I wish I could watch that show for the first time again.
0
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
I think it's time for gay penguins. Who doesn't like gay penguins, other than people whose opinions I don't really care about?
Now first, I should put up a disclaimer that we really shouldn't try to impose and project human sexuality onto other species. I did a History post on this once in regards to some other penguins. They don't run by the same social rules that we do and have dissimilar anatomy and all that. This being said, these two particular penguins caused such conniptions amongst people who don't like to even consider the very concept of gay penguins that I used the phrase anyway.
I'm not entirely sure this is the correct couple.
Roy and Silo were two male chinstrap penguins who lived in New York City's Central Park Zoo amongst a bunch of other chinstrap penguins. They performed mating rituals to each other (vocalizing, intertwining necks, that sort of thing), and tried to hatch a rock together as if it was an egg. It was simultaneously charming and kind of sad, so a zookeeper decided to give the same-sex couple an egg that had been abandoned by its presumably heterosexual parents. The two successfully incubated the egg and out hatched a little female that the two raised together. She was named Tango
This is not them, but when you have an excuse to post pictures of baby penguins you should take advantage of it.
And then, because penguins are adorable and photogenic, people wrote a children's book about the little family.
Awwwww.
Coincidentally, this book was published just a few months after March of the Penguins, so people had penguins on their mind even more than normal. A children's book that told a simple story of two male penguins who raise an adopted chick, with cute illustrations of cute penguins? Oh yeah, that's a banning. And Tango Makes Three was the most frequently challenged book of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010, and was #2 in 2009. Something something evil unnatural Satan homosexual agenda something something; you know how it goes.
But life goes on. Other books give people conniptions, and zoos continue the experiment (often successfully) of giving same-sex penguin couples abandoned eggs to raise. As for the story of Roy, Silo, and Tango, the sequel in which Roy and Silo drift apart and Silo turns out to be bi and hooks up with a female and Roy after a lot of depression eventually finds another male partner, and Tango ends up pairing with a female, and there's generally a lot of relationship drama and then Tango leads a rebellion against an oppressive government - check the young adult section.
I always just assume that with animals I don't know the female is the larger of the species.
It can vary, but I was more addressing the stereotype that the more colorful bird is the male - which when there's variation in plumage is usually the case.
+6
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
Today is Mr. Rogers' birthday!
I hope that was interesting enough for this thread.
My wife's best friend from like age 5 is a graduate student studying coral reefs. The reefs are dying faster than they can repriduce, so these weird things called giant barrel sponges are moving in the ecology.
It's a 10 minute video, but the short version is that the cranes will preen iron-red mud and vegetation into their feathers to stain them from grey to a reddish-brown. It's believed that the purpose is camouflage, and there are no other species of bird that deliberately paint or stain their feathers in this manner.
And while I'm talking about them, here's a quick video of a sandhill crane dance.
NocrenLt Futz, Back in ActionNorth CarolinaRegistered Userregular
I need to find an article about this one gorilla (can't remember if it was male or female) that learned to actually cook it's food. It can't create fire on it's own, but it's keepers give it matches and it can make a small campfire and cook bits of meat and roast marshmallows. It's also not 100% even on the cooking, but it does know to cook more than a single side of it's food.
+1
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
You're thinking of Kanzi the bonobo. Yes that's from Wikipedia - most of the articles I found on him were from the likes of the Daily Mail and I'm not linking that.
Crap, need some bird fact now...can't break my streak...
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
In fact, let me talk more about geese, particularly thinking about Canada geese.
Canada geese mostly eat grass. They will eat grain when it's available, but mostly they eat grass. Grass is coarse and hard to digest, so most creatures who consume it have special adaptations to derive nutrition from it. Cows have their four stomachs and cud chewing, rabbits chew pre-digested pellets, and so on.
Geese have nothing. No adaptations for grass-eating whatsoever. Canada geese have no pouches or extra stomachs or anything in order to actually break down the grass into something their bodies can readily take in. It's not as if birds are incapable of doing so - the leaf-eating hoatzin (leaves having a similar lack of digestibility) has an enlarged crop that it uses as a fermentation pouch.
This is a hoatzin, by the way.
Snow geese, for example, get around this by grubbing in the ground to dig up roots and tubers, which are more digestible. What do Canada geese do? They eat a lot of grass. They eat, and eat, and eat, and from the sheer bulk of their consumption are able to live off the tiny percentage that their rudimentary digestive tracts are able to extract from the grass, kinda like pandas with bamboo but at least pandas got a wristbone thumb thingy out of evolution. And then the rest of the grass that they can't digest? They poop that out. That is why Canada geese produce so much feces, and anywhere they inhabit permanently gets covered in their long, green, slick, nasty droppings. I found a statistic in a book I'm reading that fifty geese can produce three and a half tons of poop per year.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Yes to the stinky - it protects them from being hunted because no one wants to eat something that smells like manure. If you're saying dino-bird as in it has claws on its wings as a nestling, well actually that probably evolved back independently later rather than being a trait that goes all the way back.
Evolution is funny in its randomness like that. Hoatzins get the ability to eat leaves, a smell that keeps away predators, and useful plus wicked claws, whereas Canada geese have these rudimentary tracts without any adaptations so they crap all the time over everything, because apparently a useful mutation just hasn't shown up or been useful enough to give that much of an advantage.
Though personally I suspect any time a useful mutation shows up in geese they bite and beat it with their wings until it flees.
And now, you know the origins of the term "shit like a goose" as in "After I ate those mango-habanero wings and drank all the beer, I spent the next morning shitting like a goose"
diablo III - beardsnbeer#1508 Mechwarrior Online - Rusty Bock
0
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
geese are the absolute goddamn worst
+39
L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
I have a friend who works for a pest removal company. He was showing me some of the stuff he does, and one of the pests which he can be called for is specifically named "Canadian Geese". Sure, there is another generic category called "Birds", but I was so greatly amused by the fact that geese are specifically called out.
I didn't ask what the correct treatment for an infestation of geese was. I'd rather not know.
0
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I have a friend who works for a pest removal company. He was showing me some of the stuff he does, and one of the pests which he can be called for is specifically named "Canadian Geese". Sure, there is another generic category called "Birds", but I was so greatly amused by the fact that geese are specifically called out.
I didn't ask what the correct treatment for an infestation of geese was. I'd rather not know.
I have a friend who works for a pest removal company. He was showing me some of the stuff he does, and one of the pests which he can be called for is specifically named "Canadian Geese". Sure, there is another generic category called "Birds", but I was so greatly amused by the fact that geese are specifically called out.
I didn't ask what the correct treatment for an infestation of geese was. I'd rather not know.
Must be in the USA? The stupid things are protected up here in Canada, so you can't move them if they have a nest setup, and they get really aggressive in defending any nests.
They also return to the same nesting area each year, I know every summer we get a fluff news story about the ones that have a nest in a persons planter boxes on a balcony. So for about 4 months every summer the poor people just get kicked out of their own balcony.
I have a friend who works for a pest removal company. He was showing me some of the stuff he does, and one of the pests which he can be called for is specifically named "Canadian Geese". Sure, there is another generic category called "Birds", but I was so greatly amused by the fact that geese are specifically called out.
I didn't ask what the correct treatment for an infestation of geese was. I'd rather not know.
Must be in the USA? The stupid things are protected up here in Canada, so you can't move them if they have a nest setup, and they get really aggressive in defending any nests.
They also return to the same nesting area each year, I know every summer we get a fluff news story about the ones that have a nest in a persons planter boxes on a balcony. So for about 4 months every summer the poor people just get kicked out of their own balcony.
I will happily give up my balcony to a nesting pair of Canadian geese
"poor people" my ass.
0
TrippyJingMoses supposes his toeses are roses.But Moses supposes erroneously.Registered Userregular
The Pizza Principle, or the Pizza-Subway Connection, in New York City, is a humorous but generally historically accurate "economic law" proposed by native New Yorker Eric M. Bram. He noted in 1980 that from the early 1960s "the price of a slice of pizza has matched, with uncanny precision, the cost of a New York subway ride."
I have a friend who works for a pest removal company. He was showing me some of the stuff he does, and one of the pests which he can be called for is specifically named "Canadian Geese". Sure, there is another generic category called "Birds", but I was so greatly amused by the fact that geese are specifically called out.
I didn't ask what the correct treatment for an infestation of geese was. I'd rather not know.
Posts
I wish I could watch that show for the first time again.
Now first, I should put up a disclaimer that we really shouldn't try to impose and project human sexuality onto other species. I did a History post on this once in regards to some other penguins. They don't run by the same social rules that we do and have dissimilar anatomy and all that. This being said, these two particular penguins caused such conniptions amongst people who don't like to even consider the very concept of gay penguins that I used the phrase anyway.
I'm not entirely sure this is the correct couple.
Roy and Silo were two male chinstrap penguins who lived in New York City's Central Park Zoo amongst a bunch of other chinstrap penguins. They performed mating rituals to each other (vocalizing, intertwining necks, that sort of thing), and tried to hatch a rock together as if it was an egg. It was simultaneously charming and kind of sad, so a zookeeper decided to give the same-sex couple an egg that had been abandoned by its presumably heterosexual parents. The two successfully incubated the egg and out hatched a little female that the two raised together. She was named Tango
This is not them, but when you have an excuse to post pictures of baby penguins you should take advantage of it.
And then, because penguins are adorable and photogenic, people wrote a children's book about the little family.
Awwwww.
Coincidentally, this book was published just a few months after March of the Penguins, so people had penguins on their mind even more than normal. A children's book that told a simple story of two male penguins who raise an adopted chick, with cute illustrations of cute penguins? Oh yeah, that's a banning. And Tango Makes Three was the most frequently challenged book of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010, and was #2 in 2009. Something something evil unnatural Satan homosexual agenda something something; you know how it goes.
But life goes on. Other books give people conniptions, and zoos continue the experiment (often successfully) of giving same-sex penguin couples abandoned eggs to raise. As for the story of Roy, Silo, and Tango, the sequel in which Roy and Silo drift apart and Silo turns out to be bi and hooks up with a female and Roy after a lot of depression eventually finds another male partner, and Tango ends up pairing with a female, and there's generally a lot of relationship drama and then Tango leads a rebellion against an oppressive government - check the young adult section.
I always just assume that with animals I don't know the female is the larger of the species.
It can vary, but I was more addressing the stereotype that the more colorful bird is the male - which when there's variation in plumage is usually the case.
I hope that was interesting enough for this thread.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/video-friday-nexi-ros-hexapod-roboravens
(and my company gets a mention so, yisss)
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/sbs/research/marine-biology-research/sponge-marine-ecology/research/sponge-ecology
Sandhill cranes (pictured above) paint themselves.
It's a 10 minute video, but the short version is that the cranes will preen iron-red mud and vegetation into their feathers to stain them from grey to a reddish-brown. It's believed that the purpose is camouflage, and there are no other species of bird that deliberately paint or stain their feathers in this manner.
And while I'm talking about them, here's a quick video of a sandhill crane dance.
Crap, need some bird fact now...can't break my streak...
Canada geese are jerks.
Canada geese mostly eat grass. They will eat grain when it's available, but mostly they eat grass. Grass is coarse and hard to digest, so most creatures who consume it have special adaptations to derive nutrition from it. Cows have their four stomachs and cud chewing, rabbits chew pre-digested pellets, and so on.
Geese have nothing. No adaptations for grass-eating whatsoever. Canada geese have no pouches or extra stomachs or anything in order to actually break down the grass into something their bodies can readily take in. It's not as if birds are incapable of doing so - the leaf-eating hoatzin (leaves having a similar lack of digestibility) has an enlarged crop that it uses as a fermentation pouch.
This is a hoatzin, by the way.
Snow geese, for example, get around this by grubbing in the ground to dig up roots and tubers, which are more digestible. What do Canada geese do? They eat a lot of grass. They eat, and eat, and eat, and from the sheer bulk of their consumption are able to live off the tiny percentage that their rudimentary digestive tracts are able to extract from the grass, kinda like pandas with bamboo but at least pandas got a wristbone thumb thingy out of evolution. And then the rest of the grass that they can't digest? They poop that out. That is why Canada geese produce so much feces, and anywhere they inhabit permanently gets covered in their long, green, slick, nasty droppings. I found a statistic in a book I'm reading that fifty geese can produce three and a half tons of poop per year.
Tl;dr: Canada geese are full of crap.
Evolution is funny in its randomness like that. Hoatzins get the ability to eat leaves, a smell that keeps away predators, and useful plus wicked claws, whereas Canada geese have these rudimentary tracts without any adaptations so they crap all the time over everything, because apparently a useful mutation just hasn't shown up or been useful enough to give that much of an advantage.
Though personally I suspect any time a useful mutation shows up in geese they bite and beat it with their wings until it flees.
I didn't ask what the correct treatment for an infestation of geese was. I'd rather not know.
Christmas dinner.
Must be in the USA? The stupid things are protected up here in Canada, so you can't move them if they have a nest setup, and they get really aggressive in defending any nests.
They also return to the same nesting area each year, I know every summer we get a fluff news story about the ones that have a nest in a persons planter boxes on a balcony. So for about 4 months every summer the poor people just get kicked out of their own balcony.
Or so I've heard
I will happily give up my balcony to a nesting pair of Canadian geese
"poor people" my ass.
Rainbow lorikeets eating meat leaves bird experts astonished
I was surprised to see meat leaves the other day - I wasn't expecting a hambush
This
Man eating rice, China, 1901-1904
Impressive.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/1JI9WWSRW1YJI