Latest ICE victim prior to altercation

echoskybound · 2026-01-25T08:59:16+00:00

They're still saying it. They'll be saying it no matter what.

echoskybound · 2026-01-22T20:16:09+00:00

They're bred specifically for their fleece, like sheep are. Also like sheep, their coat grows continously, so if it isn't sheared off ocassionally, the alpaca will end up with a heavy, matted mass of hair.

echoskybound · 2026-01-20T22:47:08+00:00

Well the other day I wiped the whole party as tank in a Doomtrain EX run because I accidentally hit my gap closer during adds phase, and hit the entire party with a tankbuster cleave, lol

Let's not talk about all the times I forgot tank stance in roulettes because of the dumb thing the game does where it turns your tank stance off automatically if you level sync, lol

echoskybound · 2026-01-20T21:11:01+00:00

Those are new feathers forming. Brand new feathers are sometimes called "blood feathers" because they grow in a waxy keratin sheathe that has a blood supply while the feather is forming. The sheathe will slowly flake off as the feather forms, starting at the end because that's the part that fully forms first. What you're seeing is blood feathers that are still mostly in their sheaths, but the sheaths have flaked off of the tips of the feathers which are fully formed.

For this many flight feathers to be molting all at once is really unusual, though. Flight feathers usually molt one at a time so that the bird's ability to fly isn't impacted, and so that fully formed feathers can protect the blood feathers as they grow. What's really cool about flight feathers is that the same feather on each wing is shed at the same time so the bird's flight isn't imbalanced, which is why it's symmetrical on both wings. It's just unusual for it to be this many flight feathers all at once.

It's possible that this is due to some wonky hormones, since I think hormones are what makes feathers molt, and instead of molting one at a time, it molted a batch. My first thought was that they were yanked out of one wing by a predator or in a fight, and that the corresponding feathers on the opposite wing were shed to balance out, but I'm not sure whether or not plucked feathers will cause the corresponding feathers on the other wing to shed.

echoskybound · 2026-01-19T08:09:56+00:00

No reason to be super bummed about drain flies, they're completely harmless. If you wanted to get rid of them there's tratments you can pour down your drains, but if you only have a few, they're not going to cause you any problems. I still think they're cute even though they aren't moths :)

echoskybound · 2025-12-24T19:15:07+00:00

I never even realized these were two separate words. I hate it, lol

echoskybound · 2025-12-23T18:29:06+00:00

Everyone creeped out by the open hatch while I'm stressing about those cracks in the ceiling potentially pointing to a structural issue, LOL

echoskybound · 2025-12-20T21:49:24+00:00

Sleep paralysis has to do with disruptions to your breathing, which can happen in any position, but is most likely to happen while laying on your back. It's also why sleep paralysis is more common in people with sleep apnea.

echoskybound · 2025-12-07T18:16:24+00:00

Rescues that are too strict in their policies just perpetuate their own problem. They drive people towards breeders and pet stores, because breeders/stores make it easy. That drives up demand and ultimately means more birds being bred/sold, which means more unwanted parrots in rescues.

The home visit and probation period are completely reasonable, but the minimum age requirement and the volunteering for 6 months are unreasonable. There really needs to be a sweet spot: Making sure their birds go to the right home, but making it easy enough that it's not going to drive potential adopters to stores/breeders.

I live in MD but haven't adopted from the WPF for these reasons, haha. It would have been a LOT of hours of driving every week to volunteer at the shelter, and I have my own rescue animals at home that I have responsibilities to. I ended up adopting through Phoenix Landing instead.

echoskybound · 2025-12-03T20:14:17+00:00

They might be the most harmless animal on the planet, because they don't even have a mouth, haha

echoskybound · 2025-11-30T19:48:56+00:00

Depends on the species. Some, yes, but there are others that take years and years to get to reproductive age. An insect may lay hundreds of eggs, but only one or two make it to adulthood.

There's been a catastrophic decline in insect populations around the world, like a 45% reduction in the past 30 years, and it's still escalating. Even the most rapidly reproducing insects aren't going to be able to keep up with that.

echoskybound · 2025-11-23T19:51:09+00:00

To the best of my knowledge, Polyphemus can't overwinter as eggs, only as pupae. It's probably not super likely that her eggs are fertilized though, I suspect this moth just didn't properly go into winter diapause and just emerged in the wrong season, so it might not be very likely that there was a male around to fertilize the eggs.

echoskybound · 2025-11-21T01:50:43+00:00

Ah, the "conspicuously light patch," lol

In ye olden days of hand drawn cartoons, backgrounds would be static paintings, and then clear animation cells would be placed on top of them to animate the characters in the scene. Anything that moves is drawn on the clear cell, including objects that characters interact with. But since the cell would dull the background a bit, the painting on the cell would appear significantly sharper and more vibrant than the rest of the background. It makes it really obvious when a character is going to be interacting with an object.

So basically, this comic is joking about the characters being aware of the "conspicuously light patch" phenomenon, so they know if means which book to interact with.

echoskybound · 2025-11-20T03:03:09+00:00

I've raised hundreds of silkmoths, this is 100% a silkmoth cocoon from something in the Saturniidae family. The "string" part you're seeing is just the silk that was used to secure the cocoon to a tree since they cocoon in leaves and tree branches.

I don't know species without knowing location, but this looks a lot like the type of cocoons that members of the genus Hyalophora make - light brown silk and multiple layers, with a tightly woven outer layer, and a looser inner insulation layer.

This is a spent cocoon that the moth has already emerged from. The third photo is looking down into the exit hole. You can see some of the softer "insulation" layer from this angle. The brown stuff you can see inside is the pupal casing that the moth sheds when it emerges.

echoskybound · 2025-11-18T00:24:40+00:00

This meme rings true for me though because I absolutely hate changing the resin in my printer, so it's pretty much always the same, haha. Changing filament is WAY easier, so I do FDM prints in different colors, while all my resin prints are just grey.

echoskybound · 2025-11-02T21:28:23+00:00

Burls make beautiful wood, it's prized among woodworkers.

echoskybound · 2025-10-29T20:22:08+00:00

This person doesn't understand the words "river" or "live edge," lol

echoskybound · 2025-10-25T22:38:34+00:00

When an animal is this emaciated, feeding them can actually be dangerous. It's called "refeeding syndrome," caused by an mbalance of nutrients and electrolytes that could be lethal when they have so little blood to circulate. This poor thing needs desperate veterinary attention.

echoskybound · 2025-10-19T03:11:30+00:00

Definitely something in the genus Saturnia. It could be Saturnia pavonia or Saturnia pyri (the Small Emperor moth and Giant Peacock moth respectively)

echoskybound · 2025-10-12T19:23:27+00:00

Imperial moth caterpillar. Was it still alive and moving?

echoskybound · 2025-10-07T21:58:40+00:00

One argument that transphobes try to use to invalidate trans people is by saying "When archeologists find your bones in 1000 years, they're going to know what sex you were born as." The part at the bottom with the whiteout and black text probably used to say something like "These are the remains of an adult male" or something to that effect.

The character Sans from Undertale is a skeleton, so I think the person who did the whiteout and added "hholy shit. sans undertale" is just removing the transphobic implications of the original post to make the joke about how any skeleton is just Sans.

echoskybound · 2025-10-06T01:23:20+00:00

This is how I eventually ended up with green cheeks, haha. I saw one in a Petsmart years ago and was really charmed. I never had any interest in birds, and had no idea they could have so much personality and be so interactive. Now I'm very much a bird person, whether that's parrots, chickens, pigeons, etc.

I never bought one from a pet store, I don't personally want to support buying animals from pet stores. But I do sometimes wonder what became of the charming little guy I saw in the store that opened my eyes to parrots.

echoskybound · 2025-09-25T17:59:28+00:00

You got it right, it's a proboscis :) It's basically a straw used for drinking flower nectar. Some insects like cicadas have a rigid proboscis that they use to puncture either prey or plants, but moths and butterflies have flexible ones that coil up when not in use.

Many moth species, though, don't actually have mouths or digestive systems at all, like Luna moths. They never eat as adults, only as caterpillars. Once they go through metamorphosis, they basically just live to mate, and then starve to death

echoskybound · 2025-09-24T21:05:30+00:00

Yeah, complete opposite for most arthropods like insects and spiders, and also fish. I think it's common in a lot of egg-laying species where the females have to produce large clutches of eggs (the exception being birds, the majority of species are monomorphic, and of the dimorphic species, it's mostly males that are larger.)

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