Anisomorpha - Wiems

cedar water appreciation post!!!!!!

it’s red :)

me [coming to terms with a truth about myself]: hm..................................................... unfortunate

One thing that pisses me off is people seeing fish in aquariums (the establishments, not home aquariums) and being like “It’s so sad because the ocean is so big and the tank is so small and they’ll never know freedom blah blah blah-“ I’m not talking about sharks and marine mammals here but the majority of fish are not at all bothered by being in an aquarium instead of the open ocean. Like, I personally would love to be a little clown fish in one of those big reef tanks. Fed regularly. Whole team of people monitoring my health and well-being. No predators. Medicated if I show signs of illness. Aquarium fish have cushy gigs in comparison to their wild companions.

just give me 20 to 40 minutes to think on it and i can come up with the most passably human sentences you've ever heard so help me god

Fun fact: The diabolical ironclad beetle traded away the ability to fly in order to become essentially unsquishable.

Driving a car over them would just push them down into the dirt, still whole. Trying to stick a pin through wouldn't be successful without a drill. These guys are tough.

Every part of the beetle's exoskeleton seems to enhance its armor. The flattened body shape distributes pressure to even the load, the multilayered material is strong yet flexible enough not to crack, and the unique interlocking seams between wing cases function better than most joins designed by humans:

It'll be exciting to see what new materials might be possible using these concepts!

Sources: Jesse Rorabaugh, Po-Yu Chen, & Jesus Rivera et al.

Something else abt cockroaches is that they can also hold ur hand

every year we have to say it

The Exotic Animal Photo Reference Repository is live!

You can find it at: https://www.animal-photo-references.com!

Here's how this repository works: all photos were taken by me, a human, at zoos, aquariums, sanctuaries, and other facilities with animals in human care. There is no AI involved in the photo editing or creation and there never will be. Right now there's 56 species on the site; my catalog has over 300 and I will be uploading the rest of them as fast as I can.

Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission to use these references. Yes, even for work you're going to sell.

All other usage/reproduction requires permission, but assume I'm friendly and please do ask! That's educators, researchers, the media, people who need images for a school presentation, etc. This is just to retain copyright/control in case they're scraped/reused unethically - it doesn't meant I don't want folk to have access! So please do reach out via the contact form on the repository website, I don't bite and I'm most likely going to say yes.

Please don't repost the repository photos to your own blogs: I've created @animalphotorefs as a dedicated blog to share photos from the site, and of course I'll reblog a lot of it here! That again just helps with retaining copyright and sourcing of the images. If you really want to repost some for a specific purpose, please just ask me first!

Also, folks, this project has no funding. It's just me and my camera.

There will never be a paywall on the site - I believe resources like this absolutely must be free for everyone to access. So please, please, please support the repository if you use it. Want sneak peeks at photos, cute videos I take, or to help choose what I photograph and what gets posted first? You can do that through Patreon (and there's a free trial on the most interactive tier!) If you'd like to just drop a tip, I've also set up a Ko-Fi.

I can't wait to hear what everyone thinks of the repository.

To whet your thirst for cute photos, here's an Indian rhinoceros contemplating a goose.