Grison in the Labs

let’s start with a few pictures of my body shall we

(please ignore messy room i’m in the process of packing)

okay so that’s the body of someone that eats healthy, literally my fave food is broccoli, and i work out 5 days a week, you’d think i’m at ‘’’healthy weight’’’’ right?????

BITCH NOPE

a calorie is the amount of energy released in laboratory conditions to heat water when it’s burned

so in the lab you have an instrument to burn the food and you measure how much of it it takes to heat water a set amount,

this does not in any way reflect how the body works

your body breaks down foods in different ways, for example monosaturated fats break down very slowly but processed sugars break down very fast

so by that logic something that is almost pure carbohydrate would be much worse than something that is almost pure monosaturated fat

not necessarily

oats, for example, are something like 95% fibre, meaning although they are pure sugar the body decides it’s not worth the bother of breaking them down so you get a small fraction of the sugar in the oat

so just going by carbohydrate [aka sugar] content doesn’t work properly either

a stick of butter has WAY more calories than a boiled potato but the stick of butter breaks down over several hours and keeps you satiated longer than that boiled potato that immediately floods your system with sugar, that triggers the response of too much store that for later, which causes a lack in your body which triggers the i’m hungry response

or the peanuts being high protein high fat are the reason why a snickers fills you up longer than a mars bar even though it might have a higher calorie count - because you’re full longer you eat less calories because you don’t go i’m hungry and eat another mars bar 

and that’s all assuming that every body processes food the exact same way

Adding on to all of this up here, hormones play a significant role in fat storage. “Eat less and exercise more” is a fad diet. Losing fat, gaining fat, and maintaining weight has far more to do with hormonal composition in your body than anything. Change your hormonal composition, and your body’s fat distribution is subject to change. This is why dfab people often gain weight when undergoing menopause or after having a hysterectomy (gender confirmation surgeries typically excluded as the subjects are often on testosterone). This is why endocrine disorders are often associated with significant weight loss or weight gain.

Another example of the BMI being bullshit: many professional athletes have very low percentages of body fat while also having a high BMI.

Joe Rogan is considered obese by the BMI, regardless of his low body fat percentage.

Some more examples of actual Olympians:

The bmi isn’t bullshit because it’s inaccurate, it’s bullshit because it’s built on fatmisia

Please watch this playlist on YouTube from @ok2befat (sources are listed for each video)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzCJI_hV11iFYHnjOPGyVwXaFEo2eEc9S

1) how can it be based on just height? shouldn’t the ratio involve total volume? since some people are wider than others in the skeleton and stuff? except

2) no that would come out wonky too because muscle is heavier than fat so the math factoring mass/volume/height together would have to be sooooo complicated to get numbers that meant anything that why bother????

(That number, it turns out, doesn’t really explain the variance in the amount of body fat animals have. See for example Schulte-Hostedd 2001. But I digress.)

Also, it turns out that body fat is important to have in specific locations for particular types of organ function. For example, in rodents, testicles are usually wrapped in a bit of fat called the epididymal fat pad. If you remove this pad entirely, it will not grow back… and, while it is gone, that testicle won’t produce sperm anymore. That holds true even if you move the fat somewhere else in the body. Fat pads are organs, and they act in concert with other endocrine organs in the body in order to help coordinate aspects of your metabolism and your energy balance, and they’re fucking important too, not passive sacks of glorp. 

There’s a bat paper that pops up immediately on first view, with a totally unimpeachable sourcing. And it’s a flying fox–even better!

Hooray, I think! This will be perfect. Bats are cute, and everyone likes cute things. I just need a photo to put on the poster.

This is literally the only photo I can find of this species a) alive, b) clearly visible as a bat, and c) with an attributable source.

Cue a bloodcurdling scream, which startled all of us and had us wheeling to the corner with the bedroom door, where the dog was wailing and distressed in front of the closed door. The cat was on the other end of the room, her foreleg wet to the elbow with saliva from the dog. We’re still not sure who screamed, but the dog definitely tried to grab her paw, and probably got scratched on his tongue.

@fallowsthorn said to @ask-drferox: Why don’t animals “know” not to breed with their siblings/parents? Is there no animal version of the Westermarck effect?

I can’t speak for primates or clever clogs like elephants but no, there does not appear to be any sort of Westermarck effect with domestic animals, where being raised together as juveniles reduces their sexual attraction as adults.

Partly, the Westermarck effect is contested as to whether it’s a real thing or not, but our domestic species do not form the same sort of social hierarchies and complexity that humans do. We take a pair of puppies or kittens away from their mother at 8 weeks of age when they’re still very young, and bring them into a household where they may be the only two members of their species. There’s no context, there’s no cultural queues, what was anybody expecting to happen? A male and a female alone in the world without guidance and no other options?

Lions are also just like pocket sized kitties-one litter may have multiple fathers. 

Male lions kill the cubs of other males, sometimes for funsies, sometimes in hope of bringing the lioness back into heat. 

We don’t know that Simba didn’t have litttermates, just that he doesn’t have any by this point.  

Generally, lions kill cubs that were sired before their coalition takes over a pride, in order to bring the lionesses back into heat. While it's common for all or some males within a coalition to mate with any given lioness in the pride they are occupying, meaning that a litter often does have multiple fathers, generally males won't kill cubs that have been sired since their coalition assumed power.

... This also, fwiw, makes the fact that Simba returns to occupy his natal pride and definitely reproduces with at least one lioness who was a cub from the same pride at the same time... interesting. At best, Nala is at least a cousin (assuming she's the daughter of Scar and an unnamed lioness who is almost certainly a close relative of Sarabi along the female line, but who might have a father from a different, unrelated coalition). At worst, she might be a half sister along her father's side and a close cousin on her mother's, and it's pure luck she isn't a full sister.

What they did was take 25 cats who had stable human homes and 25 shelter cats and put them through the following test:

1) cats were given access to a familiar human who would talk to the cat for 1 minute, move to a different location, offer to pet the cat for 1 min, move to a different location, and offer to play with a wand toy for 1 min. (The preference was to compare cats to all stimuli simultaneously, but because they wanted to have the human be the same throughout the whole assay, they had to have the human change activities.)

2) cats were given access to 3 kinds of yummy cat food simultaneously: chicken, tuna, and “chicken flavored soft cat treat.” Each food was presented in 3 levels of accessibility: easy, medium difficulty, and “unsolvable” to prevent cats from actually getting at the food. Cats solved the unsolvable puzzle, so they had to make it harder! That meant that they could see how motivated cats were to consume each food in turn, and any hog cats who ate all the accessible food could still be assayed for choice by how much they hung around the food they liked best. Cats could access all three options for 3 minutes.

3) cats were given access to 3 kinds of biologically relevant kitty sniffs: a square cotton cloth that had been impregnated with the scents of gerbil, catnip, or an unfamiliar cat, and again cats had 3 minutes to investigate all the sniffs.

4) Cats had access to 3 kinds of toys: a movement toy being erratically moved by an experimenter who could not be seen or accessed by the cat, a mouse toy, and a feather toy. Cats also got 3 minutes to investigate the toy.

5) In the final phase of the experiment, cats were able to access all four of the types of stimuli, using whatever individual component each cat had liked best in the four earlier trials. Each was placed in a different quadrant of the room, so the cat couldn’t interact with all four at once. 

There were no difference between shelter and pet cats, as it turned out. you know what else the study found among the cats?

the most popular option among the four was the attention of a human. Yes, more popular than food, which came in second (admittedly, not significantly differently--19 to 14 cats--but hey, small sample size). 

Most interestingly to me, cats prefer to play with an unpredictable wand toy that has a known human on the other end to an unpredictable wand toy without a human operator. 

Cut to the asshole ex boyfriend giving me a Look and saying “You left me for this. Do you really think it was worth it?”

could you maybe at least TRY?

“It is bad,” says the scientist!

“It is maybe not so bad,” says me, who is not a scientist.

I don’t think it is so bad to make yourself equivalent to an animal. Not because you can expect human reasoning from a cat: how silly! But because I can look at a dog, perhaps my dog, and say, “He is just making the growly noise because he wants the toy!” or “he wants the snack!” or “you’re invading his Safety Zone!!!” 

He is not opening the gate into the living room because he wants to spite my mom! He loves my mom and wants to sit on the couch with her and maybe eat her salad with her!! He is not opening the kitchen drawers and taking out her kitchen utensils because it gives him joy to make her mad! He is bored and requires toys!!

He is not a bad dog!! He is doing his very best with what his doggo brain is telling him to do to survive and be comfortable!

He’s learning to trust his People! His actual physical body is learning to be calm!

… vs what we think when we say anthropomorphization and mean “I will view animal needs, behaviours and contexts through my projection that this dog is a small human-as-I-understand-humans and wants exactly those things.” 

The latter is shit, will lead you to wrong conclusions, and probably lead you to inadvertant animal abuse, and should be avoided. 

The former is just observable reality. 

I watched irl queer groups disintegrate bc a few ppl who got into leadership positions used that to make the space hostile towards ace ppl (among others as well), saw friends go from being loud and proud aces n aros to actively avoiding any mention of it and letting ppl assume their sexuality. I myself, having been IDing as ace for 10 years at least, have in the past couple since this whole “"discourse”“ came into being, actively and intentionally stopped telling anyone at all that I’m ace. To put that in some kind of perspective, I am incredibly out as trans and will actively out myself pretty constantly except to total strangers I will never see again. I feel safer telling ppl I’m trans than ace. Especially in queer spaces. It’s fucked me up so much I didn’t even quite grasp how much but today my therapist asked me for the first time about like romantic relationships and I physically could not say I am aro and ace. Completely incapable, utterly frozen, and I just kinda let her believe what she will. Ironically the fact that I’ve gone from being willing and ready to tell ppl I’m ace as just another facet of myself to entirely unable and unsolicited to tell anyone, is probably a thing one might want to talk w one’s therapist about.

The ace discourse has been going on here for around 3 years now with no signs of stopping considering of how many excusionist and aphobic ace discourse keep popping up here and 99% of them are just really horrible people who keep bullying,harassing and mocking ace people as a form of “discourse”

Ace discourse hasnt made ANYONE feel safe in the lgbtqa community except people who are as much of a bully towards ace people as aphobes are and has just created a huge divide among the community bc many lgbtqa ACE people too feel like they cant trust other lgbtqa people non ace people since they  might turn out to be aphobic.

I hope anyone who has EVER contributed to this disgusting agenda against the existence of ace people reads this and realizes how they have only played the part of the bullies and bigots they hated in schools and societies, towards ace people and have contributed to the unsafeness and self hatred ace people feel for being ace.

I have a dreamwidth already

you can find it here

Doot doot doot doot doot doot doot- doot doot doot- dooooo

(10:00)

Let’s take Shetland ponies as another example. True Shetland ponies (Not American Shetlands, which are basically itty bitty carriage horses) are a dwarf breed.

Except, generally dwarf horses are horribly unhealthy. The dwarfism found in miniature horses results in a shortened lifespan, pituitary and thyroid gland problems, breathing problems, deformities of the mouth and chronic soundness issues.

Another form, notable in Friesians, comes with hyperflexion of the fetlocks, deformed hooves, and tendon and ligament laxity. It’s believed it may be a side effect of breeding for their specific gait.

But Shetland ponies? Those things are ridiculously healthy! They have the longest average lifespan of any horse breed, as long as you don’t let them get fat. They can pull up to twice their weight, more than any other breed, and can carry a small adult. They can live on next to nothing. Although they do sometimes produce bracycephalic foals, it’s pretty rare. Whatever’s going on with them is perfectly fine.

Compare the munchkin cat above with this:

Horses are a tricky case because there is no case I’m aware of in which this form of dwarfism has been selected for. It is very common in dogs (breeds that require it include the Pembroke and Cardigan Welsh Corgis, Basset Hounds, Dachshunds, and the Swedish Vallhund), and in their cases there honestly are some forms of health risks in these dogs despite many of them also being old breeds--but these risks (vertebral disc slippage, arthritis) are especially pronounced in more extreme versions of the dwarf breeds with the shortest legs in relation to their torsos, which is generally not the historical shape of the breed. 

By contrast, longer-legged dwarf breeds like Russell Terriers (below), Petit Bassett Griffon Vendeen, and Swedish Vallhunds are not nearly as prone to arthritis, disc disease, and the other issues associated with more extreme dwarfism as, say, Dachshunds (bottom) or Pembroke Welsh Corgis. Note how the Russell Terrier’s legs are proportionately about two to three times the length of the Dachshund’s here. (Vallhunds and Corgis also make a good comparison.) In dogs, at least, the less severe the dwarfism, the easier it is on the animal. 

So how do Munchkin cats stack up? It’s worth pointing out that those floppy-eared dogs are perfectly healthy and that floppy ears on dogs don’t particularly put them at any health risks, but the same is not true of cats--the Scottish Fold, for example, gets its trademark ears from a general cartilage disorder that affects not only the ears but also the cartilage of the whole cat, meaning that the floppy ears that come with that breed are inextricably paired by that mutation with a congenital condition that results in chronic pain and arthritis. We can have floppy-eared dogs without the chronic pain because the specific mutation that causes floppy ears in dogs is almost certainly one in or interacting with an enhancer specific to either the ear or a particular timing of development. That just isn’t the case for any known floppy-ear mutation in cats.

Coming back to the Munchkin, species does seem to protect the Munchkin cats from intervertebral disc disease, which is easily the biggest risk to dogs of these types of structures. In 1995, a number of Munchkin breeders apparently tested their oldest cats for intervertebral disc disease; however, I can’t find good sourcing for the details of the study. I also don’t see any good evidence that refutes it, however, and most criticism of the Munchkin focuses on the arthritis issue. Particularly in the forelimbs, does the pattern of use and extra weight the cats bear on the front paws (their fronts typically being shorter than their hind legs) predispose their joints to more wear and tear than on a longer-legged cat? 

There is no good evidence right now of the question of arthritis, however, particularly over the course of the cats’ lives. There is a research project at the University of Missouri trying to find out, though! I hope they successfully enroll enough cats to be able to confirm whether or not Munchkins are at heightened risk of arthritis so that we can work out whether or not the mutation is detrimental to the cats’ quality of life. 

(For what it’s worth, I do own a (non-intentionally bred, ex-hoarder-situation) cat with some form of dwarfism. She’s brachycephalic, not to the level of an exotic Persian, but to the level of a doll-faced Persian, maybe. She also has a couple of other issues--weird legs, a partial bobtail and a lazy eye--and is generally a lovely little cat, albeit one that I wish had a better quality of life than the sneeziness. She is particularly adorable, but I don’t think we should deliberately create cats like her--for one, we are effectively waiting on her to develop arthritis as she ages because her joints don’t look right. If she doesn’t do so, I will certainly be pleased.) 

It’s not exactly my expertise, but it is the sort of thing the LSB and I might discuss as pillow talk. We were bio nerds. Technically still are, I guess.

The facts are that nobody probably knows for certain, but having two sexes (dioecy) predominates in the animal kingdom. It’s not the case in plants, fungi, or single celled organisms. Also once Dioecy has evolved, or hermaphrodititsm has been lost, in an evolutionary history, it’s difficult for a population to go back.

It should also go without saying, but I wills say it anyway because this is Tumblr, that when discussing hermaphrodites in this context it’s not about humans or intersex individuals, but rather about species in general.

We can assume based on the scientific knowledge already available, that the first cells weren’t divided into male and female, they were just single cells, doing their thing. And at some point they evolved into multi-cellular organisms to better gather nutrients and avoid becoming dead. Not all the cells within a multi-cellular organism reproduce, only a few go on to become what we know as gametes (the sex cells) and zygotes (the combination of two compatible sex cells).

Different species may also have different shapes and strategies for those gametes, too, not everything looks like a sperm, but a large, stationary, nutrient rich one (receiver) and a highly mobile one (donor) is a common and effective strategy, but it’s not the only one. You can get isogamous fungi species (only one type of gamete, and it’s all the same).

So if we’re talking about organisms, and you can assume I’m talking about animals from this point on as plants are not really my thing,

So if we have male and female gametes and their associated support systems, seems like a reasonable default to have both systems in an individual. And embryology of mammals suggests this, sometimes you get remnant cysts. There are duct systems for both male and female reproductive tracts in embryos, Wolffian and Mullerian, but one typically regresses during development. So that implies that at least mammal species (I just don’t know enough embryology for other groups) have hermaphroditism in their evolutionary history. So why lose it?

Hermaphroditism is an advantage for species which don’t encounter each other with much frequency, either because they don’t move very far or very much, and don’t put a lot of energy into raising their young. So for some species, like snails and earthworms, there’s an advantage. But it comes with disadvantages too.

It takes extra energy to maintain two reproductive tracts and you need to stop self-fertilization or you’re going to end up with marked inbreeding and a loss of genetic diversity fairly quickly. Some fish solve this with sequential hermaphroditism, where they are both male and female, but not at the same time. Others are just one or the other.

Now let’s say, hypothetically, you have a hermaphrodite species and one individual has a mutation which renders the female tract non-functional. It can now spend that energy it would have spent on the female reproductive tract on other ways, and if it’s something that permits it to encounter more mates (mobility, increased lifespan, better immune system, etc) then it will potentially be at a reproductive advantage and that mutation will propagate through the population.

And when you have a population that consists of hermaphrodites and males, there is now an advantage to having only a functional female reproductive tract, as you have plenty of mates around, but it is more difficult to compete with males for other mating opportunities. So it may be more efficient to have organisms that are either male or female as far as reproductive strategies go. This also allows more room for evolution of diverse form and function, and behavior.

So it’s about competing with members of the same species, and this strategy becomes more viable with a larger population, and even more with increased energy investments in offspring. Basically, if you want to think of it this way, something ‘cheated’ the hermaphrodite system and became male, and them female developed as a response to that ‘cheating’.

It’s a kind of game theory. New strategies develop to adapt to the dominant strategy in play. If everyone’s putting dragonites in Pokemon Go gyms, you level up your ice types to take them down.

https://iww.org/

Like this one time, I had a machine that was cleaning some extremely dirty grain (our wheat was full of peas, which we didn’t handle, so our machines just dumped it as oversized garbage along with pieces of stalks etc), and had this really heavy sack (because it was a regular burlap sack but now it was full of fucking peas) that the peas were going into that usually would be emptied maybe twice a shift or so, and we had so many peas coming out that it was needing to be emptied like every ten minutes. And by the time you lugged this like eighty-pound bag of peas to the other side of the floor to dump, and then cleaned up the mess the machine dumped on the floor while you were doing that, it was damned near time to dump the peas again.

So it’s getting time for my lunch break (mandatory half hour, plus two coffee breaks, also mandatory), and there is no way in hell I can leave it; the peas will pile up high enough that there will be a fire risk from them rubbing against the machine.

So I call my supervisor and tell him my lunch is almost due, and he should either get someone to spell me off or else shut the machine down so I can have my break (which I desperately needed at that point, as you can imagine).

Well, they had a shitload of wheat to clean all the peas out of, and didn’t want to shut the machine down. So first he told me to let the machine just overflow and clean it up after; and when I told him that would likely start a fire with how many peas were coming out, he told me to “just take my break between emptying the sack.” Which, like, does not actually count as taking a fucking break from it.

So I called down to my union rep and told him what was up, he talked to the supervisor, and then him and the supervisor came and had a look at how many peas were coming out (so many that we were joking that the peas were contaminated with wheat), and then grabbed a couple of guys off sweeping to empty the bag while I ate.

And then put a second body on the floor to help handle all those peas because omfg.

Unions are the best. Remember that in the mid-Eighties, almost half of all jobs were unionized. It was Reagan catering to corporations that got all the workers’ rights that people quite literally had fought and died for almost a hundred years previously rolled right back.

Trump thinks he can get away with it because Jeff Sessions is a goddamn shitbag asshole so he’s counting on people going “oh phew that bastard’s gone” and not thinking about who will REPLACE him.

One thing that’s worked so far is massive nationwide protest. The Mueller Protection Rapid Response Team has a directory of USA and international protest sites that have been organized and waiting to go for months.

They are calling out the Rapid Response for THURSDAY NOVEMBER 8 2018 at 5pm local time.

It's a public Spotify playlist and you can check it out here. I do prune it periodically to focus on songs that seem to go over well, but if you think of another song that meets those criteria, please let me know.