in the spring, there was a family of ducks around my uni's campus that had mostly standard yellow/black-mix ducklings, and one solely yellow duckling, which seems to have grown up into a mostly white duck (with some black/dark feathers) is it likely to be a leucistic duck? (I've been trying but failing to get a decent photo of it to tag you in)
Without looking at the duck it’s hard to say - but it might be a Manky Mallard.
With the exception of the Muscovy duck (the one with the weird face growths) all domestic ducks are derived from the wild Mallard. They can interbreed with each other, and they’re very social, so in areas with lots of domestic ducks, you’ll sometimes just see a white farmyard-style Peking duck swimming around with the wild Mallards. (People also “release” their unwanted pet ducks into the wild. I have Stories about why this is a terrible idea, including the fact that ducks practice a lot of dubcon and noncon, to put it gently.) finally, a “released” duckling, if it is lucky, might just be able to wangle its way into being adopted by wild parents.
So it’s not unusual for Manky Mallards to pop up, getting the birdwatchers all excited with their funky colours and patterns, before they find out that the duck in question is just a farmyard x wild cross.
Pure yellow ducklings absolutely do turn into white ducks, so the question is - is it a leucistic mallard, an albino or a farmyard descendant? And for that, I just don’t have an answer! I’d have to see the adult duck. By which I mean YES PLEASE SEND ME PICTURES I MUST ADD THEM TO THE HOARD.
But if we consider that white domestic ducks are originally derived from Mallards… are they not ALL a type of color morph, in themselves? Where does the leucistic wildtype color morph meet the domesticated color variant? Is it different for different species of animals, and why? That is our philosophical assignment to ponder for today.
the ducks are very friendly to people eating lunch outside, so one of my friends managed to take this photo of them today in the sunshine
[ID: six brown ducks and one white duck, standing clustered together on grass. one brown duck is looking directly at the camera, the rest have their heads turned sideways. the white duck has its head bent towards the ground]
it seems to have the same kind of black pattern as the rest of its gang, but is white underneath while they’re brown. as they all appeared at same time and about the same size it seemed like an odd-one-out part of the family, rather than an Ugly Duckling(/Cygnet) situation
for comparison, some of the family of ducklings in May:
[ID: an adult female duck stands on a plank of wood into a pond, with a yellow duckling and a black/yellow mix duckling standing further down the wood at the edge of the water. there are two black/yellow ducklings in the water with their heads down]
(people were very excited about the Single Yellow Duckling, so quite a lot of photos were taken of it, but I haven’t seen as many of the White Duck)
Aaah!! Yes! 😍😍I think you’re right! that’s a leucistic male! See how his wing patches (usually iridescent violet/blue) are still dark? And how his head (usually iridescent green/black in a mature male) is dark, stopping abruptly where his white vicar collar would be? That’s a classic thing! Leucism is often “just like the wild color pattern but kinda bleached” and if you see faded color where the iridescence on a bird would go, it suggests the underlying pattern, and thus genetics, are wildtype. Like you say, if he has the same PATTERN, just with white colouring, then he’s more likely to be a morph than a manky!
In the first pic, it even looks like he has a dab of Mallard eye makeup, further suggesting that he has a dilute version of the colours his siblings have.
He’s immature in the second pic and so are his brothers in the front right - you can see they have dark heads with the color coming to an abrupt stop where the vicar collar will be. These dark heads will go iridescent in their breeding season and the rest of the male color pattern will develop. Females are also brown, but they don’t have this abrupt line. I think the one in the far back is a young lady. The gender of the individual on the far right is a mystery to me and I support that.
I take it all back…. I was skeptical since leucism is more unusual, and Manky Mallards are quite common… but I was a fool and an unbeliever!
Please thank and congratulate your friend! You are the heroes of my day!
Hey, this post may contain sexually explicit content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.
I proudly present to you the cause of every linguistic trauma a student of German studies may suffer from:
EIERSCHALENSOLLBRUCHSTELLENVERURSACHER
(= a tool that causes a predetermined breaking point in the shell of an egg)
can you imagine to analyze the morphology of this word??? This was our first example for the morphologic analysis in a lesson called “introductory course of linguistics”
No, for serious, you guys. You need to find a copy of this book. It is amazing. My coworkers and I tell everybody about it.
Every picture in the book is like this. They are all inexplicable, full of exactly the kind of people you expect to be in a book with this cover, wearing clothing that is either entirely inappropriate for mushrooming or exactly the clothes you wear mushrooming (which are eccentric), and doing strange and silly things with fungs.
It is amazing.
Probably it is also informative about mushrooms, as our local mushroomers do check it out a lot, but mostly the pictures are just great.
There were some seriously unorthodox project designs rattling around the
Reichsluftfahrtministerium
(Air Ministry) before and during WW2, but if you wanted really weird stuff, B&V could provide it. They even got one of their oddities (the BV-141) accepted for service…
“German Aircraft of World War Two”
(J.R. Smith & A.L. Kay, Putnam 1990) says it “handled well and possessed in full measure all the characteristics desirable for its role (but) official conservatism prevailed…”
“Warplanes of the Luftwaffe” (ed. D. Donald, Aerospace Publishing 1994) says the same:
“one of aviation’s true oddities…performed surprisingly well (but) the main stumbling-block was fear of the type’s unusual configuration.”
“The World’s Worst Airplanes” (Bill Yenne, Bison Books 1990) states: “The Bv-141 proved more
airworthy than its detractors wanted to believe (but) never shook off the
stigma of its disfigured appearance.”
Translation: it was an entirely adequate aircraft (but) it looked too weird.
Blohm & Voss liked asymmetry. Here’s the Bv P.179…
The Bv P.194 (for extra jollies, a prop in one nacelle and a jet pod under the other)…
The Bv P.204 (now almost conventional, with the prop in the middle, but hey, let’s install a single jet offset under one wing)…
Oh-kaaay…
This is happening. Meet the Bv P.111…
Even the B & V take on a symmetrical trimotor was weird.
The forward view on the Bv P.170 must have been pretty minimal.
Since it
was a tail-dragger, there might have been visibility under the plane’s “armpits” during taxiing, but otherwise there’s nothing to see but metres of nose, wing and engine nacelles with a runway (and ground-crew!) out there somewhere.
These and many
other oddities
get
trotted out by a certain sort of documentary
with the tag “Could these Wonder Weapons have Won the War?” Since they mostly qualified for the
term “paper or plastic”, the answer to that portentous question is “NO”.
(What they did do was keep their designers, draughtsmen, engineers etc. looking useful enough to avoid being given rifles and sent to the Eastern Front, so in that respect they were a success…)
coworker told me he “hates all mollusks” today. and to each their own obviously but like… theres 100k species of mollusk… you really hate all of them bro? nautiluses and oysters and snails and nudibranches and chitons and thousands of animals youve never even heard of???? what did ammonites even fucking do to you
fishyfishyfishtimes
