New Trick!! He’s Starting To Say “wings Out” Too

POPEYE?!?!??

The golden hour

☙ | 𝓈𝒶𝒸𝓇𝒶𝓁𝓊𝓃𝒶 𝓋𝒾𝒶 𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓉𝒶𝑔𝓇𝒶𝓂

21 and Pinch, natural history enthusiasts 🐤

Fireflies, Mia Bergeron

LICHENS

vor dem Harz photos

People ask me why I find myself hopelessly in love with biology and want to major in genetics. Here’s why:

I have this fish tank. A glass box of water I put sand and rocks in. But the point of a fish tank are the things that are alive. I have plants that reach outstretched hands to the light and grow to the barrier between the clear fluid they live in and the clear gas we breathe. In one single leaf so much chemistry takes place, photosynthesis makes ungraspable light into life supporting substance.

And in my fish tank I have a fish. A fish that can be found lifeless in cups in pet stores, but I’ve seen this fish thrive. I’ve seen him change color due to jumping genes. I’ve seen him play in the filter meaning he makes decisions. Something so small exists and lives and makes choices. It baffles me, truly. Such vibrant color that I can only compare to something man made and yet it was nature that did it first.

I see this little world that I have placed on my shelf. Cared for by me; dependent on me. It amazes me the human emotion I have for them, and how far humanity has gone that I can dose the tank and manage it on a delicate scale.

And sometimes I wonder, what if we exist on a glass box on someone’s shelf? One way glass we can’t look out, but if we could, everything would be different? What if we are all a fragment of someone’s novel or a C+ science project? Life is so so amazing, it’s baffling.

hand over the cursed Sphenodon facts.

sure, but PUT THE GUN DOWN. 

the Tuatara is a medium-sized reptile native to New Zealand.

it looks like a lizard but it IS NOT- the Tuatara is actually a very basal reptile related to snakes and lizards but belonging to an entire different branch of the tree of life, of which it is the sole surviving member.

and it may look like a lizard on the outside, but the inside is what really counts! and on the inside, the Tuatara is basically a reskinned amphibian.

they only have a single lung, their heart is the most basic of all reptiles, and their nervous systems shares more in common with our friend the axolotl than with its lizard kin!

so if you happen to see one at the zoo, take a moment to stop and really appreciate the uninterrupted 240 million years of reptilian history you’re lucky enough to be looking at!

Here’s a piece I created for the Tarantula Show I went to a month or so ago!