Sensitive White Boys

Did you know blowfly larvae living in carcasses leave behind chemical cues which they actively seek out in order to aggregate in large groups, even with other species 😃 (source 1, 2)

^ my decomposing corpse lying out in the middle of the wilderness talking to the crows

I like making bets about things that happen in the far future and being like “if I’m wrong you can bring me back from the dead and say I told you so”, except haha sucker I’ll be long-eaten by flies by then, and those flies will have been eaten by toads and those toads will have been eaten by more flies; can’t bring me back when my atoms are already recycled and scattered all across the web of life, feeding and being fed upon, fluttering through countless existences before inevitably moving on; how many lives I have lived, how many lands my substance has visited, I am in the air and the water and the rock, how can you bring me back when I am already here

if you do bring manage to bring me back though you’ll have to also bring back a bunch of flies and toads and stuff so have fun with those

also I want to append to this, we shouldn't necessarily assume that animals will be like humans; in scientific research you want to be careful with your preconceptions and personal biases, and in dealing with animals in person over-anthropomorphizing them can even be dangerous, for you and for them. But I think dismissing it out of hand in the other direction is just pretty ignorant given all the things we do know and all the things we know we don't, dubious from a moral perspective (if a creature looks like it's in pain, uh should not the null hypothesis be that it is in pain?), and stems from a really anthropocentric philosophy that has plagued even certain areas of biology itself (if you've read about like, human brain evolution you know what I mean) in a way that is soo frustrating and just is like, augh stop the ghost of Aristotle haunts you

Also I picked those fruit fly examples because they demonstrate ways in which insects are like us, but there's also by no means anything lesser about animals or other organisms that aren't like us either! Not everything is going to be like us and I think there's value and respect-worthiness in that too.

also there's evidence that white garden snails can distinguish numbers up to five

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

thinking about that time scientists put tracking collars on jellyfish

I want to play "let's ___ with mama" with the shrimp I study, but they generally do not meet their offspring because of how their life cycle works. The shrimp put their eggs in the mud and then the young may not hatch for years, until some obscure shrimpy conditions are met. They live with a mixed group of strangers and relatives, some of which may be literal decades older, but not mama.

Leeches, on the other hand, carry their young on their underside. Let's remain safely attached to mama

Even if a species of bug exhibits some kind of social touch among themselves (which I believe some are known to, though for the large majority of species I doubt there's any data on it), it's not going to be welcome from a towering colossus that they literally may not even be able to fit inside their whole field of vision. I feel like a lot of people forget just how big we are compared to most bugs

you know that one popular tumblr post that goes like "humans will pet anything" "well how wonderful that we live on a planet full of things that like to be petted!", or various other posts you see around the internet saying stuff like "humans evolved hands so we could pet all the animals 😌". sometimes I wonder how much those posts might have left actual lasting damage on public perception of animal behavior, like I'm sure they didn't intend to but like... did they

Well I certainly didn’t expect to illicit so many questions when I reblogged this post and added some tags about jumping spider content online.

Firstly, let me say there’s nothing wrong with keeping jumping spiders as pets. I have one myself. She’s a captive bred regal jumping spider. She’s currently a bit over two years old. I’ve had other jumping spiders as well, but they passed of old age and in one instance, a failed molt, which is fairly common.

Before and after getting pet jumpers, I joined some jumper groups, read a lot of care guides, and watched a slew of videos about keeping them.

It became obvious pretty quickly that apparently due to their cute fuzzy appearance, large round eyes, and intelligent behavior, people (owners, admirers, and popular content creators) assign human and mammal emotions and behaviors to them, often to their detriment.

I personally believe bugs are complex creatures that can be intelligent and have emotions, but that those emotions and behaviors are NOT analogous to human or mammal behavior and ignoring their natural needs and behaviors means you’re likely not providing proper care for them.

This is mainly about handling. Bugs don’t want to be handled. They get nothing positive out of it emotionally. They don’t want to be pet or cuddle with you. They don’t want to hang out with you. You’re a big scary predator, and it likely wants to get away from you. Forcing handling can stress, injure, or kill them. That’s why I tagged the post (linked above) “your spider is not a cat.” It doesn’t seek affection from you.

I can’t tell you how many posts or videos I saw where people were super upset because they let their jumper out of its enclosure to handle it and it either escaped and got lost or they somehow crushed it and killed or injured it badly. I’ve also seen people chasing their jumper around its enclosure trying to grab it or get it to jump onto their hand when it’s clearly just trying to hide.

As an example, a very common thing I’ve seen in videos about jumpers is people saying when they lift their front legs at you and jump or climb onto you/your hands it’s because they “want uppies” and want to be pet and be close to you. This is a wild misreading of behavior. Sometimes raising the front legs is a defensive display, trying to make itself look larger to scare away a threat. Other times, they’re waving their legs around to sense and feel their environment, or preparing to jump onto something. They are arboreal, and their natural behavior is to find a high vantage point, so climbing onto the big thing (you) nearby is normal. It’s not because it seeks your affection.

Certainly if you DO handle them frequently they can get used to it, and it becomes less stressful for them. But in my opinion the dangers outweigh any positives, and I don’t handle mine. These are wild animals that have not been domesticated, even when captive bred. If you want to give them enrichment, and you should, offer them prey to chase or interesting things to explore in a larger enclosure. For those that do still handle them, I’d encourage you to watch their behavior closely and read the spidery cues they’re giving you rather than assuming they’re feeling what a cute little mammal might be feeling in the same scenario.

I could go on with specifics about certain videos, but I wasn’t planning on writing a huge post and this is already long. Also I’m sure many people would disagree with me about some things I’ve said, and I’m not going to argue about anything. This is just how I feel based on what I’ve seen of online jumping spider content, and it’s why I no longer interact with most of it.

their hair makes them look so round and fat

SEA TOAD MY BELOVED

"anger fishes are nightmare fuel from the deep"

OK smarty pants then how do you explain THIS:

From this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tMQhyATzQA

[Image Description: A red anger fish with big round eyes and a cute pouting expression she is bright red and textured.]

On a more philosophical note, in general it's still very up in the air what conscious experience "is"; I know neuroscientists have proposed various theories of consciousness attributing it to various cognitive processes like multisensory integration, associative learning, working memory, etc. I haven't read all that much of the literature to know what the scientific consensus is on those theories (I don't think there isn't one) but my own personal (unsourced but I don't think very controversial) guess would be that it probably involves all of those things, and also probably that consciousness is a spectrum, not just a yes-or-no thing (cf. how it feels like to be fully awake vs. in the middle of falling asleep vs. dreaming). I don't think we'll ever really be able to prove or know for sure "what it feels like" to be a fruit fly or whatever, but strictly speaking this is technically the case even with other people, right— you can't do a brain scan to find a person's subjective experience, cuz it's well, subjective; yknow there's all the classical debates about philosophical zombies and the Chinese room thought experiment and so on that philosophers have talked about. Ultimately I think people intuitively ascribe consciousness to others because yknow they have a theory of mind, like I don't think I could be a solipsist even if I wanted to. When we anthropomorphize animals (or inanimate objects 😜) this is what we're doing; we view them and recognize aspects of ourselves, accurately or not, just cuz it comes more or less naturally. From a scientific perspective I think that's basically all we can really do, is to observe animals in a rigorous manner and see what they can do, and idk from the results we do have, at least to me it sure looks a lot like these animals have consciousness. They process complex sensory information in real-time, they form novel behaviors based on experiences in context, they display signs of emotion in a statistically quantifiable way, idk what do we call that if not subjective experience?

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

In the fish tank straight up "grisping it" and by "it", haha, well. Let's justr say. My rok.