We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

“During superpod aggregations, “the real old and real young ones like hanging out with each other,” Ken narrates. “Females who haven’t seen each other for months just stay together for days on end, and chat around as if wanting to talk about what they did all winter. The young like rolling and tumbling and chasing.” During their parties, play and love flow freely. They’re light on parental guidance, and as in many other dolphins, much killer whale play is a bit X-rated. Young male killer whales start sex play in early childhood. “Even with the little one-year-olds,” says Ken, “soon after they stop nursing, there’s a lot of rolling around with their little snakes out.” Older males aren’t exactly inhibited with each other, either. “We see groups of guy whales with their three-foot wangers draped over each other—pink floyd, we call it.” Like other dolphins, they frequently indulge in same-sex enjoyment, getting help from a friend’s flipper or snout. Many free-living dolphins routinely masturbate against objects, and Ken has even had aroused whales rub against his boat. It’s vigorous but not aggressive. When Diana Reiss put a large mirror in their pool, the seven-year-old juvenile male bottlenose dolphins Pan and Delphi positioned their bodies in front of it—and watched themselves imitate the sex act with each other. (Bottlenose dolphins engage in more same-sexual behavior than any other known creature.) As Denise Herzing concluded, “Dolphins love to have sex and they have sex a lot.” Killer whale females start acting sexual in their teens—and never stop. “It’s pretty interesting when postreproductive grandmas start rubbing against males, sliding along them,” Ken tells me. In a killer whale version of “cougars,” older, menopausal female killer whales seem to entice younger males into sex play. “Any randy young guy,” Ken says. “Sometimes, even young males five or six years old. They’ll get the males all excited. We haven’t seen actual mating, but we’ve seen a lot of penises draped over whales that are upside down and downside up and sideways. They’ll roll over and you can see that their vaginal area is swollen. There’s a heck of a lot more sex than there is reproduction. They’re just very sexual.””

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

here's where to find it on windows 10

The lack of punctuation initially led me to assume that “christ menstruation” was a new irreverent way to refer to the way some denominations take the sacrament of communion monthly instead of weekly like others.

But going back to OP @batmanisagatewaydrug : there are ways to give your period the boot semi-permanently and safely!

IUDs are perfectly safe for young people to use, especially since it's a long-term form period management that doesn't require daily upkeep like hormonal birth control pills. they're also the most effective form of birth control anyone can be taking, which makes them a great safety tool for young people (or any people) who are having or are interested in having the kind of sex that could lead to pregnancy.

I take a shot once a week, and even if that was too much, I could do it as pills, and so many of my problems just evaporated overnight.

when you reblog something from someone and their partner reblogs it from you instead of their lover: homewrecker 😈

it is very instructive to play both silent hill and resident evil videogames because they are very similar except for how silent hill is good and resident evil is stupid. it helps you figure out what is stupid in a video game and what is good