♍︎ Aquatic Ghost ♍︎

Hi all. Is Tumbler still the place where you can find amazing artists to commission? My dog and cat, with whom I’ve been for 10 and 16 years respectively, were both diagnosed with some health issues recently. Diabetes and chronic kidney disease. I’m looking to commission a double pet portrait of them together, maybe oil pastel? Open to other media as well. Nothing huge, although I know that fitting in two subjects will mean it’ll have to be a little bigger. Looking for artist recommendations or quotes :) lmk if you or someone you know would like the gig. Would need to be shipped to TX

Here’s some reference photos. They’re best friends

I went through a different journey with a much older Brit to the same end, but much less dignified. I was still a teenager at the time and had to convince my father to let him go - he couldn't run, slid on floors, couldn't go up/down stairs, never pointed anymore... Even now the fact that he had to spent the last several years of his life suffering like that brings me to tears.

It's easy to feel like you should have put off the end, like they had more time that you took away. But it doesn't work like that. I'm glad that even if my dog didn't get the end he deserved, there are dogs whose humans were able to make that choice and give them those endings.

I went through a different journey with a much older Brit to the same end, but much less dignified. I was still a teenager at the time and had to convince my father to let him go - he couldn't run, slid on floors, couldn't go up/down stairs, never pointed anymore... Even now the fact that he had to spent the last several years of his life suffering like that brings me to tears.

It's easy to feel like you should have put off the end, like they had more time that you took away. But it doesn't work like that. I'm glad that even if my dog didn't get the end he deserved, there are dogs whose humans were able to make that choice and give them those endings.

The crabs will force the anemones to clone themselves if one dies OR steal others’ anemones if both die

They haven’t found these anemones in their free-living form, so, as far as we know, this anemone species is these crabs’ slave species—it’s only known in association with pom pom crabs

Cool paper on this: Schnytzer, Y., Giman, Y., Karplus, I., & Achituv, Y. (2017). Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft. PeerJ, 5, e2954. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2954

Their anemones aren’t a unique species, they are only visually distinct because the crab farms them in a very specific way - making a fragment of a larger hawaiian anemone, or finding a newly spawned one. When they carry it around, they force the anemone to adapt to an entire new lifestyle. The crab’s nocturnal behavior slowly kills the anemone’s photosynthetic symbionts, from which it gets its color. After that, the crab can control how much food the anemone actually gets by using it to mop up food off the sea floor, and take excess out of its mouth. Since it doesnt have to reach for sunlight, or reach to catch food, this encourages dense, but short tentacles.

The shortcoming of this study was just that its very hard to get the anemone away from the crab without killing both, and its equally hard to get an anemone to bounce back from this state.