I Want To Play "let's ___ With Mama" With The Shrimp I Study, But They Generally Do Not Meet Their Offspring

some standard and heirloom pumpkaboo varieties 🎃

I heard a commotion of buzzing in the long grass, so I went in there in my pajamas because I thought it might be a wasp attacking something (cool), but it was just a bottlefly getting upset because there was a sticky seed on his wing

:)

:D

:3

:V

me walking up to the whalefall: hey my fellow hagfish hows it slimin' hagatha (she's a hagfish): are you sure you're a hagfish? you look kinda like some kinda lungfish me: haha dont worry check this out (i breathe in some pollen) HURHUHUHHHUUUURURGURGUGRGG hagatha: yep, that's a hagfish-y amount of slime. come hag out! (hagfish for hang out)

sensitive white boys

Garden snails (Cornu aspersum) with scalariform shells, a rare genetic mutation.

Typical shell formation:

Photo 1 via The Malacological Society of London, 2-4 by saber_animal, 5 by joknight_nz, and 6 (typical shell) by benanna

something is wrong with my hamster

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

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

important anomalocaris dorsal carapace representation... the anomalocarapace...

sick and tired of inaccurate anomalocaris paleoart ,, decided to take matters into my own hands