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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I thought I had read something about this, but I can’t find a source, so take this with some salt.

    Even big cats chitter, and while sometimes there’s a social aspect where other cats are alerted to the hunt, not all big cats hunt in groups. So I think they chitter to warm their jaws up. Like streatching before exercising, or the jitters you get from adrenaline, the rapid movements ensure they can bite at maximum strength quickly, and without pulling a muscle.






  • This isn’t learned behaviour though. The kites tried eating the invasive snails immediately, but they were too large to be cracked by their beaks, being two to five times larger.

    The change to eating the larger non-native snails was facilitated by larger beaks seen in the years after the invasion.

    It seems like the local applesnail had a crash due to drought in the early 2000’s (partly caused by the draining of wetlands for development), and the invasive island applesnail was first seen in 2004. There are even more species of invasive snail now, but the opportunity likely arose because of a population crash.

    The fittest in this case are the kits that can eat the snails they find, not by being less picky, but by having larger beaks.







  • Selecting one wavelength are discarding all the others, and sometimes shifting that wavelength to a more convenient hue is great for science, but feels like cheating when looking for a specific colour.

    It’s like looking for pictures of red cars, and getting a car that’s 90% rust, a picture taken in a forest fire, and a picture taken through red-tinted glass.