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Sahn
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17 Jul 2020, 6:33 pm

Turtles eat jellyfish, whales eat krill



PhosphorusDecree
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17 Jul 2020, 7:04 pm

Hammerhead sharks eat stingrays. Their keen electrosense helps them find the rays, and the hammer shape is used to trap them against the sea floor. Hammerheads are scared of humans- they flee us rather than attack.


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17 Jul 2020, 9:04 pm

Speaking of Tasmania, Astocopsis is the largest freshwater "shrimp" in the world.



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18 Jul 2020, 6:56 am

cyberdad wrote:
Speaking of Tasmania, Astocopsis is the largest freshwater "shrimp" in the world.


If you're a American Boomer you might remember "sea monkeys". Those critters advertised in the back of comic books back in the Sixties. Not exactly a toy, and not exactly pets, you filled out the order form and sent it in, and you got back a packet which you poured into a fish bowl, and "viola!" you had a whole community of funny fun loving little acrobatic critters swimming around for your education and amusement!

Those "sea monkeys" were actually brine shrimp captured from remote ponds in the deserts of Nevada (or some western state like that).



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25 Jul 2020, 12:54 pm

Crocodiles make good mothers. They bury their eggs in holes or under mounds of vegetation, carefully designed to keep them at the right temperature. The mother sticks around to guard the nest. When the eggs hatch, she hears the hatchlings and digs them out, helping them out of the eggshells if necessary, before carrying them down to the water in her mouth. Some species just leave the crocbabies to it at this point, but others will stay with their children for up to a year. There's an amazing sequence in the Attenborough series "Life in Cold Blood" where a mother caiman has taken over the care of several dozen baby caimans from different families. When their pond starts to dry up, she carefully shepherds them all across dry land to find more water.


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cyberdad
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26 Jul 2020, 12:31 am

naturalplastic wrote:
If you're a American Boomer you might remember "sea monkeys". Those critters advertised in the back of comic books back in the Sixties. Not exactly a toy, and not exactly pets, you filled out the order form and sent it in, and you got back a packet which you poured into a fish bowl, and "viola!" you had a whole community of funny fun loving little acrobatic critters swimming around for your education and amusement!

Those "sea monkeys" were actually brine shrimp captured from remote ponds in the deserts of Nevada (or some western state like that).


yep long ago I used to buy brine shrimp eggs and hatch them in an aerated coke bottle to feed my Malawi cichlids.

We get them in north/west Australia in salt ponds where they go bright red after eating algae. The brine shrimp convert the algal pigment (beta-carotene) to a red pigment called astaxanthin. I think in Africa the reason flamingoes are reddish pink is because they eat brine shrimp.



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30 Jul 2020, 3:13 pm

Woodlice are crustaceans- they're basically land-shrimp. They belong to Order Isopoda, a group of 10,000 or so species, half of which are land-dwelling woodlice, half of which still live in the water. Their marine relatives include some that can grow to 50cm (2.5 feet) long, and also some rather disturbing parasites such as the "tongue-eating louse."

Being crustaceans, woodlice have larvae that need to hatch out in water. They solve this problem by having little pouches full of salt water, in which the eggs hatch and the larvae spend the first few days of their lives. So they're kind of like tiny, many-legged marsupials.

Pillbugs are a family of woodlice that can roll up into a neat, shiny black ball for defence. As a kid, I thought that all woodlice could curl up, and didn't understand why I never saw them do it. I saw the rolley-up kind for the first time a couple of years ago- one of the buildings I work in seems to be in pillbug territory. Pillbugs can be confused with pill millipedes, which are just very short, wide millipedes that can also roll into a ball. The main visible difference is that the millipedes have more legs. A nice bit of convergent evolution- the two different groups are about as far apart as you can get on the arthropod family tree.


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30 Jul 2020, 3:30 pm

The King Cobra has enough venom with sufficiant potency to kill an elephant.

The king Cobra is not really a Cobra it is not in the Naja genus,it's not a true Cobra,it is an elapid which is the family which Cobra's belong but is actually more closely related to the Krait or Mamba snakes,mamba's also make a small hood.


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30 Jul 2020, 3:45 pm

Owls go twitwoo.

No, they don't!

Different species make different noises and sometimes you will hear twitwoo but it is actually two different species one going ta-wit another going woo.



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30 Jul 2020, 6:39 pm

PhosphorusDecree wrote:
Being crustaceans, woodlice have larvae that need to hatch out in water. They solve this problem by having little pouches full of salt water, in which the eggs hatch and the larvae spend the first few days of their lives. .


By curious coincidence all land animals incubate eggs/embryos in saline that is identical to salt concentration that in the ocean. We all evolved from the sea.

In our embryo phase in our mother's womb we also frolicked around in saline water.



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31 Jul 2020, 8:08 am

vermontsavant wrote:
The King Cobra has enough venom with sufficiant potency to kill an elephant.

The king Cobra is not really a Cobra it is not in the Naja genus,it's not a true Cobra,it is an elapid which is the family which Cobra's belong but is actually more closely related to the Krait or Mamba snakes,mamba's also make a small hood.


Heh. Zoology is confusing... I did not know other families of snake could have hoods too. Here's another wierd case where the most famous member of the group doesn't actually belong to it. The Tarantula family of massive tropical spiders are named after the Italian Tarantula, which is actually a kind of wolf spider. It was the biggest, hairiest spider that European explorers knew from back home, so they used the name to refer to the even bigger and hairier spiders they found in South America.


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31 Jul 2020, 5:34 pm

maycontainthunder wrote:
Owls go twitwoo.

No, they don't!

Different species make different noises and sometimes you will hear twitwoo but it is actually two different species one going ta-wit another going woo.


Its owls of the lawyer species that say "to wit".



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31 Jul 2020, 5:50 pm

A group of owls is called a Parliament.


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01 Aug 2020, 10:50 am

My favourite one is a "conspiracy" of lemurs. Did some 18th-century zoologist get scammed out of their inheritance by golden bamboo lemurs? Or is it because of the silky sifaka's role in the Gunpowder Plot?


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Wolfram87
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01 Aug 2020, 1:17 pm

I think the most apt ones are "an ostentation of peacocks" and "a flamboyance of flamingoes". XD


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01 Aug 2020, 7:07 pm

how about a bloat of hippopotami?


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