Listen my dudes Ancient Egypt existed for a really fuckass long time. Literally just Pharaonic civilization lasted 3,000 years. That’s not even including predynastic civilization and Roman rule. If you lump that in you’re looking at more like… 5,000 years.
Like. If you want a comparison of how long that is: THE YEAR IS CURRENTLY 2018. TWO THOUSAND. TWO-THIRDS OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAONIC CIVILIZATION HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THE ‘BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST’
We comparatively just entered the Third Intermediate Period. The Greeks will not take over for another 700~ years. Cleopatra will not be born until the year 2931.
It’s a really long time guys.
Anyway look. Listen. I sat my ass down and wrote out a timeline of “when shit happened if you started at 1AD” because I know backwards numbers are hard to process but here’s an abridged version.
If the first Egyptian Pharaoh came to power in 1AD then…
300: step pyramid built
450: Great Pyramid at Giza built
815: Pepi II dies and civil war breaks out
950: Egypt re-unified
1350: Middle Kingdom ends
1450: New Kingdom begins
1520: Hatshepsut is on the throne
1650: Ahkenaten switches to monotheistic religion and builds a new city
1680: Tutankhamun dies
1720: Ramesses II ‘the great’ ascends to the throne
1740: World’s first peace treaty signed 1790: Ramesses II dies leaving way too many children
1920: Egypt breaks into 2 states again
And now we get to ~~~~the future~~~~. If we started at 1AD all of this stuff hasn’t happened yet
2050: Briefly re-united as a single state
2180: Civil war 2250: Nubian kings take over
2335: Assyrian conquest
2665: Alexander the Great conquers Egypt
2930: Cleopatra VII born
2970: Cleopatra VII dies. Egypt falls to Rome. Fin.
And that’s just starting with the Pharaohs. If you wanted to start with Predynastic Egypt, you can go ahead and ADD ONE THOUSAND YEARS to all of those dates
spiders will pull their own legs clean off if they get damaged because most of them can regrow legs during molting, which explains why you often see spiders missing a leg but never any missing half a leg?
some remarkably distressing scientists proved this by getting a spider to pull off all of its legs and then feeding its limbless torso for months until it sprouted a full complement of legs again and then hopefully used them to get the fuck out of dodge
baby spiders don’t get lenses until their first molt and before that they just have baby eyes and while this ought not to be any weirder than the concept of baby teeth, welp,
there are so many spiders floating around thousands of metres up in the air that they’re described as “aerial plankton”
The Sky Is Full Of Spiders
there are spider-parasitising spiders but instead of laying eggs in organs or stealing blood or anything like that they just ride on top of bigger spiders and steal snacks when their mighty steed is eating
there are ant-mimicking spiders that use their disguises to raid ant nests and w/e but there are also ant mimics that just. hang out. they make fake ant colonies full of fake ants. sometimes the actual ants that they’re mimicking find their house and live with them. stealth 100
some mother spiders live in communal family nests, where multiple mothers can work together to bring down bigger prey while all their collected babies are cared for by the babysitters
some mother spiders feed their babies mouth to mouth like birds
some mother spiders carry their babies around and i was aware of this but not the fact that if you steal their eggsac they’ll freak out and search for it for hours and sometimes end up adopting anything that’s vaguely the right size, they will carry around empty snail shells for weeks and lovingly dote on them…
guys i am literally about to cry over spider moms
i borrowed the book op cites from the library (biology of spiders by rainer f. foelix) because of this post and my two favourite new spider facts are
-they don’t just have an exoskeleton – they also have a secret partial inside skeleton
and
-you know the guy who gave spiders drugs and took pictures of their fucked up webs? he ended up studying them because his buddy was studying garden spiders and they spin webs at 2-5 am and his buddy was like, Ugh, fuck this, i want to sleep in, do you have anything i can give these spiders to make them spin webs at not two in the morning -and this guy, A Pharmacologist, was like, hell yea, here are some amphetamines for your spiders -and all those did was make the spiders spin some exceptionally weird webs at 2-5am -and i guess his buddy gave up in disgust at these spiders who wouldn’t let him sleep but mr. spider amphetamines was like, you know what, this is cool, i’m gonna keep going with this
So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
Some of my favorite tags so far:
@asleepinawell “Natural Curiousities” is on netflix and I think the PBS streaming app. BBC streaming keeps crashing on me but probably there too. It’s very much like his usual work, but with 500% more “Look at these funky specimens and the frantic scribbles of early scientific illustrators confronted with a fucking kangaroo” and “I’m Sir David Fucking Attenborough And I’m Going To Snuggle This Cheetah”
@heedra You are correct! According to Wikipedia: “The name “flamingo” comes from Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, “flame-colored”, in turn coming from Provençal flamenc from flama “flame” and Germanic-like suffix -ing, with a possible influence of words like “Fleming” THEY WERE TRYING TO TELL US ALL ALONG!
@melifair You’re in good company- I used to call them “Pimentos” until I was three and finally got the hang of the Letter “F”
Also, Apologies about the spelling. I have a reading disorder and it causes me to mis-read and by turn misspell certain words, especially ones with two nonidentical vowels in the middle of the word like Their and Becuase. Good thing we all know what I’m talking about anyway!
But how could you not tell us WHAT THE FLAMINGOS ARE DOING IN A VOLCANO?????
So Flamingoes are pretty badass.
They’re hyperspecialized filter-feeders, not unlike krill-feeding whales, and thier heads are shaped Like That, so they can dangle thier heads in the water, suck up water full of algae and brine shrimp and other goodies, and filter them out with thier Spiny Tongues.
(Image Source Apparently, according to the Ancient Romans, Flamingo Tounge has a “Superb” flavor. You Wacky Roman Bastards)
But the lakes with the tastiest and most dense algae and arthropods are not Normal lakes. African Lesser Flamingoes (lesser becuase they have a smaller range, but probably our phoenix given how people were travelling at the time) like to hang out in extremely Alkaline Lakes where thier favorite algae grow, and those lakes are mostly in the volcanic Great Rift Valley. Where the lava and occasional venting of hot toxic gasses happen.
In addition to the wierd diet, and caustic water, Flamingoes can also cope with some pretty intense climate. The Alkaline Lakes Lesser Flamigoes like are also VERY HIGH in the mountains, where they cope with low oxygen, Intense UV radiation, and rapid and extreme temperature fluctuations- below freezing at night and heatstroke hot in the day.
You can tell how well a Flamigo is Flamingoing by it’s color! The lovely red-pink color comes from the algae and arthopods they eat: the better-fed and healthier a flamingo is, the more intense thier colors will be! Zoo famingoes can thrive on a wide variety of diets, but thier colors will fade, and it will cause everyone to lose romantic interest, so they have to be fed a special color-intensive diet to keep breeding programs going.
So while Flamingoes probably weren’t the bird you were picturing when you thought of a Phoenix , they’re Pretty Badass and worthy of the mythic lore.
It’s not uncommon for chickens, especially roosters, to have iridescent green* feathers of varying intensity and hue, but those feathers are typically located on the body or tail, and are really more like black feathers with a green sheen. Some ckickens will have these feathers up in the head/neck area like
A) This Nice Australorp Rooster
B) This Buckwild Mutuant, which looks an awful lot like some of the feral chickens I saw roaming Hawai’i, though the photographer does not say where this specimen was found. His green feathers go right up to his throat! I’ve seen specimens there with some outright teal necks and heads, though they didn’t seem to be as popular with the ladies as thier more fair-headed cousins.
*Fun fact: almost no birds have green-pigmented feathers. The green color comes from light reflected from microscopic structures on the bird’s feathers. the only bird with Actual Green Pigment is the Turaco, which has Turacoverdin! This is probably only a fun fact if you are a biology nerd, but it’s one of the EXTREMELY FEW green pigments that occurs in vertebrete animals and comes from the Tucraco’s copper-rich diet, which is another Fun Fact only if you are major NERD. here’s a picture of one becuase they’re cute, and becuase it’s a really strange green for a bird to have:
So while Turacos come in the nice limey green color like in my Icon, Chickens Do not.
Yet.
I see in the replies section a lot of people are confused how there are other birds that are green– all of the birds that do not have green pigmented feathers, but look green?! The OP mentions this but for clarity: That is because bird feathers are colored in two ways: Pigments and structural color! Green (and blue) pigment is pretty rare in bird feathers. Turacos, as mentioned above, being an exception!
Most birds that sport bright blues, greens, purples, and iridescent feathers have feathers that use structural color. The feather uses light refraction between microscopic physical structures in the feather barbs to create a color. Iridescent feathers are the greatest example of this (it’s how they color ‘shift’ depending on the angle of the light and your viewing angle!), but non-iridescent feathers can use structures to make color too, by using air pockets in the feather barbs to refract light and bounce only certain spectra back to the viewer (most of the non-iridescent blues, greens, violets, and UV colors of feathers are formed this way; e.g. jays, parrots, fruit doves, etc). People who have seen green/blue parrots bathe know that if the feathers get soaked, they look brownish… because they are no longer refracting the light in a way that allows you to see the green/blue (at least until they dry out!).
Some birds have both structural and pigmented feather colors! IF YOU DON’T THINK THIS IS SOME OF THE RADDEST STUFF I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU, COME ON
Researchers have argued that pointy eggs are common to cliff-nesting
birds because they roll in a circle and are less likely to tumble off an
edge. Or that asymmetric eggs pack together more easily and would allow
females with large clutches to incubate their broods efficiently. Or
that spherical eggs are stronger and less prone to breaking, or use the
least amount of shell for a given volume, which would be useful for
birds that can’t get enough calcium in their diet.
“There are a
lot of hypotheses, but no conclusive explanation or theory,” says
Stoddard, who’s an evolutionary biologist based at Princeton University.
“It was a good puzzle.”
To solve it, Stoddard teamed up with L. Mahadevan,
a biophysicist at Harvard University who has studied “how leaves
ripple, how tendrils coil, and how the brain folds, among other things.”
He realized that all eggs could be described according to two simple
characteristics—how asymmetric they are, and how elliptical they are.
Measure these traits, and you can plot every bird egg on a simple graph.
They did that for the eggs of 1,400 bird species, whose measurements
Stoddard extracted from almost 50,000 photos. It was the resulting graph
that revealed the left-field nature of chicken eggs.
I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?
Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things – whether animals, words, situations or experiences – our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before – whether first-hand or through a story – then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD
Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK
Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely – seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely – no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe – but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely – too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.
And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
Technically the cognitive process of quantifying Doggo-ness is called a schema. But I wrote it a while ago, on mobile, at about 4 am, while nursing a newborn baby with the other arm, and I’m frankly astonished that I was able to continue a single train of thought for that long, let alone remembering Actual Names For Things (That Have Names.) I strongly encourage you to learn more about schemata if you are interested in this sort of thing!
