Animal Of The Day!

[Image ID: a series of tweets from Draconian Crackdown @fencuary that read:

Tweet 1: every character design course in the world should force you to draw twenty people in the same mundane profession like bus drivers or auto mechanics or nail techs before you get to draw an elf

Tweet 2: imagine how cool elves could look if they looked a fraction as interesting as Steve who bags your groceries. have you looked at pictures of your aunts and uncles lately? e-sports competitors from a country you’ve never been to? so many awesome faces to look at in the world

Tweet 3: just saying this from the perspective of a guy who could have been saved a lot of frustration from practicing this earlier on as a young artist rather than stumbling through it now, but then again I think I’m learning to embrace the Real so much more as an adult

Tweet 4: since some are taking this as a design prompt (yay), for this to work you have to show the 10 - 20 “characters” to a non-artist in your life and they have to be like, “yep, i could’ve seen any of these people today” and imagine each of them living their own rich/unfulfilled lives

/End ID]

this stunning bird is a red-tailed hawk with a genetic mutation called leucism that causes a reduction in pigments.

source: (x)

American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus)

the real reason why teachers dont want you to wear hats in school

the paralyzed cicadas I picked up from a failed cicada killer nest are the perfect material to show off some cool features of insect anatomy! (although the wasp’s venom would keep them alive for her larvae to eat, I froze them to make sure they’re fully dead for dissection).

cicadas are powerful, fast fliers, and all of their thorax is taken up by a bulk of reddish, stringy flight muscles, which I’ll talk more about later. this cicada is a female, so her abdomen is full of white, elongated eggs that she will insert into tree bark with the bladed ovipositor at her rear.

the male cicada’s abdomen, however, is almost entirely empty, and that air-filled space is used as a resonator for his loud calls. the biggest structure visible there is a curved pair of muscles that deforms the tymbals, producing a click with every contraction.

here's a view of the complete muscle, and the tymbals themselves which look like overlapping plates on his belly. if you're curious what the white frosted appearance is, some Neotibicen have a coat of waxy powder or pruinescence; this male N. tibicen is particularly pruinose.

onto the flight muscles:

powered flight is a pretty complex mechanism in any organism, and is never so simple as just flapping wings up and down, but most insects power their flight in a really unintuitive way (at least for us vertebrates): they contract muscles in their thorax that aren’t even attached to the wings!

this method of flight is called indirect flight, in contrast to the direct flight of the dragonflies and mayflies where each of four wings is directly attached to a muscle and can flap on its own.

instead, most insects have a longitudinal (image 1 above, d below) pair and a vertical (2, c) pair of muscles that deform the shape of abdomen, pulling the upper segment of the thorax (notum) up and down, and this moves the wings which are attached to the notum. useful indirect flight gif from wikipedia found here

even if compressed manually, the dead cicadas "flap" their wings due to the motion of the notum:

insect flight is a lot more complicated than this simplified look at them, but I think these cicadas offer a pretty good look at how most insects get around essentially by squishing themselves internally!

i love feral baby zoomies so much

happy pride month

brought to u by my most tolerant rat & some vegan food dye

Hey Hector

(via)