Working in retail is wild, people just tell me things about their personal life and I just stand there. I don’t know how to respond to “my kid just died” or “I’m getting a divorce” like that’s sucks… $13.48 is your total.
im bi but I tend to get crushes on fictional male characters more that real men and real women more than fictional female characters
so I guess I like to concept of men
i think this is a common feeling because men are written with such depth and complexity, whereas fictional women are not only few and far between, but are written half-assedly and from a place of little understanding of a woman’s standpoint.
meanwhile, real women are lovely and complex people, and real men are mostly just potatoes.
Okay, new rule: if you regularly consume the blood and flesh of a demigod in a room full of chanting elders you’re not allowed to call other religions primitive and evil
This is oddly specific and leaves some very interesting questions unanswered.
Catholicism sure does sound weird when you put it that way.
you know i hate tumblrs “i hope they do something problematic” shit so much? its not only with people like thomas sanders or john mulaney or that comic guy with the bike, but with whole ass shows and projects? like nobody ever said b99 is cop propaganda. nobody was saying that until one single person mentioned it and suddenly its the worst show you could watch because of one aspect of their show, while ignoring the shows diversity and political stances.
same happened to dream daddy, like you cant deny that that game was groundbreaking for the lgbt society, but suddlenly some people started shit like ‘uhhh but 5 years ago the game grumps made transphobic jokes’ and ‘you know that joesph is actually a satanist, right?’ and suddenly no one talked about the game anymore?
everytime someone tries their fucking best to be inclusive, diverse etc. people are digging through everything they can find just to justify that they dont like it? overwatch recently hosted a huge event to raise money for breast cancer research in association with the BCRF and without even doing one second of research people accused them of working with the susan g. komen foundation (which wasnt true) and tried to boycott a fucking charity event?
what im saying is, dont let tumblr ruin everything you love because they are bitter
today, I will introduce you to the largest bony fish currently living on this planet. they are active, deep-diving predators and excellent distance swimmers. adults can reach lengths of ten feet and weights of over 5,000 pounds. when they collide with boats, the boats often come off worse.
what are you picturing now? maybe a tuna? a swordfish?
those are all valid guesses, but you’re all WRONG AHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. LOOK AT IT. LOOK.
meet the Mola mola, or Ocean Sunfish. (we prefer Mola mola, honestly, it’s so much more fun to say. Mola mola. Mola molamolamola.)
Mola mola are the largest bony fish in the world (as opposed to the boneless fish, which can usually be found frozen in stick form in your nearest supermarket). adults are HUUUUUUGE and roughly disc-shaped. they can easily grow to 10′x12′, which are usually dimensions you only use if you’re talking about flooring.
yes lovely but does it come in a tile pattern?
the Mola mola is also notable for its ‘unique body plan’, which is Science for “jesus that’s a weird fucking fish”. most of its body consists of its giant fucking head, and it lacks a tail of any sort. instead, the Mola molamolamola gets around by flapping its dorsal and ventral fins (top and bottom. Science just likes to feel special.) like the wings of a butterfly.
A BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY
this might seem like a really dumb way to get around, but the Mola molamolamola (sorry, I’ll stop) makes it work. they can cross thousands of miles of open water at its slower cruising speed of 2 entire mph, but they are also capable of wiggling those fins fast enough to hurl themselves completely out of the water like a giant, horrifying Frisbee.
(in fact, Mola mola breaches can be a problem in some areas, as they aren’t very good at watching where they land and sometimes end up capsizing small boats. whoopsie!)
COWABUNGAAAAAAAA
the Mola mola eats mostly jellyfish and any other soft-bodied animal or plant it can fit into its ravenous horror beakmouth. they descend deep into the icy depths to hunt these soft boneless lunches, sometimes going deeper than 2,600 feet! can YOU do that?! no. you cannot.
after they have slaked their endless thirst for what are basically just organic plastic bags, the Mola molas return to the surface. there, they bask in the sunlight to raise their body temperatures. this is where the term ‘sunfish’ came from. (also at this point, they are sometimes struck by boats as fish are not capable of understanding nautical right of way.)
NO, YOU YIELD!
this basking habit is also unfortunate because it makes the Mola mola a giant, fish-shaped target floating around in open water. they are regularly eaten by sharks, sea lions, killer whales, and, uh…
humans.
oh yes, my regular predators include two marine apex predators and a bipedal ape. thanks, evolution.
Mola mola are regularly caught in huge numbers, and are now in decline worldwide. THIS IS NOT ALLOWED.
the recent creation of marine preserves does give some hope for the future of the Mola molamolamolamola, though there is still a lot of work needed to restrain overfishing.
hopefully these big big weirdos will continue to populate our oceans long into the future.
guess what, it’s time for another episode of Weird Biology! today we’re going to learn about a creature that looks like a stained-glass window, but stalks the oceans with toxic might powered only by the wind like a sailing ship of old.
that’s right, it’s the devil’s own shopping bag-
the name is almost longer than the animal.
The Portuguese Man o’ War is a floating jellyfish relative called a Hydrozoan. it was named after the 18th century sailing ship, apparently by a blind person. “oh, it looks like a sailing ship under full sail” no it doesn’t, shut up. it looks like a rogue walmart shopping bag that blew into the Atlantic and makes a living by strangling innocent sea turtles.
but like the aforementioned plastic bag, the Man o’ War uses its lovely blue-purple air sac to catch the breeze. it wanders in groups through the warm waters of the Atlantic, driven along by the wind and tides. kind of poetic, really.
as long as you don’t look underwater, anyway.
I’m about to ruin it for everybody, hang on.
like so many other things in life, it’s not what you see on the surface that’s important but what is underneath that counts.
in this case, what’s underneath is up to 165 feet of venomous tentacles. it’s like that thing they say about icebergs, where you only see the top 10% and the rest is an invisible ship-killing nightmare? it’s exactly like that.
except with poison tentacles.
the Man o’ War is basically a biological fishing trawler, trailing these stupidly long tentacles like a fine mesh net through the water. and when an innocent fish who probably has a family at home comes into contact with this “net”, specialized cells called Nematocysts are triggered to fire tiny poison harpoons into the victim, causing instant death or paralysis.
the tentacle then reels itself upward into the body of the Man o’ War like a fishing line, dragging its helpless victim upward to be digested.
so, uh, actually not like a fishing trawler then, not like a fishing trawler at all.
unless the fishing trawler was designed by Junji Ito.
though the Man o’ War may look like a jellyfish, it’s definitely not. in fact, it’s not even a single animal! it’s actually four separate organisms jammed into a venomous trenchcoat like three best friends trying to sneak into an R rated movie.
“how the fuck even”, I hear you say. and that’s a valid question! it’s not everyday that we discover that what we thought was a single animal is actually four smaller animals living communally to form a larger, more dangerous animal. it would be like discovering that opossums are actually comprised of 17 rats each.
no word on if they do a silly dance and tap their fingers together to fuse or what though.
in the Man o’ War’s case, these four individual kinds of “polyps” that comprise the complete final form are the air sac polyp (gets the gang around), the digestive polyp (converts murdered fish into energy for the whole gang), the reproductive polyp (makes small clones of each individual gang member), and the tentacle polyp (murders things indiscriminately for the sheer joy of it).
that’s right, the tentacles are a separate animal! you might be wondering if they sometimes come loose, wander off, and just sting people/animals randomly when they drift into populated areas. what a silly question!
yeah, happens all the time.
SHIT.
while rarely fatal, Man o’ Wars stings can seriously injure humans. this is a big problem in areas where Man o’ Wars are common, because storms and predators can knock the tentacles right the fuck off. the tentacles drift away, only to wash ashore and sting a hapless beachgoer weeks later. that’s right, rogue tentacles can still sting for days or weeks after separation! even if the Man ‘o War is beached! isn’t that neat! fuck!
the discovery of a beached Man o’ War usually closes the entire fucking beach, for this reason. would YOU want to go fuck around in the sand if it might be full of over a hundred feet of poison spaghetti too fine to notice with the naked eye?
if the answer is yes, I have great news about a bridge I’d like to sell you.
if all this information upset you, I’d like to offer my deepest condolences. but buckle up for one last upsetting fact, and here it is: Man o’ War are spreading.
usually restricted to warm waters, climate change has driven the Man o’ War as far north as Great Britain. that’s awful awful awful news for any country that touches the Atlantic ocean, which is lots of them.
luckily, we have dependable allies in this fight: sea turtles and the Mola Mola! (which I’ve written about before) unfortunately just about all we can do at this point is to cheer these awesome devil-balloon-munchers on from the safety of shore, while trying to invent a Man o’ War-proof barrier net.
for now, watch out for anything that looks like a floating plastic bag.
and for god’s sake, watch where you step.
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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.
if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee or check out my Patreon to see extra content and support Weird Biology.
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IMAGE SOURCES
img1- National Geographic img2- The Garden of Eadon img3- Sean Nash img4- Enrico Villa img5- livescience.com img6-
diply.com
img7- Daily Mail img8- Sun Sentinel
it’s not everyday that we discover that what we thought was a single animal is actually four smaller animals living communally to form a larger, more dangerous animal
