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I’m just going to keep posting interesting animal photos that I come across in this thread as long as the mood strikes me. This is a giant coconut crab. At three feet long it is the world’s largest land dwelling arthropod.
Sorry for the terrible formatting above. The poem is much better read on the site linked to.
Nittany,
Was that caption yours? Again, pretty cool language.
No, the caption was attached to the photo. I didn’t care for it myself because the “when young” part is redundant since the caption already mentioned it’s a chick. I do like the poem though.
I also like the name of the bird. Ceroneous mourner. I like melodic names. My all-time favorite is Serratia marcesens.
Lovely, right?
It’s a bacterium found in your GI tract that we’ll sometimes isolate from urine specimens when the patient has a UTI. 😉
There should be no out-of-pocket cost to the patient for that pen or any prescription medication for that matter.
No one should never have to choose between their health and the rent.
I understand that pharmaceutical companies need to make a profit and drug development is very expensive but the profits made on that pen far surpassed the costs of development a long time ago.OK will do.
Thank you! I honestly do appreciate it.
Sorry zn. I mostly post from an iPhone during the day and just the process of typing on this thing is a nightmare let alone dressing up posts. But I’ll do my best to placate your aesthetic no matter how much it tortures my soul.
There is some difficulty estimating extinction rates. A lot of it is done with computer modeling because physically inventoring species is problematic. Therefore you will see disparity between one researcher’s estimate and another. However, both the research and computer models agree that extinction is happening at a much greater rate than what can be attributed to background extinctions.
Here is one paper on extinction rates from “Science”. I couldn’t find a free copy online so I posted it from my researchgate account. Hopefully it is viewable.
EDIT INTERVENTION, ZN: the link is problematical for a lot of reasons so I have a “paint” version:
You’re equating wildlife loss with extinction. The two are not the same. FYI more than 99% of all species that ever lived on earth are extinct.
Yes, I’m aware that 99% of all species that ever existed are extinct and I’m also aware I wasn’t specifically talking about extinctions when I quoted the loss of wildlife. It was just to illustrate how extreme our impact is on other life forms. Normal ‘background’ extinction rates are about 1 to 5 species per year. They estimate the current extinction rate is somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 times that rate.
Still is. Extinctions have always occurred throughout history.
Yes extinctions happen, but extinctions on a mass scale like we are seeing today only occur due to some great natural catastrophe…meteors, widespread volcanism, the advent of O2, etc. The earth is in the midst of it’s sixth mass extinction. 50% of the world’s wildlife has been lost in the last 40 years. And unlike the mass extinctions of the past this one is completely preventable because it’s not being caused by a meteor impact but by human activity.
Yes, our destruction of the biosphere continues unabated.
Everyone should really enjoy awesome creatures like the leatherback sea turtle while they can because we will likely be the last generation to see them.
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Do you ever just sit back and feel ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ over the variety
of life-forms on this planet? I do. I mean, think of hummingbirds. And leatherback turtles. And mantis shrimps. And tapirs. Vampire Squids. Luna Moths. Ya know. There’s just a shitload of life-forms on this little dysfunctional planet.w
vYeah, the great diversity is awe-inspiring but what I like is that I share ancestry with all the myriad creatures that comprise that great diversity. It’s the interrelatedness of it all that gets me. I share ancestry with the tapir, giant squid and the redwood tree. I share ancestry with millions of species living and extinct. That includes every species that is living or has ever lived. They are all relatives.
On the other hand, that makes sending Xmas cards a chore…
