How can the ladies resist? (Male cowbird)
…Jean-Pierre Ugarte…Visions from Another World…
There was a toad party at the lake yesterday.
![asapscience:
“ Physics doesn’t care about your job. [Reddit/funny]
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Whenever I speak affectionately on why I love and am so enchanted by lichen, I mention how fascinating it is that it’s a composite organism, something you hesitate to call a single species because it is actually made up of several species from different kingdoms.
Today in one of the Facebook groups I’m a part of, someone shared the work of a biologist, Dr. Scott Gilbert, who has written about how the idea of the “biological individual” is a myth which overly simplifies research on not only evolutionary biology but also immunology, anatomy, physiology, etc. In his 2012 paper “The Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” he aims to show that “animals cannot be considered individuals by anatomical, or physiological criteria, because a diversity of symbionts are both present and functional in completing metabolic pathways and serving other physiological functions. Similarly, these new studies have shown that animal development is incomplete without symbionts.”
Maybe this isn’t as mind-blowing to people who are more involved with animal-focused research, but as someone with a botanical/mycological background I am very much enjoying thinking about this and its implications. I, like lichen, am not a single species but a collection of organisms symbiotically existing as part of the same whole. I am not an individual but rather an ecosystem.
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie - the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again.
and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels - it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’re realizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
tagged for imaginary swans doing the lord’s work
A++, two thumbs up.
It may also interest someone to know that swans can projectile poop.
I know a real-world mama swan who got shot in the wing and walked four miles overland to get back to her babies and dad swan, with her broken wing bleeding and dragging the whole way. She just kept going. Don’t mess with lady swans.
Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)
And when a swan decides to beat you up, it is not with fancy martial arts. Swans are brawlers. They have bone clubs built into their wing joints specifically for beating people up. A human swan is gonna come at you screaming and spitting and just keep punching you in the face until you regret every decision you have made ever in your life and also some of the ones your parents made too.
It Got Better
The Graphic, England, December 27, 1930
Classic “is not friend, is furniture” behavior.
The Loch Ness Friend
Imagine this. You’re part of the MIT Oceans 7 team. Your mission is to create a map of the entire length of the loch using sonar technology. The goal of the mission was to expand humanities knowledge of Ice age geological processes but what you would find would shock your entire team.
98 meters (324ft) down, on the bottom of the loch, an object looms out of the darkness. Could this be it? the fabled Loch Ness monster? No, it’s only 6 inches long. It must be a fish then. some form of, bottom-dwelling, crawling fish maybe? Still no.
You gasp as the object comes into focus. There's no way anyone would believe you without evidence so you snap these, SHOCKING, photos.
It a friend.
Source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/6618995.stm