnal (helps with camouflage.) Orange: Dawn and Dusk. Yellow: Daytime. There are no Blue-Eyed Owls.
By the Audubon Society. Ravens are beefier, gauche, and less ‘refined’. They’re also relatively solitary. They have curvier beaks, wedge-like tails, and soar instead of flap. Here’s what a raven and a crow sound like.
Sánchez infuses his landscape scenes with what the Cuban art critic, Geraldo Mosquera, called “an almost metaphys- ical vision.” This is not surprising considering that Sánchez is ardently devoted to yoga and to meditation which he practices several hours daily. He also goes regularly to a Siddha Yoga retreat in upstate New York. One French critic wrote at the time of the artist’s show in Paris that Sánchez’ work is “a mixture of extreme precision and meditation, of yearning and radiance.”
Here he is on Instagram.
You could almost just narrate the body changes and narrate the dream. So here she’s asleep. She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is a camouflage like she’s just subdued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. It’s a very unusual behavior to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another… you don’t usually see that when an animal’s sleeping which really is fascinating.
But yeah if she’s dreaming that’s the dream.
(Source Unknown)
A beautiful story about my favorite alien told with phenomenally good camera work. Left me a bit misty-eyed1. Lovely stuff.
Felt like kicking myself for reading a few comments about it on Hacker News later. Not sure why I did this but promised myself I’d stick to the topics that site is good for (empathy not being one of them.) ↩︎
And, of course, that’s all cartilage. Mama Nature is metal af. As she do 🙏
Some absolutely marvelous photos of a Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus by @SammyGlennDives
Like she’s dancing!
Would love to find out what kind of protective gear the photographer had on. But it seems like the octopuses are very shy and will attack only when provoked, which is when their rings become more intense 🐙 The salivary venom1, synthesized by bacteria and not the octopus itself, doesn’t have an antidote and is only used to hunt and defend. It’s either injected via the beak, or is sprayed as a mist, paralysing the prey in either case for the final kill (presumably involving more beak.)
Here’s a little more. Love the intro. They truly are so alien and so, so beautiful 😍
Always have to look it up: Poison is passive, venom is active. ↩︎
Look we just wanted to make sure The Ocean would remember our species for having delivered value at any cost.
I cannot get over how maddeningly cute this is. Reddit user pendragwen’s comment makes it even better:
Awww! But look at how they test out their chromatophores first thing after hatching! It’s speculated that color-changing is how they communicate and show emotion. Almost like a little joyful stretch and squeal. “Yay! I’m alive!”
😍 (YouTube link)
Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video.
The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one:
Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a while. Like the top YouTube comment notes, “Cordyceps is evolving to trick us into believing it is medicine.”
Behold the beautiful Secretarybird 🙌
– Source Unknown
Way out of other birds’ leagues, eats venomous snakes, and “appears on the coats of arms of Sudan and South Africa” 🔥