I think caterpillars are neat in large part because they have urticating hairs which stick in predators and allow their venom to flow, protecting them. In adults, these sometimes turn into urticating scales. That’s right. You’re living in a world with venomous butterflies.
Tag Archives: Minnesota Zoo – Apple Valley
Bee
Bees collect pollen on their legs as they move from flower to flower. These lumps of pollen are very sticky and are used to fill in cracks in their houses to keep the draft out in the Winter.
Fish
Fish use the same color code as Skittles. The yellow ones taste like lemon.
Common Octopus
The arm of the octopus is well adapted to opening pickle jars.
Prairie Dog performing Titus Andronicus
Nay, then I’ll stop your mouth. Bring thou her husband:
This is the hole where Aaron bid us hide him
Bird
As noted earlier, birds are dinosaurs. Back when they were dinosaurs, it was much harder to get shots like this because of the size issue. The larger a creature is, the more light you need to freeze the action. This shot was possible with a small bird using only two small flash units. Doing this with a large dinosaur would have required at least ten flash units, an assembly of light trees to position them properly, a very large piece of fruit and the invention of photography.
Wolf Cub
They’re more scared of you than you are of them.
Seriously.
Nicobar Pigeon
Four things of interest.
1) Birds are dinosaurs.
2) A lot of dinosaurs has feathers.
3) There is no reason to believe that coloured feathers are recent.
4) Colouring books have yet to adapt to these facts, so be sure to draw the feathers on with a pen before colouring them in.
Prairie Dog performing Macbeth
“Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, and look on death itself! up, up, and see the great doom’s image!”
On Porcupines
Hi. I’m a porcupine.
Porcupines are pointy.
Well, not when we’re babies. Or if we have mange.
Or, I suppose, if we shave off our quills, but only the weird porcupines do that.
Anyway, the point here is if you meet a porcupine, odds are, that porcupine is going to be pointy.
In fact, if you get to know a porcupine, there’s a chance you may get poked.
That kinda goes hand in hand (or paw in paw) with the whole porcupiney lifestyle.
We don’t mean to do it. We’re normally careful.
Sometimes though, it just happens. Usually because we don’t communicate well beforehand.
Well sorta.
I don’t like to admit it, but some porcupines are assholes.
They poke you on purpose.
They think it’s fun.
When we talk about porcupines, we don’t really think of those porcupines.
When we were growing up, we avoided those porcupines. They were mean.
Still, the rule growing up was, “all porcupines gotta be put together”,
so there they were, hanging out in the locker room, being all pointy and stuff.
You had to watch out too, ’cause as soon as you weren’t watching, you’d get poked and they’d all laugh.
Not only that, but you had to laugh when your friends got poked, because otherwise, next time, they’d poke you.
We avoided them then as much as we could, and now that we’re all grown up, we still do.
I mean, who would hang around with assholes on purpose.
The thing is, they’re still around. I can recognize them, ’cause I’ve met a lot of them over the years.
When I meet one as an adult, I just mentally think “pointy asshole” and find somewhere else to go.
Sad to say, I’m still a bit afraid of getting poked.
Anyway, the “point”, of all of this is that you’re probably not a porcupine.
Not being a porcupine, you probably can’t tell the regular occasionally, accidentally, pokey porcupines from the asshole pokey porcupines.
I’m know you know that #NotAllPorcupines are pokey assholes. But I also know that some are …
… and not being a porcupine, it’s probably hard for you to know ahead of time which ones are the assholes.
So you’ll be wary.
Probably because you’ve either know someone who has been poked, or have been poked yourself.
I’m sorry.
That sucks.
Snow Monkey
Introducing the new personal monkey force field … available at a troop near you.
Frog
Few people know that Ducati has entered the frog business.
Binturong (Arctictis binturong),
According to Wikipedia, binturongs plantains, figs, eggs, rodents, and fowl’s heads … which seems rather specific to me.
Prairie Dog performing Antony and Cleopatra
The shouting varletry of censuring Rome.
Japanese Snow Monkey
The Japanese snow gator is an ambush predator that occupies the hot springs of the islands. The geothermic-heated temperature allow the alligators to thrive at an altitude that would normally get too cold. Lacking defenses against attack, prey species have learned to be extremely wary when visiting watering holes.
Penguin
Penguins don’t have teeth, so they have evolved little mouth (beak?) barbs so the fish only go in one direction.
Japanese Snow Monkey
Back in the day, zoos were mostly bars and fences (a lot of older zoos still have a lot of fences). Eventually, zoos realized that humans felt better about looking at the animals if there weren’t bars in the way and they started digging pits. Interestingly, this works for real life humans and is the exact opposite for photography. With photography, you want the animal slightly above you, so you feel a sense of connection, even through bars. If the animal is below you, it reinforces the common “humans are better than animals” view, and creates distance. The greater the height, the more the distance and the photos just don’t resonate as much.
That is, unless the animal is interacts directly with the viewer. Then the image can still work.
Throwback Thursday
This fish has a distinctive mustache. It experiments with surrealistic painting and sculpture, makes unintelligible films and engages in multilingual puns. You don’t want to be eating that. Throw it back.
Lynx Kittens
This lynx kitten hasn’t lost it’s mittens, so it knows it’s getting some pie.
Snow Monkey
Due to their small size and wide range of expressible emotions, captive monkeys prefer to play the air harmonica.