wikipedia poem inspired by @headspace-hotel‘s stuff!
can you tell i’ve been having a lot of feelings about evolution/extinction/ancestry/time lately?
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I know they aren't your area of expertise but could you maybe explain (or point me in the direction of someone who could) if the Pokédex entries for Spoink and I believe Sharpedo are true? Pokédex entries that claim that spoink needs to keep bouncing or it will die, and sharpedo has to keep swimming or it will die as well?
oh, i can answer that. spoink is a similar situation to charmander where people misattribute a symptom of sickness to being the cause- spoink will stop bouncing if it feels really sick, or if it’s close to death in some way, but it doesn’t need to bounce to survive. so it’s the other way around.
sharpedo does have to keep moving to force oxygen through its gills, but it’s probably more gentle movement than people imagine. they aren’t rocketing through the ocean at a hundred miles per hour at all times. just some of the time.
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I made a shirt design thats be rattling around in my brain for a while
I will be making it
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thinking about slugcat related spec bio again.... trying to decide whether it would be cooler if scugs were simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites... im leaning toward simultaneous as an homage to the slug part of their common name but im not sure yet
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nobody:
absolutely nobody:
literally nobody at all:
me: ....i should make a coccolithophore discord custom emoji
10 minutes later:
my roommate is very done with me rn and you know what? that's fair
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i can’t remember if this is canon or not but if the first people in the demon realm were humans who just wandered over there somehow a really long time ago, im curious as to how the pointy ears evolved. was it evolutionarily advantageous to be able to hear better?? i can imagine maybe so in a world with so much more immediate danger than the human realm. or maybe it’s a wonky side effect from exposure to magic
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PERFECT MARKS ON MY BIOCHEM QUIZ THIS DESERVES A GOOD NAP
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How come humans don't have claws?
Did we ever?
well! to put it simply, claws--while lending themselves to being useful for grooming/climbing--aren't particularly favorable for dexterity. they tend to get in the way!
via the Smithsonian Mag
and to your second question--yes! at a time, we did have claws. or... the animals that would give rise to us did.
via Florida Museum
so--we know that nail beds didn’t arise all at once from a common ancestor, but instead, there was likely a transitional period in which certain groups were gradually replacing claws with nails.
there’s many, many theories as to why that was occuring, but the largest and most prevalent idea is this: grooming (including removing parasites which can be harmful to an organism, for example) can be carried out by other members of the community, if you are living in a group. because many of these species were living communally they could groom each other, and thus weren’t disadvantaged by having broad, flat nail beds (derived from a mutation/series of mutations). and because this feature proved advantageous (allowing for more dexterity for food collection/tool handling), the animals with the flat nail beds who lived in communities passed the trait on!
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thinking abt the guy that was interviewing my field crew abt why we were interested in the intersection of bio anth and paleontology and how everyone was excitedly talking abt how interesting it is to see adaptations and behavior that humans have in other animals, and then me completely killing the vibe when i started enthusiastically talking abt how i thought the opposite direction was more interesting, like how i find viewing humans as animals and looking at what we share with other organisms like, coming FROM other organisms via evolutionary biology is way more interesting and grounds us more in the family tree, how we got all those adaptations and behavior FROM them and everyone looking at me like im deranged
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