Nimblenewt

Daylight savings is a curse. My drive to work this morning as the sun rose was so good for my mood, I felt glad it was spring. Now on it will be darkness for another month. The only good part will be hearing the great horned owl hoot more at work, it always goes hoot-wild just before the sun rises.🦉

a metal robot arm extends from the top right of the frame, holding a plastic kitchen brush with bright white bristles out toward a very large, dark red squid just behind it. the squid's arms are splayed open, with the bright white suckers facing outward

hey did you know that a viable way to get a DNA sample from cephalopods is to literally scrape them with a kitchen brush

this is ROV SuBastian from the Schmidt Ocean Institute deploying the KBOS (Kitchen Brush Of Science) on a megalocranchia which is understandably less than thrilled 🧪🦑

A small frog in the spout of a green watering can.

🌱 I wondered why the water wasn't flowing out of the watering can spout properly! Hello little frog! 🐸 #Gardening #AustralianWildlife

Oh! I did not see that...I just looked at your youtube videos for other works and saw it there, along with how you animated the great turning owl gaze, very nifty!🦉

I enjoyed it! Thank you for sharing it with us. I just watched Hipposterous as well, the clever details on the periphery of the action were really fun.

Great range of facial expressions, esp the final minute. Also I like the bird on the skull.

*chuckle*

Assorted white and yellow and minty green and dark grey lichens coat the bark of a young Magnolia stellata like wallpaper, so that the bark's own texture is obscured. The variety of lichen textures is pleasing as they jostle each other for surface space.

Lichen coating the bark of a star magnolia beside the hardware store.
#lichen #FungiFriends

photo of the frog effigy vessel on display at museum Red & tan, molded & incised details, stirrup spout

photo of gallery sign: “Moche artists); North Coast, Peru Stirrup-spout bottle with toad 200-500 CE Ceramic, slip Gift of Conny and Fred Landmann, 1992 (1992.60.8) Recorded provenance: Conny and Frederick E. Landmann, New Hampshire, by 1992 Moche artists were close observers of the natural world, and their early ceramics often depicted animals with considerable fidelity. Made before molds were commonly used, these effigies demonstrate an expansion of the sculptural possibilities of clay vessels. Some vessels captured salient features of animals two-dimensionally; in later centuries, slip painting would become the favored means to convey ideas.”

#FrogFriday in the Ancient Americas wing at the Met 🐸: (1/3)
Moche artist(s); North Coast, Peru Stirrup-spout bottle with #toad 200-500 CE
Ceramic, slip
1992.60.8
#AndeanArt #PeruvianArt #IndigenousArt

Maybe it's hanging out on the balcony enjoying the fresh air?

305 Day - our slogan is ‘Civic Pride Through Biodiversity’ and today we celebrate Miami, an incomparable city harboring manatees and other marine megafauna in its midst. Don’t take it for granted! Today we were graced by this absolute unit of a manatee!! 🤩〰️🐮〰️🌇 #305day #coralcitycamera

An owl meme of a much gibbled "before-coffee" owl that looks like yoda if he'd been tarred, feathered and driven over by a steamroller, and a super alert "after coffee" owl. No meme photo attribution (is that a thing?) was included when it was sent to me.

I also discovered in the search that my co-workers have sent me this owl meme 16 times over the past 6 years, which is both amusing and a bit concerning. I remind them of the before-owl *that much*?!? haha

*sigh* everyone at work is celebrating the end of switching wake-ups twice every year (my province is sticking with Daylight Savings Time forever after this Sunday) but I'm feeling a bit glum about all the pitch black shift-starts for soooo long next fall through spring.

A cluster of 4 shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) mushrooms are pictured on the forest floor. They are cone shaped mushrooms that have a white cap with a beige tint, that peels gradually back into a sort of many-hangnail layers effect. As they grow taller the bottom liquifies into a black ooze that gives them another nickname, ink-caps. This group has been attacked by a slug, and it has made several holes in the cap. The one in the middle is white and cartoon ghost-shaped, and has two holes like eyes looking at the camera, made extra haunting by the blackness of the inky ooze interior of the cap. I think I meant to post this on Hallowe'en but clearly forgot. My phone's search function thinks it's an owl, and it actually does look like one enough that I laughed out loud.

I wanted to post an owl photo to raise people's spirits, so I typed "owl" into my elderly iphone's photo search to find the two owls I have ever photographed, and of the 57 non-owl photos it gave me, this was the funniest.
#owl #FungiFriends #mycology #ShaggyMane

Great news! Also that owl has fantastic eyebrows.

There are new reasons to celebrate World Wildlife Day in Saskatchewan. Located 40 kilometres east of the East Block of Grasslands National Park near Rockglen, NCC and a local landowner have formalized a new conservation agreement, securing 426 hectares of grassland habitat.

Scientists tagging 10,000 bogong moths to solve mystery The project's success largely relies on citizen scientists spotting a distinct white dot on the wings of moths.

"We cool the moths down on ice, and then we give them a couple of puffs of CO2 … and that just knocks them out for a couple of minutes so we can gently remove a couple of scales, and glue a little piece of paper with some eyelash glue onto their wing," Dr Umbers said.
#inverts #ScienceDetectives

Hey! Thanks for posting this link. I just learned how to hear a word, very slowly, in practice mode🐸

Peacock running past a beautiful perennial border, vibrant blue neck extended, speckled wings tucked, fancy tail plumage dragging behind in the grass. They have very big feet, a bit like a moorhen's, and are pretty aerodynamic when at full gallop, if you ignore the massive rustling impediment of the dragging tail.

One of the peacocks last summer, panicking because the peahen wandered off, bored, while he was showing off his tail for the belligerent Canada Geese.🙄 Gotta catch up! (This happens constantly.)

A peahen in front of the miniature goat paddock (after hours, the goats are in their barn). Her grey body has subtle white/black mottling on the wing feathers like a hawk would have, and her neck ruff is a gloriously vibrant iridescent sapphire-emerald mix with white edging and some copper/brass notes as accents. She has a funky 1920s style headpiece of feathers in a row with pom-pom tufts at the end, and dramatic white lines from beak to above her eyes.

A peahen glares over her shoulder at the peacock barrelling up the path in a full run, shrieking, because she got a bit ahead of him. No dignity, those boys. (The fenced paddock behind her is for the miniature goats, who are safe in their barn for the night. The peacocks tribe roams wild, they are feral and have overrun adjoining neighbourhoods as because they raise so many chicks successfully and none of the predators can be bothered to eat them. One apartment building next to the park is famously hard to get in and out of, because the males spend all their time blocking the door as they display their tails to their reflections.)

Aw, I love the peahens at Beacon Hill Park. They are so curious and pretty, their plumage is pleasing, they are kind mums, and they have to live their lives with a collection of big-tailed brightly coloured buffoons shrieking like mad behind them all day trying to get their attention.
#birds

release them w/gratitude?

This clip reminds me how beautiful this Island's outer coast is, and also how tough our squashy, brittle, delicate intertidal critters and seaweeds actually are, to withstand this normal wave action.
🩵🦀🐙🌊🪸🦐🩵

Nudibranche Phyllidia
#gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #seaslug #nudibranch

These lichens are *all* lovely but I especially appreciate these 4 photos🤩 The colours!

Ah! The owl system of digestive sorting. Yay for operculum (from snail's viewpoint). The image of an anemone dexterously seiving its catch (yum! gulp. nope - ptoooey!) is very pleasing. I had wondered how they got rid of waste, since there did not seem to be an exit hole. Thanks for answering🙂

Can they spit out sand? Or pick it out with tentacles?

A dense pelt of green slightly shiny moss on a very old grey (and even so, only somewhat decayed) fallen Arbutus trunk, near the summit of PKOLS. The moss tightens up into dense embroidery-thread like tufts when it gets a bit dry, like the back of a tapestry with all the thread ends sticking out after a mouse attack. The tips of the moss show their feather shaped growth habit, but as the colony expands it quickly becomes a dense mat with no feathering visible, probably a way to regulate moisture loss from individual stems. As pleasing to pat as it looks. If I locate my guidebook I will add the name, it's not uncommon on Vancouver Island so many will recognize it!

Some moss for the weary. I can't recall the genus of this one, but whenever I meet it I feel compelled to stroke it like a pet; it is dense and kind of feels like a wire-haired fox terrier. Just looking at the photo gives me a tactile satisfaction. Seems to prefer seasonally xeric conditions. #moss

Sorry for delayed alt txt for video: a super lively cerise and yellow sea butterfly snail (I think the latin is Agaminopteron ornatum? captioned in video) is darting around a habitat with various less mobile creatures and a black-with-thin-white-stripe eel-like fish who seems to find the snail fun.

Not sure how to alt text this but: A beautifully illustrated rendering of 9 different Pterosaurs, starting with one as wide as a human is tall (the "teeny" one) and moving up in both size and bill/snoot volume to the 7th, 8th and 9th who all have enormous bills, and one leg is as tall as a human.

oho! true sign of spring, like the skunk cabbages☺️