hello on this fine day here at bunjywunjy dot tumblr dot com and it’s time to talk about weird animals again.
today we’re going to learn about that denizen of the deep sea that looks like it’s in on the ultimate cosmic inside-joke, the Snipe Eel.
(no, they won’t explain it)
about five feet long, they live a dreary existence feasting upon shrimp in the lightless dark, like nature’s saddest cocktail party.
at least they get to gloat over the fact that they have more vertebrae than any other creature on earth. we would say we’re impressed but honestly that just sounds really unpleasant. yikes.
that sure is a thing to be proud of and not a reason to pity them even more, no sir.
while the Snipe Eel rarely appears in popular culture, A TRAGEDY BEYOND MEASURE, it is believed to have inspired the Pokemon Gorebyss.
slap some mermaid boobs and a shitty Speed stat on it and call it a day
a final lesson we can take from our friend the snipe eel is that a big smile will get you anywhere in life, as long as it’s coupled with aggressive wiggling
Look at the eyes on the deep sea fish IPNOPS. They’re some of the most modified eyes ever known in a vertebrate. It’s basically lost “eyeballs” in favor of huge, concave lenses, perfect for gathering even the faintest light, possibly used to hunt bioluminescent invertebrates.
I’ve known about these since drawings of them when I was little but I never saw such clear photos of a living one before.
NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2012 Expedition. License: CC By Attribution
So cuttlefish have some kind of rudimentary(?) language that has a gestural component. Or, if you don’t want to call it language, they communicate with each other, in part, through gesturing with their arms. (Not sure how a consistent system of signs isn’t a language but I’m not a linguist).
Anyway, there is a tank of cuttlefish at the New England aquarium. Usually, the animals totally ignore the visitors. Once when I was there with a friend, the cuttlefish were signing to each other. My friend held his hand up to the glass and began to imitate their gestures with his fingers, and then made a sequence of random signs.
The cuttlefish became extremely agitated and signed furiously at him and rapidly flashed different colors, and we will never know what he accidentally said to them.
The moral of this story is actually that it’s fucked up how we keep sentient and sensitive beings in a weird little fish jail.
After knowing a few different swan families for two years, we learned some of the sign language they use for “Hello friend! (You know me)” and “Sorry.” Their vocalizations are a little difficult to mimic, but “Hello friend!” and “sorry” are gestures done with the head. There’s also “Hey! Hey! (come start a fight)” which, in a human, involves hands and arms.
You can actually get into a feedback loop saying “Hello friend” to friendly swans that actually know you, where you say it and then they get excited and say it back, and then you say it again and they feel like they have to respond. And if you meet a strange swan and they behave aggressively towards you, you can get them to calm down and even say “sorry” by telling them that you know them. This is often easy to lie to them about, since swans think all humans look very similar.
Anyway! It is extremely funny because when humans walking outside encounter a swan, the humans often say “Hey! Hey!” in Swan, and when the swan puffs up and says “Excuse me?” the human says “Come start a fight!” and the swan, particularly if it’s defending a nest, is like “Fine. Okay. I’ll end this.”
And then the human complains that swans are awfully Hostile and Aggressive.
/linguist mode on/ sticking my nose in briefly to say that a consistent system of signs used for communication is definitely a language /linguist mode off/
So hairless bulldog bats live in symbiosis with these big, pale earwigs who feed harmlessly on the bat’s dead skin flakes, oil and guano, but the bats have their own species of flea, and because the bats don’t have hair, the fleas ride around on the earwigs when they’re not biting the bats.
The fleas also very frequently fall off the bats and land on the cave floor, but fleas don’t fly and they can’t climb the smooth rock walls, so they hide in the bat’s guano wating for another earwig to come by.
All three animals in this relationship are beautiful and perfect and great
The real question here is “what is smart?” because rationalizing is something we as the human species invented in my opinion (what is “good” and what is “bad”). Anyhow, the question is still interesting, let’s look at the phylogenetic tree shall we:
Following the “if the clade is younger, the animals are more adapted/advanced”-argument, flies, butterflies and hymenoptera should be most “intelligent”. I think intelligence can be “measured” in cognitive behavior, and we know some examples of moths reacting to chemical cues. But this is not “real learning”.
Bees, bumblebees, wasps and ants are however capable of learning behavior. In nature, these animals live in colonies and are able to protect other individuals altruistically and care for larvae that are not even from their own. In addition, bees have developed the interesting “bee dance” in order to communicate about food-sources, and if I remember correctly, bees even learn the dance from other workers. Orchids even have some interesting co-evolution going on with inexperienced bees, indicating that bees can learn which flowers they can visit.
i cannot stand that post that calls jellyfish evil bags. a jellyfish is a morally neutral bag. it is man that is evil
jellyfish are pretty much environmental damage, like spike pits and poison dart traps; the animal is not the evil, it is only evil if someone knowingly placed them somewhere to obstruct others and even then it is the deed that is immoral, not the wad of cells with stingers on it
An extremely rare white giraffe called Omo. She lives in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park and was first spotted in 2015. Omo isn’t albino but has a genetic condition which is called leucism. While her skin doesn’t produce pigmentation, her soft tissues do.
Sea otters and giant river otters are like if someone got two artists to design a giant otter, but ended up with two very different ideas on what they should look like cause one draws hello kitty fanart and the other was a nihilist.
Ok, but like… seriously.
this looks like sea ottters reacting to the incredible violence of a river otter
This post needs some serious fixing:
What are these lovely, adorable creatures you ask? RIVER OTTERS.
Oh, this post was specifically about giant river otters, you say?
They are just large river dogs, do not be mean to them because they must eat!
This post was on Giant (Amazonian) river otters and not just river otter in general.
They are much like like dogs and have been dubbed as “river wolves” locally do to their cooperative hunting and can take down and eat Caimans
I still love them even tho they can reach 6 feet in length and are bigger then me
lovingdread 