I’ll admit I’m //not// a fan of spiders but we rarely appreciate them as the cool, complex organisms they are. So here. Have a spider. I tried to make it fuzzy and friend-colored so it’d be less threatening.
You know what, instead of shoving my own very positive opinion on this topic down your throat, let me bring my good buddy NEW ZEALAND ENDEMIC FAUNA to the table to field this one!
For several million years, mammals were entirely extinct in NZ. Birds – and to a lesser extent reptiles, amphibians and insects – filled those niches that had been taken by mammals everywhere else in the world.
The kiwi bird, for example, is a case of convergent evolution with small omnivores like mice and other rodents; they’re nocturnal, have a highly developed sense of smell, and have lost the ability to fly due to spending their lives hunting for underground prey.
Moawere huge, flightless bird versions of deer – they were the primary large herbivore on the islands until humans arrived and hunted them to extinction in a turn of events that shocked absolutely no one. Haast’s Eagle was a huge bird of prey – filling a large predator niche like that of a wolf or a lion.
Flightless birds have (ironically) really taken off (ha, ha) in New Zealand; species like the kakapo, the takahē, the weka, etc. Without terrestrial predators to prey upon them, flightlessness wasn’t as big of a danger as it is anywhere else. The non-flightless birds are just as interesting – Nestor species are parrots that diverged earlier than any other extant psittacine, wattlebirds are found only on the islands, and the mohua are passerines of their own distinct family.
Did you know? When octopuses are caught in the act of moving rocks and destroying the hard work of their aquarists, they drop everything and slowly back away like nothing happened.
Step out of time, trace a path back to what was once there, before humanity was even a dream, and what still is – welcome, friend, and meet the ancient
These images were created in front of an audience. All the colour and smoke you see were actually there
This body of work mixes still images with live demonstration, education and performance art, all unraveling the crocodile’s great mysteries
Yeah, that’s one of my weird pseudo-suction-cup-footed babies on top of some species of tortoise. Hyrax will climb on anything.
Suction cup foot? On a mammal?
Sort of! Hence the psuedo. This is a rock hyrax foot:
See how there’s that depression in the center? They can actually use the muscles in their foot to retract that part of the pad while keeping the rest of the edges of the foot in contact with whatever they’re standing on. Hyrax feet sweat to help keep them too, and the combination of the sweat and the flexible center of the paw pad ends up creating a structure that creates a tiny bit of suction when they’re standing on rocks or other smooth surfaces. Hence, psuedo-suction-cups!
My favorite part of that article is that because rabies travels so slowly through the body to get to the brain, a whale could take years to show signs of infection after being exposed.
lovingdread 