Viscouse
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Didn't know octopuses dream or the cat purring thing. Gotta check that one.
Also...Bees. Love. Balls.
I've frequenbtly been asked what my favorite animal is. I don't have one...every genus has a very specific edge that allows it to survive & (mostly) thrive. Thus they all deserve respect & favoritism.
Even (deep breath) asshole wasps.
Aspernari
Imagine forgetting where you've buried your nuts.
Howlingowl
And hyenas give birth through a vestigial penis
youareagreatguybut
And most people enjoy and love these things. But a couple of sociopaths cares only about hoarding money and power and does not give a shit about cat purring, and the rest of us is too stupid to recognize them and not listen to them. And they ruin everything for everyone.
baldbear
End them, free us all from hell.
crunchefun3000
@OP 'wasps' are great pollinators, but "Nope"! Runs away screaming...
DiracsDelta
Old dead people inventing religions: humans are the only intelligent beings, and we are so special that the rest of the world exists for us to use how we want.
charondaboatman
systemfrown
I can’t imagine not remembering all the places I’ve buried my nuts.
theSpinnerBoy
Rookie! I’ve forgotten more places where I’ve buried my nuts than you’ve ever … forget how the rest of it goes…
InitHello
The cat purring thing has been experimentally verified to help the cats themselves heal, but there's no evidence that the purr is loud enough to affect *our* healing.
Tuneh
One could argue that lower stress levels makes it easier for us to heal, and purring cats are pretty relaxing and stress relieving. So technically... :p
ericbres1337
I realize it’s only anecdotal (if I’m even using that in the right context) .. but I 100% believe my cat never leaving my side while I was going through my cancer treatments is a main reason I’m alive today. Cats heal.
InitHello
Cats heal, including but not limited to the method Tuneh pointed out, and cats absolutely definitely love us. Which is also healing.
ForPriestSake
Giraffes are afraid of heights
freeAssociator
I dunno — I suspect we could do without ticks
HolyFreakingToast
yes all true! otters have rock they keep for smashing shells open.
Bojovnik84
Dogs just over here reading this like:
drums4lyfe
so that's why dogs gotta pee on every tree! fuck dem squirrels!
cbaggs32
They're sending p-mails
mwipfband
I know where I left my fucking nuts, okay
mindblogger
I inherited a frog from my Dad after Dad was placed in a home. Friend's of his told me the frog drove him crazy but Dad did have a drinking problem. His name is Michigan T, Frog and he sings, 'Hello my Baby' so Ive finally decided to show him to the world.
He's such a good singer and great dancer as well. Can't wait for everyone to hear him...
baldbear
Dyamonde
All interesting, except for 'the forest grows flowers first'. That one is insane bullshit the way it's worded. 'The Forest' is not an entity and has no agency. Flowers are just the fastest growing plant in that environment, which is completely unremarkable.
CompressedInfo
BEES!
GuysJustWannaFish
I've planted a tree or two myself.
OhIfIMust
Here is an octopus dreaming; her name was Heidi:
marquettegoldeneagles
Absolutely incredible animals.
nachosyndicate
The eye movement and breath acceleration.
JeezusJuice
I worry the color changes are because she’s having a bad dream. I hope it was a nice dream.
Feralkyn
You'd think that the chromatophores (if that's what they are) responding to a dream would be a BAD IDEA evolutionarily, if indeed octopuses sleep. Can you imagine being a predator swimming through a reef and finding an octopus, dead asleep, turning albino against the brown corals?? Lol
OhIfIMust
They don't sleep out in the open in the wild.
Feralkyn
Don't they sleep tucked up in reefs and such?
OhIfIMust
They’re extremely good at finding or even making cover. Heidi-holes, if you will.
Feralkyn
I thought they hid themselves with camo in part, but interesting!
HandoB4Javert
@TinyOctopus has dreams
keyserv
Whatchu mean WAS?!
OhIfIMust
They don't live long, and this was filmed about 6 years ago.
ReallyOG
This reply deserves an award of its only. Beautiful dreams Heidi. 12/10
Snooj
Squirrles don't just "plant trees". They are a vital part of the life cycle of many trees.
tzahtman
Not if you take away their shovel and post digger.
boumboum34
*singing* "I'd like to be
Under the sea
In an octopus's garden
In the shade"
baldbear
+1 for long lost harmonies
lonosham
And otters torture and rape other aquatic animals! Oh, and the hand thing, that’s cute I suppose, if you overlook the raping
baldbear
Dolphins rape, never heard that of Otters.
robingal1
Could we tape a recording of cats purring to a leg cast and measure its heal time contrasted to unpurred heal time?
jlist
If you want to meet some intelligent octopuses, read the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
theSpinnerBoy
My new pickup line! “Hey, baby, wanna come meet some intelligent octopuses?”
iusedtodream
Pretty fucking fantastic planet we got and we're ruining everything. I'm so mad at us.
LrrrRulerofThePlanetOmicronPerseiVIII
If it makes you feel any better, it was all here long before us, and will be here long after we’ve killed our dumb asses off
Bulmero8
It won't "all" be here. We are causing a mass extinction. A lot of species have not and will not survive us :(
sirbartonslady
Mass extinctions happen. The biosphere still endures. We are ruining things for ourselves and our nearest relatives, but the biosphere has endured far worse than we could ever inflict. Even if we wiped out more than the Permian extinction, there's still time for life to evolve and thrive before the sun goes red giant
Bulmero8
I'm happy for the biosphere, and I know life will endure, I'm not arguing that. It just doesn't help with the fact that I deeply unhappy about the suffering we are causing animals 💔
sirbartonslady
Naah i get that, worrying about extant animals suffering. But people claiming we're going to render the earth sterile and DESTROY ALL LIFE!!!1 need to chill the fuck out and realize that there's greater forces at work than we'll ever understand. We can start by reversing what damage we can, but... the mass extinction we're in likely started with our earliest ancestors during the ice age, so I don't think we can reasonably expect to just STOP it.
LiuJr
See, thats what worries me. Yeah, we're killing ourselves off with how we're ruining the planet and we will deserve it. But we're great at adapting through technology. So who knows how far we'll ruin Earth before we finally are exterminated by our own actions, and if the Earth will actually be able to recover from our presence. Afaik, Earth never had such a durable parasite as "Humans" with their technologies.
sirbartonslady
The biosphere survived multiple snowball earth events. I genuinely do not believe we have the technology to destroy the entire biosphere.
DustInComp
I was thinking about this recently... once the last person capable of reading a calendar dies, it doesn't matter if the Earth takes a hundred or a billion years to recover. Won't look like it used to, but life finds a way.
horsetuna
Otters have favourite rocks, not shells.
EatYourSoylentGreenAndShutUp
Depends on where they live...
TsubakiTragic
and they have pockets... folds in armpit pelt that envelope a 'space', for their rock(s)
SecretSquirrel27
Can confirm. Still havent found my nuts...
KaIsAWheelbarrow
johnblood616
River otters rape baby seals to death then fuck their corpses.
baldbear
Proof required.
johnblood616
I misspoke. Sea otters.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/24/5640890/otters-r">d">https://www.vox.com/2014/4/24/5640890/otters-rape-baby-seals-monsters-bad
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7426965/
Chereazi
I'd assume most animals with brains dream, it's a side effect of processing data over night, likely evolved in a relatively early ancestor
BananaForScaIe
Huh, I coulda swore neil de grasse tyson said only humans dream. Ah well, I'm probably wrong.
Chereazi
Maybe he meant it in the more philosophical sense? Like dream of traveling to the stars? And even then I'd doubt it tbh...
BananaForScaIe
No, it was a discussion with him and his black physicist friend about aliens coming to earth and going "wait humans just lie prone for 1/3 of their lives doing nothing but having crazy ideas? No other species in the universe does that" type argument on why HUMANS are weird.
Either way, I don't think he's right on everything lol, just that somehow I'd filed that in my head even though I CLEARLY know dogs dream *facepalm* lol
theSpinnerBoy
See “Dreams For Survival” theory, by Robert Feldman. Also Elias Howe dreaming up the sewing machine and August Kekule dreaming the structure of benzene. Aristotle said we’re always dreaming but the outside world overwhelms it when we’re awake
QuartzPoker
It's possible dreaming evolved multiple times, given the enormous gulf between some of the animals that do it
Snooj
Even androids dream.
HardyandRamanujan
I bet they've seen things you people couldn't believe
LrrrRulerofThePlanetOmicronPerseiVIII
Of electric sheep?
lonosham
:shrug: I don’t know, do they?
Vorphalack
REM sleep has been observed in jumping spiders, for example.
madflenser
That's an utterly bizarre factoid. How many neurons do those lil guys even have?
InitHello
Gotta be at least a dozen.
Feralkyn
Dunno but they are highly intelligent. We still don't actually *get* how intelligence works, in a lot of cases. Some of the smartest animals on Earth are small fish, and as another example, ANTS pass a pretty stringent version of the mirror test for self-awareness. Ants will tend gardens, keep livestock, wage wars and more (depending on the species).
madflenser
True but we do know certain things are linked, for example brain to bodyweight ratio as well as neuron or more accurately synapse density.
Vorphalack
Not sure about that number. You can read the full jumping spider REM study here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204754119
jaggcomputing5
(Wasps) I was driving home from work this evening thinking about tiny lives. Our rat correspondent here on Imgur has me thinking differently about rats, as does our dear spider woman about jumping spiders.
There are lots of different wasps, not all of them are arseholes. We humans either anthropomiphise animals or demonize them, there is a middle ground but a lot of people seem to avoid it.
You are right about the (deep breath) wasps.
AFallenDragon
Honestly wasps don't bother me. If they see me as a place to land while I'm standing still I just move around a bit, it tells them that I'm not a sturdy place to land. When you freak out & start smacking at them is when they tend to get stingy. Irony here though. The only time I have been stung one had managed to find itself in my pants (no idea how either) & when I was putting said pants on so I could leave, it freaked & stung me twice.
Feralkyn
European Hornets are really cool. Huge. Scary if you aren't familiar, but super social & super chill. I got to know some against my will when I visited my parents, who had an infestation with a hive somewhere outside. They were everywhere, invasive there, huge--several were trapped indoors every night. My parents had gotten used to them, and explained that they hadn't been bitten or stung except once when they stepped on one, on accident; otherwise they just put them outside. I ended up hand-
Feralkyn
feeding one juice I had, watching them body-block hummingbirds away from a feeder in a display of competitive social communication, and one returned to me looking for more food (buzzing my neck until I realized it was NOT a hummingbird fluttering directly on my skin). I was initially so freaked out by them that I slept in a closet to avoid them; the morning after, I got up, went to the bathroom, dropped trou and reached down to scratch an itch on my leg and a fucking hornet CRAWLED OUT of my-
Feralkyn
pants. That thing had been IN MY PANTS, on my leg, for god knows how long--it sure as fuck didn't fly into the closed closet overnight--and never bit or stung me. It freaked me out but that's about when I realized how chill they really are. Dude knew I wasn't a threat.
Feralkyn
(or well, dudette, I guess.)