i swear to god i didn’t intend this to become an entire comic but HERE WE GO this happens to me all the time now i guess
WHAT CONTEXT DOES THIS TAKE PLACE IN??? WHY IS ODO THERE? WHY IS GAILA OR SOMEONE WHO LOOKS VAGUELY LIKE HIM THERE? WHO’S THAT OTHER GUY??? WHAT HAPPENED TO ISHKA’S OTHER ARM??????
well, i don’t know why you think you’re going to get those answers here. this is not an answers kinda place.
The keeper we talked to says no diagram prepares you for the task at hand.
5 Things Nobody Tells You About Breeding Endangered Animals
#5. We Are Constantly Masturbating Animals
I’ve sat through entire lectures discussing the proper way to give a crocodile a hand job (answer: very carefully), and I was once assigned to a team responsible for jerking off cranes. It’s not that we’re just really enthusiastic about animal wangs; for rarer crocs, artificial insemination makes more sense than traditional breeding, because there’s less chance of them murdering each other. Zoo animals kill intended mates all the time.
Nursery web spider (Pisaura mirabilis).
These guys get their names from the funky box-web the female builds when it’s time for their babies to hatch out. They look like wolf spiders, but they’re not, which is probably not that big a comfort, because something like 99% of our scream-and-cry-and-set-shit-on-fire reaction to spiders is looks based.
These guys are one of the spiders where the male will offer the female a courtship gift, which are great when it comes to increasing the chances of getting laid/increasing the length of copulation/decreasing the number of competitors who have access/increasing the fitness of resulting offspring/all of the above. In this particular spider’s case, it’s mostly the first two.
Males will catch a bug, wrap it up in silk, and offer it to females with whom they’d like to have awful spider sex. The wrapping doesn’t just make the bug more attractive to the female—spider silk can be loaded up with spider pheromones, in addition to being more noticeable against the background—it gives the male a better grip in case the lady-spider tries to steal it and run away.
Remember how I told you guys that spiders are fucking shady as hell? Well, spiders are fucking shady as hell. They just are. I don’t know how often or how deeply I can tell you people about the perfidy of spiders, but I do know that it can never be enough to fully catalog the shameful behavior in which they engage. Unlike bees, there’s just no end.
Anyway, with these guys, it’s just nonstop sexytimes ridiculousness. Like a third of the time, the boys will just wrap up any nonsense they find to try and entice one of the girls, which they kind of get away with because of the wrapping. And the girls will just try to steal the package and run off with it, like “Fuck you, brooooooooo,” because bugs are delicious and they’re bored. And to counter that, the boys will grab onto the bug and go all passive-resistance on her. Like, that thing with kleptoparasitism, and the spider that’ll just hang on to the other side of the ant and play dead? And how that’s just like the saddest move ever? Well, that move is five times as embarrassing when you’re pulling it during sex.
I feel like I should add at this point that the top photo is spiders boning. Spider sex is kind of complicated, in that it involves the male jizzing on a wad of silk, sucking the sperm up into his palps, and using them to inject it into the receptacles on a receptive lady-spider. This is why spiders always look like they’re sixty-nining in those nature documentaries where black widows are nomming on their mates.
Nursery web spiders both remain immobile during the actual palp-bumping—because that could go so wrong, so quickly, if they didn’t—but part of the reason the males offer the gift-wrapped insect is that they’d like a couple of shots at inseminating the female. The female is usually out to bone more than just one male, though, so her ideal night out is going to look more like a hit-and-run dinner-date.
The indignity of clinging to a doggie-bag while playing dead in an attempt to get laid again isn’t lost on the spiders, either. When they’re trying to skate by offering a fake-out bundle, they don’t bother.
Spiders, man. They’re fucking terrible.
[http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/329]
chequerootlurks
I’m an apprentice tattoo artist. An artist who owns a few shops invited me to their team.
I’ve got a long way to go. I’m still learning basic shading techniques. Working with a tattoo pen adds depth to the traditional flat plane I’m used to working on.
One is never too old to learn a new skill.
At times I feel like a complete newb.
So, here is a meme that I love. I’m sharing it for everyone who is learning something new.
