Weird stuff from wikipedia

I receive quite a lot of asks and submissions of things that fit this blog, which I absolutely love. However, as I am not able to add alt text to submissions, or edit the images to make the formatting easier to read, my policy will be to make new posts using the material in the submission, and @ the person who sent it in to thank them.

Pinned Post

A wikipedia article titled "Anting (behavior)" The header reads "Anting is a maintenance behavior during which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin. The bird may pick up the insects in its bill and rub them on the body (active anting), or the bird may lie in an area of high density of the insects and perform dust bathing-like movements (passive anting). The insects secrete liquids containing chemicals such as formic acid, which can act as an insecticide, miticide, fungicide, or bactericide. Alternatively, anting could make the" An image on the sidebar is captioned "A black drongo in a typical anting posture". It depicts a bird sitting on the grass with its wings spread out, touching the ground."

A subheading reads "Sensory self-stimulation" Text below reads "Anting has been compared to human activities such as smoking and other external stimuli that serve no biological purpose and is just for self-stimulation. This hypothesis has been suggested as anting has no obvious function, it is non-adaptive, birds are said to achieve pleasure from anting and anting has characteristics of a habit. However, there is no definitive evidence that sensory self-stimulation is the purpose of anting in birds. There have been several studies that claim to prove this hypothesis while others say just the opposite.[6]"

Anthro bird who finishes a long shift at work, leans against the wall with a sigh, and covers themself with ants.

Text on a wikipedia article reading "Wee Ben Nevis was a character appearing in The Beano comic for a few years from 1974, drawn by Vic Neill,[109] in a feature described by Auberon Waugh as having "strong undertones of Scottish Nationalism by its untrue suggestion that Scotsmen have superhuman strength despite their diminutive stature".[110] "

goodscreencaps

throw-your-boat

wikipediahmms

text on a wikipedia article reading "Cicadas excrete fluid in streams of droplets due to their high volume consumption of xylem sap.[60] The jets of urine that cicadas produce have a velocity of up to 3 meters per second, making them the fastest among all assessed animals, including mammals like elephants and horses.[61][62] "

throw-your-boat

Can insects weighing mere grams challenge our current understanding of fluid dynamics in urination, jetting fluids like their larger mammalian counterparts? Current fluid urination models, predominantly formulated for mammals, suggest that jetting is confined to animals over 3 kg, owing to viscous and surface tension constraints at microscales. Our findings defy this paradigm by demonstrating that cicadas—weighing just 2 g—possess the capability for jetting fluids through remarkably small orifices. Using dimensional analysis, we introduce a unifying fluid dynamics scaling framework that accommodates a broad range of taxa, from surface-tension-dominated insects to inertia and gravity-reliant mammals. This study not only refines our understanding of fluid excretion across various species but also highlights its potential relevance in diverse fields such as ecology, evolutionary biology, and biofluid dynamics.

–Unifying fluidic excretion across life from cicadas to elephants (Elio J Challita, M Saad Bhamla) (source 62 in above image)

Gonna be honest, insect urine velocity was firmly on my "yeah sure thats a thing you can measure but id be surprised if ppl'd find a way to make it useful any time soon" list until today

dor-min

tananansad

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only Dusun-speaking furry in this world so this WIP translation of the English Wikipedia's "Furry fandom" page is mostly dedicated to myself.

Liwang kaanangan furry - Wikipedia

dtp.wikipedia.org

Marginalized indigenous languages don't deserve this pessimist narrative of being close to "extinction". They can still thrive in this day and age as long as you let them evolve dynamically as they should, even if it means in embarrassing and taboo ways. Or something like that. IDK, I just did this for the funnies, but also because I needed an outlet to practice my Dusun translation skills.

Dusun (and more broadly, Indigenous) furries exist, spread the word around. Kopibabasan ku duyu.

very cool!!! not a hmm