Potoos are nocturnal insectivores, like the closely related frogmouths and nightjars (below), which accounts for their soulless eyes and nightmare mouth (all the better to see/eat you with, my dear)
Furthermore, potoos can independently control their pupil dilation, to maximize incoming light and hunt effectively. They can also compress the feathers of their head and bulge out their eyes to see in a complete 360 degree rotation without moving their head. They are highly adapted to their lifestyle, and are formidable predators.
HOW BOUT THEM PEEPERS: For an animal that relies on camouflage to hunt and not be hunted, those eyes are anything but subtle. In keeping with their ongoing theme, potoos have once again dealt with this in yet another way that is hypothetically really cool, but makes them look like colossal dorks.
It’s actually impossible to measure how many fucks a corvid give because there is no device sensitive enough to register such a tiny amount.
science/animal side of tumblr… explain to me the birb thing
Tail Pulling is a behavior noted in many corvids. The practical application is to create a distraction that will allow the birb to make off with the target’s food. Imagine being in the lunch room and a large fellow has a Twinkie you covet. You can’t just take it from him because he’ll defend his Twinkie. But if you thwap him on the back of his neck and then dash around to snag the Twinkie while he investigates, you stand a decent chance of enjoying spongey goodness. This is basically that in birb form.
Except corvids don’t only do this as a distraction. Sometimes they seem to just being doing it to mess with other animals/birbs. But to use my lunch room analogy, there are times you might thwap someone sneakily on the back of the neck just for amusement. Primates exhibit behavior that appears to be just be annoying other animals for amusement. Given how intelligent crows are, its not unlikely that this is a manifestation of an innate desire to just fuck with someone else for the fun of it. Such as this from the link above:
THANK YOU FOR THE BIRB KNOWLEDGE
BECAUSE IT IS FUN
This speaks to me on a molecular level.
birbs just wanna have fun
Sorry to hijack a little, but to put it bluntly, corvids are also pretty BALSY. They are more than prepared to harass other huge birds of prey which could deal them a lot of damage. There’s plenty of cases of corvids ‘riding’ other birds as well. It’s often to harass the larger bird out of the area, but as @red3blog said, they quite often (in layman’s terms) enjoy fucking shit up for fun.
‘Where the hell is the seatbelt on this thing?’
I mean they deserve a medal for having such huge bird balls imo
Moon jellies go through many phases in their storied life—what we call the “jelly” is really just the adult “medusa” phase. From sexual reproduction to asexual cloning, moon jellies have a truly extraordinary lifecycle.
i HAD NOT but after a bunch of reading, it turns out that gouldian finches, when theyre freshly hatched and featherless, are often born in very dark nests. dark enough that its was suspected their brightly colored parents used to find it hard to actually locate their chicks mouths, which APPARENTLY led to the development … . of these
the little nodules are completely normal, and act as a light-reflecting homing beacon that guides their parents beaks in the right direction, which im SURE comes in handy but also has the side effect of being Really unnerving to watch in action
the chicks dont stop being nightmare bobbleheads until about 25 days later when their first feathers come in, but the little nightlights still remain visible until they get into their adult feathers and completely distance themselves from their shady past
while the colorful bumps on the beak seem to be unique to the goldian finches, the pattern on the INSIDE of the beak are pretty common in a lot finch species ( and other birds in general !)
Flocks of birds, no matter how large,
are never led by a single individual.
The movement is collectively
controlled by each bird reacting
almost simultaneously to the slightest
change of direction by another flock
member, as if they are of one mind. SourceSource 2Source 3
Which you can observe in just how completely inefficient their movements are sometimes.
i know its a stingray but it looks like cthulhu popped his head up to say hi
I thought it was a giant squid.
holy shit they get this big?
They do get this big! They also tame relatively easily and are surprisingly docile animals. Its popular to swim with them in many beachy areas. As long as you’re not stupid and mean to them, your odds of being hurt by them are very low.
I had the opportunity to swim with a school of them on a sandbar once and I must say they are very aggreeable animals, though they do have the tendency to mob you if you have food, and they can be quite heavy. Still very pleasant animals.
ha cthulhu
Humans will pet anything. If aliens come, that might be what distinguishes us from the rest of the galaxy.
“we were going to blow them up, but they engaged in an oddly pleasing patting ritual and, well, it was nice.”
Kimchi and Justice 