The Amature Naturalist

The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.

To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.

On the 17th, dead silence.

People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.

But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.

What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’

A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.

If you want to join in, here’s what to do:

Do:

Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th

Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad

Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion

Come back on the 18th and check in

Don’t:

Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)

Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.

Open the app or website (including specific blogs)

Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)

Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.

Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.

Time to talk about spider mating then! Let’s make this educational so they feel bad if it gets flagged.

Look at the massive palps on this boy! Nice long sperm duct, too.

Male reproductive organs are at the rear of the abdomen, which makes delivering sperm into the female’s receptacle a little difficult. They instead deposit sperm onto a small web (sperm web) and transfer it into their palps.

And this scandalous lady spreading all eight of her legs for us… 

If a male has successfully wooed a lady spider, he will use his pedipalps to deposit his sperm into the female’s epigyne. 

Let’s not forget that spiders have threesomes too!

Spider sex is always a competition to see which male can mate as many females as he can before anyone else can. Check out this other post of mine about a spider that literally leaves his palps in the female’s epigyne to prevent other males from mating with her!

One more racy image of two spiders getting it on!

(This last image is actually a 3D model made by designer Julia Stoess, and I greatly recommend checking out more of her work. It’s truly amazing.) 

These are diamond-tipped indenter heads. They are used to inflict ludicrous pressure upon various shit in order to measure the hardness of said shit. Recently, one of these was used to measure the hardness of a certain animal’s shell, and, instead of crushing the ever-loving fuck out of it, it found serious resistance.

The aforementioned animal is a snail.

Let me spell this out for ya. There is a snail that can resist the onslaught from an industrial-grade diamond applied with the pressure of several metric fucktonnes. A. Snail. That. Can. Resist. A. Diamond. Indenter.

Just imagine stepping on one of these guys. Instead of breaking their shells like those of usual snails, you’d break your own fucking ankle.

Jesus trilobitic Christ.

Today’s Episode: the Scaly-Foot Gastropod

Just look at this little piece of shit. Look at it and say to my face it doesn’t look like a tank.

What we’ve got here is the rather lamely-named scaly-foot gastropod, also known by the considerably more badass-sounding names of iron snail and  Chrysomallon squamiferum. The SFG hails from the deep-sea thermal vents known as black smokers, deep-sea vents from which water gushes constantly. That water, by the way, originates from below the mantle.

The proximities of black smokers are perfectly lightless, unforgiving badlands, with water rich enough in poisonous sulphuric chemicals to perform the chemical equivalent of curbstomping on any “superior” lifeform that dares stick it’s overspecialized, prissy ass down there, heat up to 450 degrees Celsius (one thirteenth of the temperature of the Sun’s surface) and pressures that could turn any land-dwelling scum into a Flatlander within seconds. If creatures want to survive here, they must either be hyper-effective murder-machines, or damn nigh unkillable.

The SFG’s predators, such as venomous, killer cone snails with bionic harpoon guns evolved from their own “teeth”, and car-wrecking carnivorous crabs that kill snails by pressing down on their shells for days with jagged ultra-hard pincers specifically designed to do this belong in the first category.

The SFG itself belongs in the second.

Hoooly shit does it ever.

The unkillability itself is obtained by using the chemosynthetic bacteria lurking in its glands to absorb and mineralize the poisonous iron-sulphides the water is overabundant with, making them non-poisonous for the snail. It then coats its shell with the minerals, constructing an unique three-layer structure no other gastropods possess. None.

To sum it up, the outer layer, used to block the bulk of the attack, is made up of greigite (Fe3S4), a ridiculously hard mineral. Then comes a middle layer of squishy organic matter purposed to absorb the shock of impacts, dents and blows. Finally, an inner layer of aragonite (CaCO3), designed to prevent asshole crabs from sticking their nasty claws into the shell and picking it apart splinter by splinter.

How effective is it? Well, this armor is so much better than what we puny humans possess that the U.S. Army is actively conducting research about it with the hope of developing new armor using the same build. Yes, this shell is so unbreakable that it caused the a military to lose their heads over a goddamn sea snail. Go figure.

Also, according to biologists researching the SFG, if we covered oil pipes with the stuff, they could easily shrug off damage done by such trivial things as fucking icebergs,

Not bad from a snail, I say.

But that’s not all! Look at it again.

There is a reason it’s called Scaly-foot Gastropod.

Those are scales. Made out of iron minerals.

Iron minerals that are poisonous and magnetic.

The scales are there because of the tooth-harpoon-hurling killer snails. Namely, they serve to deflect the harpoons entirely. Deflective iron scales. On a snail.

Holy crap.

So let’s sum it up, shall we? There exists a snail that forges itself a magnetic armor made out of poisonous iron ore to fend off killer crabs and venomous sniper snails that hunt it in its habitat of a vent leading to the Earth’s mantle.

Oh, and they don’t really eat anything, relying on their chemosynthetic bacteria for sustenance instead. In layman’s terms, that means that the snail keeps itself running by oxidating the sulphides in the water, all of which are lethally poisonous to most lifeforms, including the snail itself. The only reason it survives is that the bacteria chemosynthetize the sulphides, enabling the snail to quite literally live off of poison.

Tropisternus lateralis (A water scavenger beetle) [link to iNat obs]

Common Eastern Firefly [link to iNat obs]

Seven-spotted Lady Beetle [link to iNat obs], recently emerged from pupa. They have to hold their wings out and unfolded while they dry/harden. The spots don’t darken until later.

Mystery Water Scavenger Beetle [link to iNat obs]

Banded Hickory Borer [link to iNat obs]

Weevil time is my favorite time!

The subject was something like a 12 foot long water scorpion

And Poppy, what you saw was an arthropod known as Pterygotus (it was actually featured in Walking With Monsters). Not only was it as big (or maybe even bigger) than your average human, it had a stinger the size of a lightbulb. REALLY glad that bugger isn’t around anymore.

Also, Megalodon deserves to be mention again, because just hearing its name makes me want to never be submerged in water ever again.

THAT IS A GODDAMNED LEAF-EATING SLOTH.

AMBULOCETUS WAS AMPHIBIOUS AND PRETTY BADASS

BASILOSAURUS WAS THIS GIANT REPTILIAN CETACEAN THAT PROBABLY SWAM LIKE A DUMB EEL BECAUSE OF ITS TINY FLUKES BUT THIS FUCKER WAS 60 FEET LONG AND AT THE TOP OF THE MARINE FOOD CHAIN

AND THEN THERE’S MY FAVORITE, ZYGOPHYSETER, WHICH WAS THIS HUGE EARLY SPERM WHALE THAT ATE SHARKS AND OTHER WHALES

IT WAS NOTHING BUT TEETH

Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider of the genus Heteropoda. It was described in Malaysia and named in honor of singer David Bowie, with particular reference to songs such as “Glass Spider” and the resemblance of the frontal view of the spider to the singer’s painted face in his early career.

MY FIRST PAPER HAS BEEN PUBLISHED YA’LL: Description of four new species of Eadya (Hymenoptera, Braconidae), parasitoids of the Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle (Paropsis charybdis) and other Eucalyptus defoliating leaf beetles! You can read it for free, that’s right free because my coauthors believe in open access at the Journal of Hymenoptera Research: https://jhr.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=24282