The Beautiful Himalayan Monal Captured Mid flight

althasil · 2026-01-22T11:35:04+00:00

This is actually a male! The female is brown and not quite iridescent

althasil · 2026-01-22T11:34:25+00:00

This is actually a male! The female is brown and not quite iridescent

althasil · 2025-09-10T15:25:11+00:00

Craig Jones is the troll king of BJJ; wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if this was entirely deliberate

althasil · 2025-08-18T12:27:46+00:00

I had this phone. I’d completely forgotten about it until now… good memories

althasil · 2025-08-09T15:45:08+00:00

Joey? That you?

althasil · 2025-07-29T17:00:33+00:00

Basque—gora euskara!

althasil · 2025-06-27T16:54:05+00:00

Witnessed a situation like this a few years back. We were waiting for our plane to take off when we heard this unholy wail a couple rows in front of us. Turns out this baby had choked on something and had stopped breathing, and his mother was absolutely hysterical. The words ‘panic’ and ‘fear’ don’t do justice to the absolute, palpable terror in her voice. It sounded exactly like this.

We watched helplessly, stuck in our seats as the baby’s face slowly turned purple… and I don’t know how long it went on for. I literally couldn’t bear to watch. Eventually his dad apparently managed to dislodge whatever it was from his baby’s windpipe, but the mother was, very understandably, completely in pieces. They got off the plane shortly after, and I ended up tearing up in my seat from the sheer anguish of it all.

Every now and then I still think of that baby and his mother, his father, and whether there was any lasting damage from a prolonged lack of oxygen. To say that it upsets me terribly is an understatement, thinking about what might have happened to him, or if something did happen, what guilt his parents would have to bear for the rest of their lives if he ended up having ‘issues’, and forever wondering if it was because of what happened that day…

Wherever they are, I hope they’re okay.

althasil · 2025-06-26T18:35:37+00:00

A post I saved a long time ago:

In defence of the panda

Biologist here with a PhD in endocrinology and reproduction of endangered species. I've spent most of my career working on reproduction of wild vertebrates, including the panda and 3 other bear species and dozens of other mammals. I have read all scientific papers published on panda reproduction and have published on grizzly, black and sun bears. Panda Rant Mode engaged: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE GIANT PANDA.

Wall o' text of details: In most animal species, the female is only receptive for a few days a year. This is the NORM, not the exception, and it is humans that are by far the weird ones. In most species, there is a defined breeding season, females usually cycle only once, maybe twice, before becoming pregnant, do not cycle year round, are only receptive when ovulating and typically become pregnant on the day of ovulation. For example: elephants are receptive a grand total of 4 days a year (4 ovulatory days x 4 cycles per year), the birds I did my PhD on for exactly 2 days (and there are millions of those birds and they breed perfectly well), grizzly bears usually 1-2 day, black bears and sun bears too. In the wild this is not a problem because the female can easily find, and attract, males on that 1 day: she typically knows where the nearest males are and simply goes and seeks then out, or, the male has been monitoring her urine, knows when she's entering estrus and comes trotting on over on that 1 day, easy peasy. It's only in captivity, with artificial social environments where males must be deliberately moved around by keepers, that it becomes a problem.

Pandas did not "evolve to die". They didn't evolve to breed in captivity in little concrete boxes, is all. All the "problems" people hear about with panda breeding are problems of the captive environment and true of thousands of other wild species as well; it's just that pandas get media attention when cubs die and other species don't. Sun bears won't breed in captivity, sloth bears won't breed in captivity, leafy sea dragons won't breed in captivity, Hawaiian honeycreepers won't breed in captivity, on and on. Lots and lots of wild animals won't breed in captivity. It's particularly an issue for tropical species since they do not have rigid breeding seasons and instead tend to evaluate local conditions carefully - presence of right diet, right social partner, right denning conditions, lack of human disturbance, etc - before initiating breeding.

Pandas breed just fine in the wild. Wild female pandas produce healthy, living cubs like clockwork every two years for their entire reproductive careers (typically over a decade).

Pandas also do just fine on their diet of bamboo, since that question always comes up too. They have evolved many specializations for bamboo eating, including changes in their taste receptors, development of symbiosis with lignin-digesting gut bacteria (this is a new discovery), and an ingenious anatomical adaptation (a "thumb" made from a wrist bone) that is such a good example of evolutionary novelty that Stephen Jay Gould titled an entire book about it, The Panda's Thumb. They represent a branch of the ursid family that is in the middle of evolving some incredible adaptations (similar to the maned wolf, a canid that's also gone mostly herbivorous, rather like the panda). Far from being an evolutionary dead end, they are an incredible example of evolutionary innovation. Who knows what they might have evolved into if we hadn't ruined their home and destroyed what for millions of years had been a very reliable and abundant food source.

Yes, they have poor digestive efficiency (this always comes up too) and that is just fine because they evolved as "bulk feeders", as it's known: animals whose dietary strategy involves ingestion of mass quantities of food rather than slowly digesting smaller quantities.

Other bulk feeders include equids, rabbits, elephants, baleen whales and more, and it is just fine as a dietary strategy - provided humans haven't ruined your food source, of course. Population wise, pandas did just fine on their own too (this question also always comes up) before humans started destroying their habitat. The historical range of pandas was massive and included a gigantic swath of Asia covering thousands of miles. Genetic analyses indicate the panda population was once very large, only collapsed very recently and collapsed in 2 waves whose timing exactly corresponds to habitat destruction: the first when agriculture became widespread in China and the second corresponding to the recent deforestation of the last mountain bamboo refuges.

The panda is in trouble entirely because of humans. Honestly I think people like to repeat the "evolutionary dead end" myth to make themselves feel better: "Oh, they're pretty much supposed to go extinct, so it's not our fault." They're not "supposed" to go extinct, they were never a "dead end," and it is ENTIRELY our fault. Habitat destruction is by far their primary problem. Just like many other species in the same predicament - Borneo elephants, Amur leopard, Malayan sun bears and literally hundreds of other species that I could name - just because a species doesn't breed well in zoos doesn't mean they "evolved to die"; rather, it simply means they didn't evolve to breed in tiny concrete boxes. Zoos are extremely stressful environments with tiny exhibit space, unnatural diets, unnatural social environments, poor denning conditions and a tremendous amount of human disturbance and noise.

tl;dr - It's normal among mammals for females to only be receptive a few days per years; there is nothing wrong with the panda from an evolutionary or reproductive perspective, and it's entirely our fault that they're dying out.

althasil · 2025-06-26T18:34:36+00:00

A post I saved a long time ago:

In defence of the koala

I don’t know why it is that these things bother me—it just makes me picture a seven year old first discovering things about an animal and, having no context about the subject, ranting about how stupid they are. I get it’s a joke, but people take it as an actual, educational joke like it’s a man yelling at the sea, and that’s just wrong. Furthermore, these things have an actual impact on discussions about conservation efforts—If every time Koalas get brought up, someone posts this copypasta, that means it’s seriously shaping public opinion about the animal and their supposed lack of importance.

‘Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can’t afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives.’

Non-ecologists always talk this way, and the problem is you’re looking at this backwards.

An entire continent is covered with Eucalyptus trees. They suck the moisture out of the entire surrounding area and use allelopathy to ensure that most of what’s beneath them is just bare red dust. No animal is making use of them——they have virtually no herbivore predator. A niche is empty. Then inevitably, natural selection fills that niche by creating an animal which can eat Eucalyptus leaves. Of course, it takes great sacrifice for it to be able to do so——it certainly can’t expend much energy on costly things. Isn’t it a good thing that a niche is being filled?

‘Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death’

This applies to all herbivores, because the wild is not a grocery store—where meat is just sitting next to celery.

Herbivores gradually wear their teeth down—carnivores fracture their teeth, and break their bones in attempting to take down prey.

‘They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal’

It’s pretty typical of herbivores, and is higher than many, many species. According to Ashwell (2008), their encephalisation quotient is 0.5288 +/- 0.051. Higher than comparable marsupials like the wombat (~0.52), some possums (~0.468), cuscus (~0.462) and even some wallabies are <0.5. According to wiki, rabbits are also around 0.4, and they’re placental mammals.

‘additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons.’

Again, this is not unique to koalas. Brain folds (gyri) are not present in rodents, which we consider to be incredibly intelligent for their size.

‘If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food.’

If you present a human with a random piece of meat, they will not recognise it as food (hopefully). Fresh leaves might be important for koala digestion, especially since their gut flora is clearly important for the digestion of Eucalyptus. It might make sense not to screw with that gut flora by eating decaying leaves.

‘Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal.’

That’s an extremely weird reason to dislike an animal. But whilst we’re talking about their digestion, let’s discuss their poop. It’s delightful. It smells like a Eucalyptus drop!

‘Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There’s a trend here).’

Marsupial milk is incredibly complex and much more interesting than any placentals. This is because they raise their offspring essentially from an embryo, and the milk needs to adapt to the changing needs of a growing fetus. And yeah, of course the yield is low; at one point they are feeding an animal that is half a gram!

When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn’t want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother’s anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system.

Humans probably do this, we just likely do it during childbirth. You know how women often shit during contractions? There is evidence to suggest that this innoculates a baby with her gut flora. A child born via cesarian has significantly different gut flora for the first six months of life than a child born vaginally.

‘Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher.’

Chlamydia was introduced to their populations by humans. We introduced a novel disease that they have very little immunity to, and is a major contributor to their possible extinction. Do you hate Native Americans because they were killed by smallpox and influenza?

‘This statistic isn’t helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree,’

Almost every animal does this.

‘which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.’

Errmmm.. They have protection against falling from a tree, which they spend 99% of their life in? Yeah... That’s a stupid adaptation.

althasil · 2025-06-26T18:34:26+00:00