I kickstarted 100 of these early in the year and over 50 were claimed, so this is more “limited edition” than usual!
Sea angel in its hunting posture, with its tentacles deployed, brightly glow-in-the-dark!
This is something seldom portrayed about sea angels in media! They are hunter-killers!
What's your favourite invertebrate taxon? Also are there any relatively obscure invertebrate taxon that you think more people should know about?
Anonymous
I think the answer to both might be rotifers. I wish they were at least like an inch long so everyone would know about them and I could keep them like a shrimp tank.
It is believed that parasitic thorny headed worms are highly evolved rotifers
In person you can always see their jaws working deep in their “throat” and their one pogo stick leg is all stretchy and silly:
They have exactly the same “immortal” hibernation mode as tardigrades but aren’t as marketably piggy shaped I guess.
We do believe thorny headed worms are just really evolved rotifers and they grow several inches long but they lost most rotifer features and they’re intestinal parasites so you can’t keep those as pets in any advisable way.
Arrow worms might also have evolved from rotifers or an immediate common ancestor and they get up to minnow size and are awesome but they’re also completely different and live out in the open ocean. Very cool how all these larger “rotifers” changed their ciliated vacuum mouths into different stuff for different lifestyles though
Things about my partner @revretch’s animated series if you still haven’t checked it out:
-A future in which things went so astray for our civilization, the only known remaining humans now live as “house pests” to a civilization of kaiju-size insects and arachnids, with neither party realizing that the other are sapient people.
-This all takes place in a network of plant life orbiting an alien planet.
-Many nonhuman vertebrates that still exist have evolved beyond recognition into abstract, deadly monsters.
-A lonely and eccentric praying mantis has a lifelong fascination with vertebrates, which are considered disgusting vermin or “gubs” by most other arthropods.
-She works as an independent exterminator who’s really just collecting and rearing them.
-Her tarantula girlfriend is at least slowly warming up to the idea that maybe gubs aren’t entirely horrible.
-Not even firegubs! (what most of them call us, on account of starting little fires so much)
-A deadly, mutant human woman has a mysterious past connection to the same mantis, and is among the few humans who know that the insects are intelligent beings.
-Full of original science fiction worldbuilding, unique lore and lingo.
-Huge plot twists, revelations and secrets you can either already piece together or will get to see unfold in coming episodes.
-One of the WORST EVER characters is coming in the next episode probably later this year. She is a honeybee. You will love how much she sucks!!!!!
-Harsh life and death drama (especially in the plot beats to come) in the spirit of classic scifi/fantasy animal settings such as the Secret of Nimh, Warrior Cats or Silverwing.
-Real science education incorporated throughout; learn some things about biology and physics as you go :)
-All an independent solo project, recently bringing on some assistance but still mostly hundreds of hours of a single artist’s labor!
-An original aesthetic rev developed in blender from scratch and keeps refining. They’re now even at the point of developing their own entirely new method of 3d modeling and animating.
Even if it’s not the kind of series you’re looking to get into or you don’t have the time right now, consider boosting and helping it grow its audience :)
It’s almost as if it’s designed to be poison or something.
There is not and can never be a pesticide or “weed” killer completely harmless to humans. We are all eukarya. We all have cells made of the same stuff.
Hey, in case you somehow still don’t grasp the shameless depravity of America’s corporatocracy, Donald Trump has responded to this with an executive order to protect the stock market value of these particular cancer poisons by officially declaring glyphosates to be a “national security” issue, alongside elemental phosphorous in the same order.
If you don’t understand what that means, he wants to use presidential power to legally categorize this one specific cancer poison as something absolutely necessary to defend our country and its allies from their enemies, on the basis that our military needs it.
And yes, in the case of the glyphosates, the argument they’re making is simply that it helps with food production, and our military eats food. Note that there are thousands of other effective pesticides and herbicides used in mass food production that are not under fire at this time. Lots of them should be, obviously, but this one is particularly profitable, so the self appointed king of money has decreed that its profitability is more important than any amount of human health or life, as per his usual moral priorities.
If you think I’m misrepresenting this, here’s a copy-paste from his administration’s own statement on whitehouse.gov:
Filmed in Norway. From Sea in Motion - Wonder of the North Sea (2023).
“Get off my lawn punk!”
That is absolutely an anglerfish (Lophius piscatorius), in fact the anglerfish, the original fish known by that name - as well as monkfish, devilfish, goosefish, and many other monikers besides.
And if it was a wobbegong, it would be even more unusual to find a tropical Indo-Pacific species in Norway.
Some people don’t even know that there are anglerfish outside of the deep sea abyss. Anglerfish up here in the sunlight are either flat like the goosefish or they resemble sea sponges and rocks, what you might know as “frogfish.”
Walking batfish, on the other hand, are a group of anglers that look exactly as weird in both the deep-sea and sunnier reefs.
…………….Global climatological change can be caused by a single species of aquatic fern or the once novel emergence of wood-eating fungi, actually, to name just a few of the organisms much smaller than us that have affected or continue to affect earth’s climate at a planetary scale.
Did you think rainforests grow where it rains, for instance? I bet you did. But remove a rainforest and you get desert, because the plants themselves are what create the wet climate. It’s the collective respiration of a concentrated biomass.
Weather can be engineered by bacteria in the air. Not just “influenced,” straight up engineered:
Condensation in the sky needs foreign particles to form, and the average atmospheric particle is a living bacterial cell, among other microbiota.
Do you realize how easy it is for even subtle changes in the surrounding chemistry to alter the density and composition of unicellular life by the way, especially just drifting in the air protected only by moisture?
Do you know that your oxygen based atmosphere is primarily produced by photosynthesizing plankton, that pollutants observably kill plankton, and satellite imagery can detect a change in the actual color of earth’s ocean as phytoplankton dwindle?
Do you realize these are all SINGULAR factors that would change the whole planet if disrupted enough by any ONE new variable?
Is there anywhere that human activity has created one and only one new variable?
You and I and everyone else alive have fucking plastic particles in our brains now. There’s artificial fertilizer on the bottom of the ocean and pesticides on the highest mountain peaks. It would be fundamentally impossible from hundreds if not thousands of angles for human activity to have no noticeable effect on climate. Climate comes from microscopic chemical processes more than it just comes from the sun or volcanoes or the will of jesus.
This page from “the little golden guide to north american insects,” my favorite book as I was learning to read, might have been what started me on loving ectoparasites so much. Look at the variety and personality of these fuzzy beasts, as different as the different creatures they live on! So tiny but so hated and evidently so dangerous! And one of them is this silly looking WINGLESS FLY that people named after ticks?! And for years of my life this was the ONLY source I had on the entire existence of this tick-like-fly. That alone drove me nuts!! I drew it so many times! I thought adults knew everything so I’d ask them if they knew more about what a sherp tick was and they’d just think I was cute and say things like “YOU’RE a little sheep tick hahaha!!” excuse me but that is on fact not the case if you would kindly put me down and direct me to someone who can answer the original question thank you!!!!!!
(I finally learned all about Hippoboscidae when the internet came out)
Ive shown them before but I’ve also got these two 1950s toy ones 😎
Seahorses is bugs
hey, I have an animal question. I’m pretty sure that at some point I read about a deep sea louse or maybe an isopod in which the males imprison the females in their lair for reproduction and then the babies eat the mother, but I don’t know if that was just made up and Googling “sex dungeon louse” has the same problem as googling “Korean tits” (I wanted to see what kind of birds they had over there and had a severe lapse in judgment). Is this a thing?
I could be wrong because there are a LOT of bizarre mating strategies in nature, but I don’t know of any organisms that do both those things.
The only one I know of where the young invariably kill their own mother in fact are Adactylidium mites, but what happens with these is that each mite produces a large number of female offspring with only one male. The single male fertilizes all of his siblings before they’re born, and then he’s left to die because he doesn’t even have the ability to eat. All his sisters are born already pregnant and four days later the whole cycle repeats in them all.
Driver ants also have a system that’s close to the one you heard of, with the sexes inverted. They have the largest winged males of any ant species, which were once mistaken for their own species altogether and still called “sausage flies.” Instead of going on mating flights together like in other ants, the male is “captured” by workers who chew his wings off and take him to mate with a newly emerged queen, then he dies because almost all male ants just naturally die shortly after they mate. I’m not sure if his corpse is eaten or not, I know most ants just discard their dead, probably to avoid spreading pathogens around!
Gave these leeches natural sand after they grew up with a bare glass tank but I think this just confuses them now, you can see in this video that they got used to suction-cupping along their floor and are still trying to on the sand 😩
What a weird take??? Monsters are drawn grotesque because they’re monsters and it’s fun, and people overwhelmingly tell me the monsters become cute to them because of how they’re presented, which in turn makes “scary” animals in real life seem cuter :)
This guy comes so close to almost getting that when he’s like “….but that’s not what real animals look like?!”….yeah dude it’s exaggeration. It’s almost like drawings are caricatures of reality or something!
This is the monster he’s upset about by the way, which was my take on a Catoblepas, so I tried to give it a distressingly detailed and random “face.” This emerges from a turtle-like body because the catoblepas was supposed to hide its face, but I also made it look like a big cyclops eye socket because that’s cool c:
I think anon probably believes everyone who draws “ugly” monsters really wants to elicit actual revulsion or hatred in the viewer, so he’s confused as to why I would draw things he thinks are intentionally engineered to just be “gross” while I also encourage admiration for “gross” wildlife. But every monster artist I know does think their monsters are just fun or cool or charming, even if they give them oozing pus and bile, and frankly that isn’t even how I design mortasheen monsters anyway; I DO mostly use colors, textures and details I just think look awesome in nature, so I guess anon is just that weak?
When I give monsters more overt “body horror” aspects, that’s because it’s fun to recontextualize body horror into a goofy monster pal, like if you could put The Thing in a pokeball, and I don’t think the horror aspect clashes with the positivity in the slightest.
Pustulump is the “grossest” Mortasheen monster by my standards, which weaponizes explosive cysts. Explosive cysts are actually the second or third most horrible thing to me in real life but that’s all the more reason I tried to make a monster out of the concept that still had sympathetic charm to it. (SEE ALSO: lots of Awful Hospital characters are based on my personal greatest health fears)
I still avoided making it look like relatable human flesh, modeling it more after a coral reef and various weird succulent plants, and was careful not to design it like it’s in pain from an “affliction.” Instead, it visibly “hides behind” its pustules, to convey that something horrible to us humans is a natural comfort to this very different being. Wherever you see this principle in my silly ideas, I’m really thinking of things like carrion birds. They shove their whole heads into festering entrails! Right up into maggoty dead buffalo buttholes! That would be UNBELIEVABLY UNWELL for you and I, but it makes this thing happy:
….and RIP anon guy, but I really do think this is a beautiful and lovable animal as-is, at a glance, and not strictly once you come to understand it better. If I had no idea what this animal does I would still love it at first sight either way. Conversely, if I didn’t know what it looked like I would probably love it as soon as I heard what it does, and that’s not because I think “grossness” is interesting. What I’m so autistically obsessed with is just the “strangeness” of different living things, anything about them that is extremely unlike you or me.
The most outrageous strangeness in nature just happens to intersect quite often with what people find “disgusting,” like organisms that tunnel inside other organisms and screw around with their nervous systems, so it’s hard to even really avoid “gross things” if you have a “weird biology” hyperfixation, so I don’t try to avoid it at all and sometimes just lean into it because, yeah, it’s enjoyable to build different ideas around things people don’t like! That’s the whole reason monsters and villains and weapons and “dark” things are ever popular at all really.
When I actually do consider something “gross,” I can’t actually take it; I have an extremely weak constitution for human injuries and diseases. I CANNOT STAND snot and boogers and barf. I’m so neurotic about my hygiene I just give myself other, different health problems from overdoing all the soaps and sanitizers. The instant you apply something to a non-human though, like an explosive cyst monster or a rot-slurping bird, it just stops being gross to me at all because I am neither of those things. Those are their jams! They like it! I don’t eat dirt but it is really cute that worms eat dirt!
I hope this has been enlightening to one 4chan guy who will never ever see it, and just a fun topic of conversation to more normal types of people.
a collapsed mushroom and the hole it came out a
Ive said this before but I feel like this has to be exactly how dunkleosteus ate. I mean, even when it’s reconstructed with lips, everyone gives it a big wide mouth to take big giant visually impressive bites like a big weird shark but I wouldn’t be surprised if it really had a relatively small mouth opening to help suction and grip food exactly like a blowfish does. Their jaws are built so similarly for the same diet of hard shelled prey, back when those were also a lot bigger.
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