TFW you’re close to the abyss but know that withdrawing into your shell would make the fall more likely.
Fish
Many fish are bitey. Some are more bitey than others.
Splash-Backed Poison Dart Frog
I swear, it’s like Spider-man gets a different costume in every movie.
Ribboned Sea Dragon
The sign said there’s a ribboned sea dragon in here somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.
Electric White Lobster
This is an electric white lobster. Why is it called that? Because it’s white, and it’s related to the electric blue crayfish. Neither have electric powers. Instead, the colour is named after lightning and, apparently, was popular in the 1890’s where they distinguished between deep electric blue (aka French electric blue), iridescent electric blue, medium electric blue, and dark electric blue.
Wikipedia takes care to note that iridescent electric blue is only metaphorically electric and metaphorically iridescent. However, odds are that you are looking at this on some sort of computer screen, so it is metaphorically iridescent, but all of these blues are actually electric.
That also means that, even though there is no such thing as electric white, the white you are seeing in the electric white lobster above is, actually, electric. It’s other name is the White Ghost Lobster. It, however, neither a lobster nor a ghost.
This is a crayfish.
Bumblebee Poison Dart Frog
Species naming is largely a matter of luck. If taxonomy had evolved starting in central America, we’d probably have things like “Non-poisonous Poison Dart Frog Bumblebees.”
Blind Cavefish
According to Damian Moran, Rowan Softley and Eric J. Warrant, the blind cavefish lost its eyes because the visual part of the brain consumes 15% of all the energy used by the fish. So it’s less that they lost their eyes because they didn’t need them in the dark. It’s that, in the dark, there’s less total energy to go around so energy-expensive systems are selected against, as the most efficient fish win the energy game.
Read more at http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/8/e1500363.full
Achilles Tang
Things you may not know about digital cameras:
– If you over-expose and get too much white, it may not be possible to save the image
– If you under-expose and get too much black, it may not be possible to save the image
– They’re very sensitive to red, so it’s easy to get too much red, which makes it hard to save the image.
These fish are hard to shoot.
Mexican Wolf
When you realize the “treats” you just found were left by visiting rabbits.
Swift Fox
Swift foxes have had ample practice looking condescendingly patient while waiting for others to get their jokes.
Maned Wolf
I was right!
Maned Wolf
I … I’m not sure that tongue is going to fit when he closes his mouth.
Red Wolf
The red wolf went extinct in the wild in the 1980’s, when their range had dwindled from covering all of the east coast, going as far west as Texas, to a mere 100 animals in Louisiana. They were captured and bred in captivity to create enough of them to re-release into the wild. This was somewhat successful … until a few years ago when coyote hunting was allowed once again. It turns out that people who hunt coyotes in a region where red wolves haven’t existed for thirty years never stop to think “hey, maybe that’s a re-introduced red wolf and not a coyote”, and their population declines once more.
Today, wild populations are declining once again and some sites are having difficulties breeding them in captivity. Some estimates are that the red wolf will be re-extinct in the wild by 2020, with extinction in captivity following not long after that.
Landscape
Here’s a bonus infrared landscape, about which I can think of nothing clever to say.
Swift Fox
I saw no chicks with bricks or blocks.
I saw no tricks with chicks and clocks.
I made no stacks of tricks and bricks.
I made no stacks of clocks and blocks.
I saw no crows. I saw no clothes.
I saw naught but just one nose.
There was some goo. Though ’twas not blue.
No band, nor bend, nor broken broom.
No lake, no duck, no licks, no luck.
No cheese, no fleas, no breeze for mees.
I did look, for beetle battles.
I did look, for poodle noodles.
No bugs were found, nor their paddles.
Nor were any duddled muddles.
There were no ticks. There were no tocks.
’twas nothing found, for lack of socks.
Gull
And only then did Jonathan understood that all his prior realizations were due to the constraints of traditional narrative structure coupled with authorial intent.
Relieved of his burden, he flew on, unfettered, free to live the life he loved.
Bayou
Early this year, I changed my long-term travel plans from trying to see as many endangered species as I could (before they’re gone) to trying to see endangered ecosystems. The focus on species is still there but I see a lot of the same species at the zoos I visit (which makes sense, since the zoos are what are keeping some of those species alive). It’s just that now we’re committed to a world in which climate change is an unavoidable reality, some areas will vanish in my lifetime.
One of those areas is the Louisiana bayou. Sure, we’ll always have areas in which the brackish water moves slowly, lapping at the boat as you paddle through, but the environment will continue to grow increasingly hostile to the forms of life that traditionally live there.
On this trip, in addition to going to a few zoos, I took a kayak (with a guide) out into the bayous to see what I could see. There wasn’t a lot, due to the BP oil spill a few years back. But what I did see were a lot of birds and a lot of general quiet. There wasn’t a lot of trash, largely due to organized kayak group pick up days, but in general, things seemed to be okay. The area was slowly recovering, but nowhere near the biodiversity it used to have. There was a lot of evidence of the animals that had been killed during the disaster (bleached clams, for example), but in general, it seemed like an area that, all things being normal, would recover in about 20-30 years – at least to a point where people couldn’t really notice the damage anymore.
As the climate warms, though, the alligators will likely die out due to their sex selection being heat based.
As the seas rise, the soft in-and-out tidal motion that gives the bayous their name will extend northward, drowning the land you see here and creating new paths further inland, where you don’t find the sorts of plants and animals that are adapted to the bayou system. Sure, some of them will eventually recolonize the new area, but it will take a very long time for that to happen, as the new area must also shed some of the pollutants that are trapped in the soil*.
As the storms increase, we can also expect the older trees and established protective sand and mud banks to collapse, depriving many species of the shelters they need for their young.
All in all, I’m glad I went. I wish it weren’t as damaged as it turned out to be, but I’m still glad I got to see it before it is gone.
* Interesting how, despite all the evidence to the contrary, “detoxification” in human bodies is believed with an almost religious fervor, yet toxic chemicals in our land is ignored entirely despite decades of evidence.
Birds
There’s a bad moon on the right.
Alligator
Alligator realizing that there is a point at which post-industrial nations, reducing their safety and reliability in the pursuit of costs and Internet-of-things features, will meet the level of industrializing nations coming up.
Alligator thinks humans deserve what’s coming to them.
Cityscape
People on FB already saw this one, but I am resharing through the blog because I really like how it turned out.