Happy Father’s Day to You, Seahorses!
by Tami Weiss, FusedJaw.com
Seahorses are often referred to as the best dads in the animal kingdom – and for good reason – they’re the only animal where the male gets pregnant! That’s right, it’s the men that take on the joys of childbirth in these equine fishes.
How does he do it? He has a special patch of skin called a “brood pouch” that the female lays the eggs into. He then keeps the eggs safe until they hatch using a strong muscle to keep the pouch closed. When they hatch, he releases the fry (baby seahorses) to fend for themselves. The fry are exact replicas of the parents, except only a few millimeters long.
Some fun seahorse facts:
- As few as 8 or as many as 2000 seahorses can be born at one time, depending on the species.
- The male seadragon and the male pipefish, seahorse relatives, also incubates the eggs. However, another relative, the Ghost Pipefish, the female that incubates the eggs.
- Seahorses lack a tail fin for swimming. Instead, their tail has evolved to grasp objects to keep them anchored in place. To swim, they use their small dorsal fin on their backs, and steer with their pectoral fins which are located on their head behind their gills. For that reason, they are not very good swimmers.
- Adult seahorses do not have very many predators. They have bony plates covering their whole body which makes them unpalatable to most fish. The few animals that don’t seem to mind this are crabs, skates and rays, angler fish, tuna, penguins and other sea birds.
- The first recognized pygmy seahorse Hippocampus bargibanti, a species smaller than your thumbnail, was discovered on accident when a biologist studying the sea fans in the lab noticed this tiny fish that had hitched a ride on the sea fan he was studying.
- The smallest seahorse known is only 13mm long. Satomi’s pygmy seahorse was only discovered in the past year, and is less than the size of a penny. Its babies (or fry) are about the size of an apostrophy in a newspaper when born.
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1. I can’t get up at the crack of dawn to carpe fucking diem because I’m out five nights a week chasing laughter and the moonlight.
2. I don’t want to wake up feeling comfortable. Fuck comfort. I want to wake up and know I’ve woken up, I want to feel my life as it happens and if that means a throbbing headache, so be it; I’d rather dance in the dark than under a rainbow.
3. Eat whatever you want, idiots.
4. My breakfast happens at 1pm and I’d like to read whilst I eat it, thankyou very much.
5. I don’t need to stretch, nor do I need to reach for the sky; I am not a member of S Club 7 and my head is already in the clouds.
6. Drink all the water your body needs, put a chopped up lemon in your bottle but never neglect iced tea and vodka - whatever your poison, indulge yourself in it sometimes. Striving for perfection in any aspect of your life is just going to disappoint you; have a shot every now and then.
7. If you’re living life, you might not have time to write down your activities until four in the morning. Your life record may be scribbled onto receipts as you ride the train. That’s okay too; it doesn’t have to be beautiful to be valid.
8. Sleep on a pile of towels if you have to. Sleep in the grass. Sleep at a new friends’ place every night. As long as you’re sleeping next to something you love - whether it be a partner or the latest Palahniuk - scented fabric softener won’t mean shit.
9. Chaos can be better sometimes.
10. Run into the ocean instead.
11. You don’t owe strangers your smile. You don’t owe nature your observation. Maybe you don’t have a dog to walk.
12. Don’t make plans you can’t follow through with, it’s unfair.
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14. Fuck it. Pick up a book because you liked the cover. Pick up a book because the person before you left it behind. Scribble all over it if you want. Tear pages out and cut out words if you want. Pick up no books for a month, then ten in a day. Books will always be there.
15. Be yourself without imposing cliched values and movie-romance ideas onto your personality. Do what comes naturally. If you don’t want to pay your speeding fines, don’t fucking pay them, it’s your life. If you don’t like old people, don’t go and volunteer at their homes, you’ll only make everyone there miserable. Find your true bliss rather than assuming you’ll know what it is by sticking your tongue out at babies. You’ll get there, there’s no rush.
16. Don’t fucking daydream about it. Do it. Write your own ending.
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Thomas Bukovatz Salvatore Ferragamo AW12
“Blood is thicker than water”, when used in the context of family over friends, is in fact a wildly incorrect bastardisation.
The true, full quote is “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” and refers to relationships forged by choice holding deeper meaning than those of mere biology.
The Nu Project’s Nude Photos Tell The Truth About Women’s Bodies
The Nu Project is a no-glamor honest look at beauty and image in our world.
Female nudity isn’t hard to come by in the media, but the bodies we see usually represent a fairly limited scope of sizes and shapes. The Nu Project, a collection of nude photographs shot by Minneapolis photographer Matt Blum, seeks to add some variety to the mix. Blum started The Nu Project in 2005 but said it really took off when his wife, Katy Kessler, became the project’s editor. Blum sees the photos as filling a void. “When I started shooting nudes there was no project like it,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. The things that I had seen either used models with typical model bodies or average people who were made to look extremely unimpressive. I figured there was a way to treat women (of any size/shape) like models and photograph them beautifully, respectfully without a lot of sexual under or overtones. The women photographed are all volunteers, and most of the pictures are taken in the subjects’ homes — where they feel most comfortable. The Nu Project’s website showcases six galleries of nudes, three shot in North America, three in South America. Although Blum told HuffPost that he feels that they have a “good variety of people involved,” he and Kessler acknowledge on The Nu Project website that they’d love for the subjects to be more diverse. “The hardest part for us is that the project is 100 percent volunteer, so I do not see the women until I show up at their door,” Blum writes on the website. “We’re doing our best to encourage all types of women, but we need volunteers of all backgrounds and walks of life to make the project more complete.” Blum said he ultimately hopes that these images inspire the women who see them to feel better about their own bodies. “It’s been really exciting to hear people react to the images,” he told HuffPost. “We get a lot of feedback from women (especially) who have struggled to see themselves as beautiful, and this project has helped them on that path.”
This miniature ecosystem has been thriving in an almost completely isolated state for more than forty years. It has been watered just once in that time.
The original single spiderwort plant has grown and multiplied, putting out seedlings. As it has access to light, it continues to photosynthesize. The water builds up on the inside of the bottle and then rains back down on the plants in a miniature version of the water cycle.As leaves die, they fall off and rot at the bottom producing the carbon dioxide and nutrients required for more plants to grow.
That is awesome!!!!!!!
