mousewings

Kamen Rider Geats OTP || Ukiyo Ace/Azuma Michinaga aka

“I’ll take you on anytime.”

Fun Fact: This is generally agreed to be a direct reference to IRL director David Lynch

I took my second ADHD pill a little too late I guess because it was suddenly 4 am and I made this thing about why parasitic organisms are shaped like ways and how to consider that for your fiction settings. Raw text version below the cut for people with busted seeing:

Here are Argulus fish lice, a large family found in both fresh and saltwater. They’re transparent, scale-shaped and almost invisible - even a friendly cleaner fish might miss a few! The black dots are their eyes and the large circles behind those are a pair of powerful suction cups! Their little legs can scoot them around the host surface without ever having to break their suction.

This is a species of “sucking” louse, a group that almost exclusively infests mammals, and it has a very long snout that most other lice don’t need, so if you only found the parasite, you could already deduce the existence of a very large or tough-skinned mammal in the area! Specifically, this type of louse affects only elephants and warthogs :)

This completely different louse on the other hand has an extremely compact, sturdy body with stumpy, exceptionally powerful gripping claws, so that tells you it lives on something that would easily shake off other lice: it lives on elephant seals that can dive thousands of feet deep. Even its antennae are stubby, so they don’t break off in a powerful current.

And here’s a typical looking flea (this one is from a hedgehog!) with all its spines and bristles, all pointing backwards, which allow it to “swim” at high speed through host fur, BUT WAIT!!!