Today, on Penguin Awareness Day, we’re interested in the little-known facts about these charismatic birds. What are some penguin facts you think we should all be aware of?
Background image: Penguin in the Arctic by Nick Karvounis. CC0 public domain via Unsplash.
A Genetic Oddity May Give Octopuses and Squids Their Smarts
By Steph Yin
Coleoid cephalopods, a group encompassing octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, are the most intelligent invertebrates: Octopuses can open jars, squid communicate with their own Morse code and cuttlefish start learning to identify prey when they’re just embryos.
In fact, coleoids are the only “animal lineage that has really achieved behavioral sophistication” other than vertebrates, said Joshua Rosenthal, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. This sophistication could be related to a quirk in how their genes work, according to new research from Dr. Rosenthal and Eli Eisenberg, a biophysicist at Tel Aviv University.
eucalyptus trees are full of flammable oil that causes the trees to explode during forest fires, killing other trees and spreading its seeds to grow in their place. koalas survive solely because nothing else in their environment Wants To Eat The Fucking Bombs
oh u like that? try this one: the main natural cause of death in koalas is starvation, because
1) their dumbass teeth are SHIT. to be a herbivore and chomp cellulose all day u need some real tough grinders in there, and almost every other herbivore in nature has SOME sort of dental adaptation to make sure they dont run out of tooth by the time they hit middle age. horses have big tall teeth, wombat teeth grow forever, kangaroos have got a little conveyor belt system goin on, etc etc everyone’s doin SOMETHING except fuckign koalas. idiots have tiny fuckin shortass normal teeth that do an okay job for maybe like 15 years and then wear down and leave them with ridiculous fuckin useless old man gums that do shit all. but thats fine bc all koalas do anyway is sit in trees and sleep 22hrs a day then wake up and scream and eat poison and they do this all day every day until they run out of teeth at which point they just fall out of the tree and die
2) idiots can’t die any other fuckin way bc nothing in nature wants to eat them bc their bodies are chocker block with LITERAL poison. fuckin USELESS their flesh just sits around and slowly rots bc its too gross-tasting and toxic for any animal w half a brain cell to think abt going near it. have yall ever seen koala viscera. bc i have and let me tell u that shit is RANK. looks like the inside of a smoker’s lung from some fuckdamn nicabate ad bc the tannins in eucalypt leaves stain their organs like khaki black. like some fuckin dark!steve irwin costume well better piss ur way right off from this one anti-steve bc thats a natural defense mechanism meant to warn u that koalas should in no way be alive and if u touch them theyll drag u into their stupid evolutionary dead-end where they get to sit around all day doin fuck all and pumpin themselves full of brain-killing poison while we run around makin them our olympic games mascots and pretending theyre cute and honest to god looking for ways to save them from the brink of extinction which actually is unnecessary bc a) theyre not really endangered at all, nature is a fuckign miracle and b) the drongos clearly want to die so i say let em
by the way i never elaborated on “koalas sit in trees all day screaming” but heres a lil fuckin. heres a fun nugget heres a lil soundbyte this is what koalas sound like
Also, it doesn’t matter that they’re eating brain-killing poison, because their brains are already tiny, and smooth rather than folded they way most animal brains are to increase neuron surface area. Also full of holes? These animals are so fuckin dumb, they’re basically like if vertebrates tried to evolve a scale insect.
Fucking dumbasses I love them
so they’re the terrestrial equivalent of sunfish?
im crying omg
What’s the bird equivalent
WITHOUT A DOUBT it is the kakapo, the cutest yet worst-evolutionarily-pranked bird in existence
their natural instinct when faced with danger is to just…freeze and not move….which is basically one tiny step above just walking into the hungry maw of the invasive cat/ferret/rat/raccoon/etc etc
they are also Very Bad at mating and, oh btw, mate only ONCE EVERY 5 YEARS OR SO when one particular berry (the Rimu fruit) has a good year
anyway they are the worlds heaviest parrot and only flightless one, can weigh like 4kg/9 pounds (BIG FRIEND), and if they can avoid being blissful evolutionary dum dums can live 60 TO 100 YEARS if only they can keep it together, bless them
Oh my god
It is illegal for me to not include this video
They don’t ‘forget how to fly’ - Kakapo’s will climb trees and then yes, jump to then glide down. Its not always elegant.
I don’t think people understand how the kakapo literally evolved to suit it’s enviroment and it was super well adapted!!!! Until settlers brought cats and dogs and foxes becauseNEW ZEALAND HAS NO NATURAL MAMMILIAN PREDATORS because birds like the kakapo and the kiwi only had to worry about like, hawks and eagles. And that’s it. They’re not dumb! They’re not evolutionarily backwards! They are literally dying out because of introduced species killing them that they naturally have no defense against!
If you only had to worry about flying birds, you wouldn’t have to worry about anything finding you by scent; which means you can afford to be slow and conserve energy. Kakapos freeze when they meet a predator because their plumage is super suited to blending in seamlessly to its natural habitat. If your predator uses sight to track prey and if that prey can camouflage then buddy!! That’s a good defense mechanism!!
People often assume that evolution is a process like levelling an RPG character into an unkillable god.
It is not.
Evolution is basically a guy who puts character builds together for the sole purpose of exploiting the game mechanics for funsies.
Meet the skimmer.
Skimmers have evolved to fly along the surface of the water with their lower bill partly underwater, grabbing whatever they bump into.
This is a completely ridiculous means of feeding and nothing besides the three skimmer species does it. Dragging their bills through the water creates huge amounts of drag, so they need more energy to fly than usual and specialised skull and neck adaptations to avoid ripping their own heads off. Skimmers also cannot see what their bills touch underwater, they just stick them in the water and hope for the best while trying not to crash into stuff and break their bills (which happens).
Skimmers are exactly as ridiculous as koalas but by god they’re going to do their thing.
“Evolution is basically a guy who puts character builds together for the sole purpose of exploiting the game mechanics for funsies.” is one of the best descriptions of evolution i ever heard. It doesn’t matter if your build is a joke build, it just has to work. A good part of the fun in studying evolutionary biology is finding out HOW IN HELL do these joke builds actually work. Everyone can look at a wolf and say “what a perfect predator, the terror of every herbivore, i stan”, but finding out why his distant cousin, the maned wolf, decided to walk on stilts,eat berries and practiced what’s basically ant-assisted agricolture? That’s when the fun begins.
Some would say they are just athletic guys with big dicks. In the consideration of millions of (white) girls the real men are much more - they are supposed to be warriors and as them they conquer and takeover, which is perfectly fine because it is like nature intended it. We should embrace the spreading of superior DNA instead of blaming it for being superior
Stocks are tickets to a table where you get to skim off the profits generated by the company forever, even though your initial stock purchase was for a finite amount.
So yeah, while the stock market is not just an estimate or mechanism of extracting wealth from work done by others, attracting and enabling parasitism is one of the biggest perverse incentives inherent to stocks.
