VERY IMPORTANT a dam in the Netherlands, the weerdsluis lock, is directly on a migratory path for spawning fish. They have a worker stationed there to open the door for the fish, but they can take a while to open it. So to keep the fish from getting preyed on by birds they installed a doorbell. Only, the fish don't have hands to ring the doorbell. If you go to their website, they have a LIVE CAMERA AND A DOORBELL that YOU RING FOR THE FISH when they're waiting, and then the dam worker opens the door for them! I can't express how obsessed I am with this. look at this shit. oh my god.
Please check on the fish doorbell once in a while :)
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POV you made a popular post about insects
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I had a new "oh, my family were the weird ones" moment recently: it seems no one else's family celebrated Frog Night (the first warm rainy night of spring) by going down to the local vernal pool after dark to help the amphibians safely across the road and listening to the spring peepers. (We'd then go back in daytime later on to observe the egg masses, of course.)
Apparently "Frog Night" as a holiday is a thing my mother invented and not a widely-accepted idea, which is a shame because I've been referring to it as if it was for the past 30 years.
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I got a fish book from the library and I just think everyone should know that archerfish aka the guys that spit jets of water at bugs to knock them off plants and eat them aka these guys-
-are a social species (like a lot of fish), and that the jet spitting is actually a learned behavior rather than one they just do instinctually. They have to watch older members of their social groups do it a bunch of times (like up to thousands) before they're able to successfully do it themselves. If you take a young one and isolate it from its species, they just never get good at it (they also catch prey like "normal" fish tho, so an archerfish that can't archer won't starve just bc of that)
When they do learn to do it tho, they can compensate for light refraction, vary how much water they spit based on the size of the insect they're aiming for, and will learn to shoot insects that are midflight by spitting in the bug's flight path rather than where the bug actually is
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