Lost Inside My Head

let’s talk about housecats and how fucking weird they are evolutionarily/anthropologically

like who thought it was a good idea to have tiny malicious predators in our homes anyways????? (not us actually)

are they even domesticated????!!!?? (yes) do they even feel LOVE???????!!? (yes)

LET’S LEARN ABOUT CATS

“you ready 2 learn punk”

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

See, Cuban crocodiles are a super social species - and one of the few where the fathers stick around and provide paternal care for the babies! In the wild, babies would regularly interact with both parents, including when they provide food. This call is basically the type of vocalization that the babies use to communicated with their parents.

These crocodiles are being hand-raised as part of a private-sector breeding and reintroduction program (because the parents are so protective of their offspring that if you left them the babies to raise, you’d never be able to safely get close to them), and so they’re responding to the guy in the video the same way because he’s constant known safe individual and also the provider of food. He’s not a threat - his presence is a good thing, and he’s worth interacting with because it normally means food. You can also tell from their behavior and body language that they’re not stressed: some of the crocodiles are actively climbing on him and interaction of their own volition, but the ones that aren’t don’t show any indicators of hyper-vigilance. If that were a distress call, every crocodile that heard it would be alert and on edge looking for the threat. Distress calls tend to only happen once or twice, because in the wild continuing to make noise makes a baby more vulnerable: so these crocodiles wouldn’t be continually vocalizing if they felt threatened. There’s no snapping or gaping or freezing, all of which would be behavioral indicators of distress or discomfort. (Here’s a video of a baby nile crocodile being harassed by photographers which will give you a visual reference for both freezing and gaping.)