SO Psyched!

I saw this and my immediate reaction was 'oh no that's the vibe. Oh Noooooo'

I’m still not over Scotty brooding over Mira Romaine while he’s up on the Enterprise at the beginning of this book like:

People forget that you can light a bonfire with a candle; that's what this felt like to me.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

It's rather telling that while I would guess you're referring to Torch's latest (and strangest) alien paramour, he's got enough weird stuff in his backstory that I can't be entirely sure.

Now Doris, I'm sure Johnny must be THE most frustraiting boyfriend in the universe But you must know that that's not a promise he can morally keep in all circumstances Amazing Spiderman 21

All of the Prehistoric Pride guys in one collective post to celebrate pride month. Choose your fighter and have an awesome time :D

More suggestions are always welcome, I sadly was not able to cover everyone, but I will do more of these in the future!

I am going to add more and more to the collection as I get them done :D

If you would like to support my silly little dinosaur art, then you can buy any of these Prideaurs as stickers from my Etsy shop, which I just set up recently. I am pretty new to this entire business side of art things, but I am trying my best :D so a like or a reblog would go a long way. Thank you guys so much for all your kind words and support!

Etsy

ShatterHeadShop - Etsy.de

Shop items by ShatterHeadShop.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? To be fair to the hospital, I don't really see any reason to keep a geiger counter by the blood bags.

Flash will spend a lot of time in the coming years getting his heart dragged out by force, a little at a time.

Also Peter they would probably notice if your blood had some noticable amount of radioactivity before giving it to her. Amazing Spiderman 10

I have no idea how, but this artist has created a picture that looks more like Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne than any comic panel. I'm almost totally face blind and tell the bats apart mostly by context and memorizing costumes, and YET. As soon as I saw this picture I knew which Batman and Robin it was meant to depict. Excellent use of body language personality cues, truly surreal experience, 10/10 would startle in consternation like a newly-awoken cat again.

🌻 comm for gee! thank you 💖

Amazing that they have to clarify that, no, the footage isn't being sped up

nimble, a border collie-papillon mix, wins the 12” class in the 2024 masters agility championship. the first time a mixed breed has won at westminster ever.

Someone who is A. transgender and B. funnier than me should do something with this. Amazing Spiderman 14

When I first read this I asked my teen-in-the-’60s-age relative about that very issue. Received a whole lecture about the differences between ‘going on a date’ and ‘dating’ and ‘going steady’ etc. Social distinctions (apparently less well-defined in modern times) that would allow for Archie to date both Betty and Veronica without ‘cheating’ on either.

General take away was that what Peter is doing here (not telling two ladies about each other) was idiotic, but not necessarily unexpected, or even unethical.

Liz is discovering a woman's desire for a partner who can hold a conversation for more than 30 seconds. Amazing Spiderman 14

Oh, cool animation

-wait it's WHAT?!

The Silver Swan, built by John Joseph Merlin and James Cox, 1773.

Source: Mechanical Marvels, Clockwork Dreams (BBC)