Marine Snow

I'm continuing down memory lane with Quest for Camelot, and inadvertently slipped and stumbled on what-if-Ruber-was-the-protagonist? I guess? Why did he come out looking like that... ദ്ദി ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ )

I did read Vera Chapman's The King's Damosel when I learned the film was 'inspired' by it a loooong while back, and it's... something alright. As an aside, Kayley's thought bubble is in direct reference to the book.

Note: Given how I drew Ruber, let me confess this... Ruber's nails genuinely upset me, and since I have the power to draw them more nicely manicured, I shall whole-heartedly make use of it and extend it to bringing down his hairline juuuuust a bit. Juuuust.

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

little horsie is ready to explore with you 𓃗 .°˖⋆

Beneziphius cetariensis was an early beaked whale that lived off the coast of what is now the northwest Iberian peninsula.

It's only known from a partial skull that was fished up by bottom trawling nets from the seafloor, so its exact age isn't known, but based on related species it's estimated to date to somewhere between the mid-Miocene and early Pliocene, around 13-5 million years ago.

About 4m long (~13'), it had a fairly short narrow snout and was functionally toothless, with evidence of only small vestigial teeth that would have been fully embedded in its gums. Males of this species probably had a pair of tusk-like "battle teeth" at the tip of their lower jaw, similar to some other beaked whales, which would have been used in fights against each other.

The back of Beneziphius' skull was also proportionally tall, and although not as elaborate as some other fossil species this may still have functioned like "internal antlers" — display structures visible only via echolocation.

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Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.