Cute and Small and Ready to Brawl

painted skimmer • Libellula semifasciata

the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.

this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.

therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:

- being a cow

- being an almond

- being a woman

- being a coconut

- being in the omegaverse

- being an oat

(list is exemplary and not finite)

For @poketcg-art's Hoenn TCG redraw event! Mega Chimecho doesn't have it's own card, so I sort of superimposed it on a regular Chimecho card.

All California sheephead start life as female and move through an array of colors and body shapes as they mature. Some female adults may transition to male as social and environmental factors shift, balancing the delicate ratio of individuals in their population.

While male California sheephead are largest and easiest to identify at a glance, a closer look at the lively waters of our Kelp Forest exhibit reveals a variety of female sheephead swimming through these fascinating life stages. 

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

First of all, 60ft (18m) is the max depth for the Open Water qualification aka the beginner level. 60ft is not very deep at all in the world of scuba diving and certainly not deep enough to feel the effects of nitrogen narcosis.

The Advanced qualification allows diving to a max depth of 30m (98ft) which is just at the threshold of where you might start to feel the tiniest bit of nitrogen narcosis.

Also on that note, nitrogen narcosis is not some mysterious phenomenon that makes people lose their sense of self, it’s more akin to the feeling of being drunk. Even at 30m, it’s so minor that I could hardly even compare it to being tipsy. Beyond 40m (131ft), it can start to become more noticeable, but that’s why we use different gas mixes to dive beyond that depth.

So what is nitrogen narcosis, then? Essentially, most breathable gases can get you high when they’re at pressure. They become more and more narcotic the deeper you go, but the effect isn’t even noticeable until you get really quite deep.

My dad, brother, and best friend all did a rather reckless dive to 50m (164ft) and they told me about what it felt like to experience proper nitrogen narcosis and they said that they just felt like they were high or lightly drunk.

As for the truth of the mermaid story, I really don’t know, but I certainly could imagine a beginner diver experiencing some placebo effects after learning about nitrogen narcosis and just getting silly with it. If they were only diving at 60ft, she would have had to dive a LOT deeper to actually get into any genuinely dangerous conditions.

All in all, not as scary as the story makes it sound but it still would’ve sucked for the other divers who would’ve had to end their dive early because she used up all her gas.

Diving is a pretty safe sport! I love all the spooky cave diving stories and stuff like this, but I’m reality it’s a super zen experience once you get your head around how to use all the kit.

This World Crocodile Day, why not grab a seat on the couch? These are all the crocodilians in my teaching collection. I use them to do public events with the herp society and for teaching zooarchaeology. It's not nearly as diverse as my lizard collection, but I like that I have all three of the families represented. Species include:

American alligator (several life stages)

Spectacled caiman (neonate and adult)

Freshwater crocodile

Nile crocodile

Gharial (cast)