Nimblenewt

A rodent hand, with four short fingers with curved claws. The short thumb has a dirty, awkwardly human-looking nail.

Reminder: most rodents have thumb nails rather than claws.

In fact the ancestor of all rodents probably had nails.

They probably evolved independently from our nails but for similar reasons: nails are good for dexterous food handling.

📸Missagia et al 2025

A few diatoms from recent samples. Gyrosigma or Pleurosigma sp., Zygoceros rhombus, Actinocyclus senarius.
#marineplankton 🦑

Photo of four lichens growing flat on grey rock. A yellow lichen is growing in a diagonal line across the photo. A dark grey oval lichen is growing along the yellow line as is a larger, round, off white lichen. A small amount of brown lichen is at the right side end of the line of yellow lichen.

Crustose lichen mix: Candelariella (yellow), Rhizocarpon (dark grey) Dimelaena (off white) and Acarospora (brown). Photo covers about 6cm, left to right. NWT, Canada. #lichen #fungi #fungifriends

A top-down closeup photo of a pale yellow flower with serrated-tip petals, with the ground and leaves below out of focus. There are two little moths in the flower; the moths have a fuzzy gray thorax, and cream-colored wings with thin bands and edges of deep pink.

These pretty, day-flying moths (Heliolonche pictipennis), only about 1 cm. long, are one of my favorite desert spring insects. The only flowers they visit (desert dandelion, desert chicory, or scale bud) close up at night; the moths sleep inside them, which is scientifically adorable. #BugSky 🌿🐙🌼

Some of the colours from a winter sunset near the Amphitrite Lighthouse. Ucluelet, Vancouver Island. From a longer, widescreen video, link in the comments.
#Ucluelet #Tofino #VancouverIsland

holy shit

It's true! But without the pokey bits haha.

That's how it makes me feel too!!! Different from other equally pleasing mosses. I wonder why? But I'm so glad it gave you that moment🐸

I am waiting with bated breath for the post where your dexterous smart gelding starts speaking using the buttons cats and dogs use! (possibly he will ask for a zipper of his own?) If he can use a paintbrush, surely a button-stick is within his ability?☺️

A bright yellow round skunk cabbage spathe illuminates its muddy brown roadside ditch on Vancouver Island. Its leaves are a lovely fresh lettuce-green. Lots of pollen, and one tiny green leafhopper insect is perched on the left of the spathe.

Daylight savings can steal an hour of our morning sun but the skunk cabbage shines bright regardless!
💚💛💚
#SpringFlowers

The drive in to work was indeed pitch black and grim, but the great horned owl hooted dementedly for 45 minutes and may possibly have been two owls, which lifted my spirits enough to trudge on til dawn. Why can't we just stay in blessed standard time forever? Daylight savings is so unscientific.

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

Daylight savings is a curse. My drive to work this morning as the sun rose was so good for my mood, I felt glad it was spring. Now on it will be darkness for another month. The only good part will be hearing the great horned owl hoot more at work, it always goes hoot-wild just before the sun rises.🦉

a metal robot arm extends from the top right of the frame, holding a plastic kitchen brush with bright white bristles out toward a very large, dark red squid just behind it. the squid's arms are splayed open, with the bright white suckers facing outward

hey did you know that a viable way to get a DNA sample from cephalopods is to literally scrape them with a kitchen brush

this is ROV SuBastian from the Schmidt Ocean Institute deploying the KBOS (Kitchen Brush Of Science) on a megalocranchia which is understandably less than thrilled 🧪🦑

A small frog in the spout of a green watering can.

🌱 I wondered why the water wasn't flowing out of the watering can spout properly! Hello little frog! 🐸 #Gardening #AustralianWildlife

Oh! I did not see that...I just looked at your youtube videos for other works and saw it there, along with how you animated the great turning owl gaze, very nifty!🦉

I enjoyed it! Thank you for sharing it with us. I just watched Hipposterous as well, the clever details on the periphery of the action were really fun.

Great range of facial expressions, esp the final minute. Also I like the bird on the skull.

*chuckle*

Assorted white and yellow and minty green and dark grey lichens coat the bark of a young Magnolia stellata like wallpaper, so that the bark's own texture is obscured. The variety of lichen textures is pleasing as they jostle each other for surface space.

Lichen coating the bark of a star magnolia beside the hardware store.
#lichen #FungiFriends

photo of the frog effigy vessel on display at museum Red & tan, molded & incised details, stirrup spout

photo of gallery sign: “Moche artists); North Coast, Peru Stirrup-spout bottle with toad 200-500 CE Ceramic, slip Gift of Conny and Fred Landmann, 1992 (1992.60.8) Recorded provenance: Conny and Frederick E. Landmann, New Hampshire, by 1992 Moche artists were close observers of the natural world, and their early ceramics often depicted animals with considerable fidelity. Made before molds were commonly used, these effigies demonstrate an expansion of the sculptural possibilities of clay vessels. Some vessels captured salient features of animals two-dimensionally; in later centuries, slip painting would become the favored means to convey ideas.”

#FrogFriday in the Ancient Americas wing at the Met 🐸: (1/3)
Moche artist(s); North Coast, Peru Stirrup-spout bottle with #toad 200-500 CE
Ceramic, slip
1992.60.8
#AndeanArt #PeruvianArt #IndigenousArt

Maybe it's hanging out on the balcony enjoying the fresh air?

305 Day - our slogan is ‘Civic Pride Through Biodiversity’ and today we celebrate Miami, an incomparable city harboring manatees and other marine megafauna in its midst. Don’t take it for granted! Today we were graced by this absolute unit of a manatee!! 🤩〰️🐮〰️🌇 #305day #coralcitycamera

An owl meme of a much gibbled "before-coffee" owl that looks like yoda if he'd been tarred, feathered and driven over by a steamroller, and a super alert "after coffee" owl. No meme photo attribution (is that a thing?) was included when it was sent to me.

I also discovered in the search that my co-workers have sent me this owl meme 16 times over the past 6 years, which is both amusing and a bit concerning. I remind them of the before-owl *that much*?!? haha

*sigh* everyone at work is celebrating the end of switching wake-ups twice every year (my province is sticking with Daylight Savings Time forever after this Sunday) but I'm feeling a bit glum about all the pitch black shift-starts for soooo long next fall through spring.

A cluster of 4 shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) mushrooms are pictured on the forest floor. They are cone shaped mushrooms that have a white cap with a beige tint, that peels gradually back into a sort of many-hangnail layers effect. As they grow taller the bottom liquifies into a black ooze that gives them another nickname, ink-caps. This group has been attacked by a slug, and it has made several holes in the cap. The one in the middle is white and cartoon ghost-shaped, and has two holes like eyes looking at the camera, made extra haunting by the blackness of the inky ooze interior of the cap. I think I meant to post this on Hallowe'en but clearly forgot. My phone's search function thinks it's an owl, and it actually does look like one enough that I laughed out loud.

I wanted to post an owl photo to raise people's spirits, so I typed "owl" into my elderly iphone's photo search to find the two owls I have ever photographed, and of the 57 non-owl photos it gave me, this was the funniest.
#owl #FungiFriends #mycology #ShaggyMane

Great news! Also that owl has fantastic eyebrows.

There are new reasons to celebrate World Wildlife Day in Saskatchewan. Located 40 kilometres east of the East Block of Grasslands National Park near Rockglen, NCC and a local landowner have formalized a new conservation agreement, securing 426 hectares of grassland habitat.

Scientists tagging 10,000 bogong moths to solve mystery The project's success largely relies on citizen scientists spotting a distinct white dot on the wings of moths.

"We cool the moths down on ice, and then we give them a couple of puffs of CO2 … and that just knocks them out for a couple of minutes so we can gently remove a couple of scales, and glue a little piece of paper with some eyelash glue onto their wing," Dr Umbers said.
#inverts #ScienceDetectives

Hey! Thanks for posting this link. I just learned how to hear a word, very slowly, in practice mode🐸