pangur-and-grim
specsthespectraldragon
animal teeth r so cool like....the way they r designed and like the positions in the mouth depending on the food they eat. If any1 has any like random facts abt this stuff stored in their brain pls tell .....
ohoh! this is one of my favorite subjects, just because of how much information you can glean from an animal’s teeth! there’s so much, but i’ll start on what i’ve been excited to talk about recently:
multiple rows of teeth and how they’re used! a lot of people will discuss sharks and how they use their teeth, regularly bringing up their multiple rows, but very few people seem to understand the purpose of having multiple rows and how they change something’s bite.
for example - multiple rows of teeth combine very badly with higher bite power. it’s a lot of force, yes, but you’re having to distribute it across several different points, when you want a single edge to bear all that force at once, to act like a sword or a knife and cut through what you’re biting.
otherwise, it works more like a crushing motion, or how a bed of nails works. there’s a lot of sharp pointy things, yes, but because they’re all together and all being given the same amount of force, they’re effectively harmless!
(this is also why you don’t want to but too many nails on the end of a baseball bat. some are good, but too many and you’ve just made another bludgeoning weapon)
even great white sharks, famous for their multiple rows of teeth, will only use one row at a time! the others are folded back, ready to replace the first row when they fall out or are damaged. this is why their bites are often so clean when they sever bone, its being hit by one focused point at a great power!
so, what are multiple teeth rows actually good for?
soft-bodied prey!
while using multiple teeth rows at a high force just results in crushing your prey, having many different points at much less power works really good in catching things with softer, squishier bodies. while the first example was like a bed of nails, this is more like barbed wire - it’s designed to catch on soft, squishy bits and tear at them. and, in the ocean, a lot more animals are soft and squishy, since their gelatinous bodies don’t have to worry about holding them up against gravity, and thus having many, many teeth rows of sharp, needle-like teeth can be used against everything from squid and octopi to even a fair number of fish, with their smaller, more delicate bones.
this is also why animals with more rows of teeth often don’t bother with having excessive bite forces - to create power like that, you very fundamentally have to rearrange your entire jaw setup and skull (particularly to avoid breaking your own face when you go to bite something), and it’s just not worth it if what you’re eating has nothing hard to bite through in the first place. less is more, when it comes to biology.
(and now is where you may bring up that moray eels do, in fact, eat crab and other hard-bodied creatures - but you have to remember that moray eels and their body plan are VERY dexterous. you don’t need to bite hard if you can pull off their legs to eat, or simply thrash about and break their shells apart!)
similarly, this is why a lot of “average” sharks like sand tigers will have multiple tooth rows of fairly simple teeth - because it’s a fairly easy catch-all underwater, where most of the things around you are fairly squishy to begin with.
this is also why on land we don’t really have many animals with multiple rows of teeth, and those that do are very small and eat insects: because tetrapods invested very heavily into having some very big, very thick bones, and those multiple rows of teeth can very easily shatter if you try to use them on something too hard.
you might also notice that the animals with multiple rows of teeth all have very small, thin teeth, unlike the much broader teeth of the great white above. this also comes down to biophysics - you need much thicker, heftier teeth if you’re going to be exerting a lot of force on them (to again, avoid breaking them from your own power), but theres also a very real cost to making bigger teeth like that, plus its just much less efficient if you’re trying to shred soft prey.
however, there is an exception to having multiple rows of teeth with a high bite force! and that is if you’re wanting to crush prey to begin with!
rays have the same multiple-tooth-rows as sharks, but while their cousins are chasing down and eating fish, lots of rays are more adapted to eating crustaceans! hence, if they have a very high bite force, and distribute it out into a single place, they can very easily crush things with shells and harder bodies, though its less effective for cutting through stuff or for trapping squishy prey.
this is why a lot of herbivorious animals have something very simiiar too - the plants aren’t going to run away, so you don’t need to trap them, and they are very tough and hard to break apart, so cutting would only be a precision tool that can’t take care of all of the plant material you need.
THIS IS SO COOL YES PLEASE TELL ME UR TEETH KNOWLEDGE I LOVE THIS
Thank you for including my all time favorite photo of a caecilian. This is another good one:
Literally looks like a movie prop. Like you’d see this and think it’s “too cool” to be a real animal.
ask-a-vetblr
freeasfishes asked:
Do you think an animal like a hagfish which doesn't have a true spine could have polio?
I do not have a hagfish nor am I afflicted with polio so this is not a medical question or anything I just want to know if I were to acquire a hagfish sometime in the future would this be a concern.
Sueanoi here,
Polio is caused by a virus highly specific to humans. A hagfish is very distantly related to us and therefore cannot be infected by this virus.
reflectedeve
There was a Multifandom Doodle prompt for “Pumpkin or Jack-o-Lantern Headed Girl(s),” and I immediately wanted to draw a spooky girl gang. For some reason, “girl gang” took me straight to “teddy girls.” I had so much fun with this piece!
theres-no-protocol-for-this
greatshell-rider
one of the best things martha wells does is let murderbot retain its ownership of its body and boundaries. it's so common to see in fiction for a traumatized and "anti social" or shy character to, over the course of the story, "come out of their shell" in order to show closeness and trust between them and another character. that's frequently done by "fixing" the character's preferences/actions--after everything that the friend has done for the traumatized character, now's their chance to show how they've "healed" by getting rid of their boundaries and acting how the friend does, how they're "supposed" to
for murderbot, that could've been done in so many dumb cheesy ways, like murderbot allowing dr mensah and the other survey members to hug it whenever they wanted, or murderbot "making the effort" to look them in the eyes when talking, or even murderbot promising to stay by mensah's side/on preservation forever, getting rid of its hard currency cards because it knows it won't need them anymore yadda yadda retching as i speak
instead, murderbot's needs and preferences are the ones being accommodated for. mensah gets it its drones so not only can it build its own surveillance system in order to do its job/feel safe, but so it can interact with humans in the manner it prefers, watching through cameras rather than making eye contact itself. pin lee literally puts "no hugging" in its contract. despite preservation primarily using a barter system, murderbot is paid in hard currency that allows it to leave the station/return to the corporation rim if ever it wants to. it's not forced to conform to the "normal" standards of showing and reciprocating affection and trust just to make the audience go awww how touching
that makes the times murderbot does allow itself to be touched all the more significant, because it shows how serious the situation is lol, since likely a hostile is shooting at them and murderbot is using its body as a shield or picking them up to run away or is carrying them as protection or because they're hurt - all things murderbot is okay to do, because that's its job, that's what it's most fiercely passionate about, keeping its clients alive and safe. and even after an event like that, it's never presumed by its friends that they're allowed to cross murderbot's boundaries now, or that they can expect it to cross them regularly now. yet the level of caring remains the same!
murderbot's "wrong" actions are never treated as something to fix but are respected and accommodated for by the people it cares for and that is so fuckin important
lexicals
ALT
ALT[ID: Two sketchy drawings of SecUnit from The Murderbot Diaries, depicted as a humanoid of athletic build with short, messy straight dark hair. In the first image it’s standing in a neutral pose with two small drones flying around it, looking off to one side with an uncomfortable/annoyed expression. It’s wearing a loose hoodie and cargo pants, and a high-collared t-shirt which reads in small text, “If you can read this stop looking at me.”
The second image also shows it standing in a neutral pose, wearing the “one outfit, 235 pockets” look from this tweet. Most notably this consists of a baseball cap with pockets on it, a face mask with a pocket, a jacket with pockets covering every square inch of it, a backpack also covered in pockets, a harness that adds two more small backpacks across the chest, a bum bag/fanny pack, cargo pants with pockets all the way down either side, and shoes with pockets on the sides. Several arrows point to different parts of it and all read “pockets.” End ID.]
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Starting off the new year with some Pure Silliness
cosmictuesdays
shes-a-voodoo-child
Yes, because the other guy tried to overturn our democracy. Get a fucking grip.
Also worth mentioning that he's not like just saying this. Its been a year and every attempt at a federal policy has been blocked by Republican judges. There is no federal solution left, thanks in part to Trump's appointees and their vendetta and the active attempt by Republicans to prolong the pandemic and run on the fact that it hasn't ended yet.
To everyone who wants Biden just to ignore federal law and the way our government is set up: do you want tyranny? Because that's how you get tyranny.
The U.S. president has a lot of power, but he can't nullify court decisions and he can't ignore congress, and we don't want the office to be able to do so.
Hey! So this was a partial quote. And a huge actual misquote. Biden had a call with ALL the governors to talk about the role states have to play in curbing COVID. Things like providing testing sites, promoting the boosters - stuff like that. He actually didn't just say "your prob" and jump on out of there.
Because like it or not, it's been well established by the courts that the states have the ultimate authority over mandates for public health. The feds can make money available, but the states have to do the work.
Can we please make it a rule to actually Google what someone said if it seems like a post was designed to just make you made and react?
self-reblogging to add: hey remember how it was, like, a proven fact that people were intentionally coming into liberal spaces to convince us all the options were bad and we shouldn't vote? remember how that was a huge issue in the 2016 election?
OP is doing exactly that.
always be super fucking wary of anyone trying to convince you to just nope out of the political process.
they are not your friends.
they are are trying to suppress your vote.
ladyyatexel
ladyyatexel
comrade-bastard asked:
Hey, just a heads up but the hyperlink text in your tumblr bio is unreadable on mobile due to your mobile theme background being a very light tone and the hyperlinks being white!
ladyyatexel answered:
I’m not experiencing the same thing?
If it helps here's what it looks like from a Samsung galaxy if that matters.
I'm on a Samsung Galaxy Note!
I'll try to adjust it
Why is everything a problem right now >:|
I made it fucking green hopefully that helps
dxmedstudent
doedipus
If you had shown me this site in 2005 I would have asked you if had checked your virus software lately, because this looks like a bad one. I would have clicked away so fast it would give you whiplash. Looking at these sites now, I have to convince myself that they aren't virus laden sites and fight against the pavlovian urge to just navigate away.
I navigate away anyways because fuck them, there's usually a better site (though they are dwindling quickly). I still can't get over how the internet "as intended" today looks like a malware ridden fever dream from 20 years ago. This is every story I've ever read about an empire that used to be great and has now fallen into turmoil.
bunjywunjy
arcticflakes
