helianthus05

“He picked up the next pear and climbed up on to the tree's low fork to hand it over. The gold surface striped briefly as it reflected their fingers.”

12th artfight attack!!

[ Click here to participate ]

It's open until 19th July 2026, and it's open to anyone whose gender(s) (or lack thereof) defy the restrictive binary of male/female.

Reblog for SCIENCE~~~

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

Female eastern tiger swallowtails can be differentiated from males by the blue iridescence on the dorsal hind wing. Female eastern tiger swallowtails also come in two morphs, a black one & a yellow one.

I found one myself about a year ago:

This individual shows it quite faintly, but you can clearly see that this is a mostly black morph female with just the faintest yellow morph coloration shining through. Other individuals can be far brighter, appearing grayish-yellow or even mostly yellow—it's a big spectrum!

This kind of "confused" female coloration—both a uniform overlay and a more clear-cut mosaic pattern—seems to happen far, far more often than actual gynandromorphy does, which makes perfect sense. Gynandromorphy is an error of expression of sex chromosomes, while this phenomenon is within the same sex but is instead the cells being confused about which female patterning to express. Far less impactful from a reproductive standpoint (thus more likely to pass on to offspring), and in many cases more noticeable to us, as a male-female gynandromorph tiger swallowtail could go unnoticed since both sexes have a yellow morph. It takes someone who's paying more attention to notice a lack of blue on one half of the butterfly and know what that means, but anyone can see a patchy or gray one!

Amongst the Stars - Melissa Franklin Sanchez , 2024.

British , b. 1984 -