tired n gay

Rats vs Mice

Some people say that cats don't make expressions but you can see the thoughts in this boy's head plain as day

Cat butler consoling Da Juanr (full name "Hua Juan" - a type of steamed and twisted bun)

tomboy, meaning “this child is clearly queer but let’s hope it goes away”

sensitive, meaning “clearly neurodivergent and often distressed but let’s keep going until they grow numb”

self-sufficient, meaning “next to zero trust in parental figures’ ability in various aspects of parenting”

Oh boy, do I have a story for you!

There was a study published last year about the first instance of color camoflauge in a caterpillar of the butterfly species Ariadne merione. The caterpillars look like this:

They were keeping them in a container with a blue lid:

And completely out of nowhere...

One of the caterpillars turns bright blue, the exact shade of the container lid.

Camoflauge like this is extremely rare among caterpillars, and has never been observed in this species before, much less to this degree. Blue colors are extremely rare even in butterflies, and this change didn't happen slowly as it typically would with caterpillars - it happened between one molt.

There wasn't even anything wrong with this caterpillar - it pupated fine, turned into a healthy butterfly, and was released. As you can imagine, this was all very interesting to the researchers because, well, this had never been recorded in this species before. So it begs the question: why? Is it a random mutation that allowed for the color change? Do all Ariadne merione caterpillars have the capacity to do this but simply don't most of the time? I don't know and the researchers didn't really know either. But what I do know is that this bright blue baja-blast colored caterpillar will live rent free in my head forever.

If any of you are interested in reading the study, here is the link where you can find the pdf: