I put together a Flickr album of my favorite wildlife photos I’ve taken for a grant I’m looking at. Random question, do you think dead wildlife counts as wildlife? Like I know cattle on a farm are “life” but not “wild,” so are bones of a deer in a forest “wild” but not “life,” ergo they are also not wildlife? Just curious what would fit the application best. Obviously this is for my book on dead animals (@carcassafterlives) anyway.
Variations of one of my favourite pictures. I call it Explodey Coyote
Do you think if Dr. Doolittle or Eliza Thornberry existed they’d have a really hard time translating what animals are saying?
Like, do you translate body language? Do you say “Fido is a little bit annoyed and doesn’t want to play now?”
Do you think there are a lot of concepts that one species communicates to each other that simply have no equivalent in the human language?
I don’t imagine there would be a lot of idioms and cultural references, right?
You can learn a lot from social media but you gotta go do stuff to get it! I understand it’s not always feasible, so, I’m trying to show you some of the inevitable biases of media. Even if someone is an excellent and accurate journalist.
Both of these animals belong to the Norwegian Mangen pack (pictures taken in 2019). Looking at these pictures makes it kind of hard to believe the scientists’ claim that these are indeed pure wolves. Pure wolves do not have white markings like this. However, I wonder if it is possible that this is a mutation?
Holy crap. I mean, they could be coywolves? Or they have recent dog in their lineage, frankly I’ve never seen a coloration like that on wolves without some other canine in the mix. The second image does look a bit dogish.
No coyotes in Europe so dog hybrids would be the only option
I’m currently writing an article on blue-eyed coyotes and I’m sort of struggling to find really well-agreed-upon scientific explanations for differences in canid phenotypes (or let’s limit it to colors.) On the one hand, dogs, wolves, and coyotes are completely interfertile (read that carefully, interfertile), meaning it’s genetically possible for a coydog to have babies with a coywolf and they can have babies with a wolfdog etc forever (other behavioral factors make it not-extremely-common, though.)
I looked into the “domestication hypothesis” which is when animals are more friendly to humans they’ll develop associated characteristics like white spots, floppy, ears, blue eyes etc…but I don’t know if that’s really universally accepted among animals that are not selectively bred by humans? If friendliness and colors are truly linked, then you’ll see a disproportionate number of oddly-colored canids in your photos because those ones allowed themselves to be photographed. However the data is inherently troublesome, because how do you know the colors of animals you’re not photographing? Trail cams can help but tbh there are a lot more community scientists on iNaturalist than funded studies! And trail cams can also affect results because they might attract animals who are behaviorally different, ie more curious about novel human objects.
The third and safest answer is “it’s a mutation.” However that doesn’t tell you much because literally all characteristics are mutations. I also wonder if any of this is really specific to canids - they are special because they can breed with domestic animals, but there aren’t a lot of really highly-domesticated deer around for the deer populations to breed with. And yet piebald deer exist.
If anyone has any reading to recommend about diverse canid coloration, especially if it can help regarding blue-eyed coyotes, and why this diversity persists, lmk!
I know I’ve made this joke before but I found this cat skull in a park so I had to film it with my sweet, frolic-loving Thunder. Who is alive.
If adopted, countries signing the Universal Declaration of Animal Welfare would agree on several terms, including that animals are sentient and should be respected and that animal welfare affects other aspects of the UN Millennium Development goals, such as improving the environment and human health.
As with other declarations like the Paris Agreement, UDAW is both vague and non-binding: there are no specific rules such as “domestic birds need at least N square feet of space.” It’s more like “animals should be treated well.” However someone could file a legal complaint if a signatory was, according to them, violating a part of the declaration by doing a specific thing.
Coyoteblr and urban wildlifeblr, my work is hosting an advanced online screening of “Don’t Feed The Coyotes,” which I believe was initially called “Urban Coyote” or something along those lines. Made by a really dedicated biologist/filmmaker.
Donation suggested, but not required!
Bone Hunter
I expected it to have trouble with “Dik Dik.” “Duiker” could have been worse. Didn’t expect the word “antelope” to be captioned as “anal.”
I finally solved the horn mystery
Wow this filter is like magic!
Advances in carcass visualizing! There are a lot of challenges to seeing the internal anatomy of an animal: when they’re alive they don’t want to be handled much and certainly not to have body parts removed of cleared. When they’re dead they’re floppy, and how do you see inside without damaging them?
People have been diaphonizing animals and shining fluorescent light to study anatomy for a while, but I haven’t seen them combined with gelatin for suspending and posing them!
There are better photos inside the article, but here is my fave:
(Photograph by Matthew Girard, University of Kansas)
