thinking about them 😍 🪶

Also wow I don't think I've ever cracked the Kindle Top 50 in... anything, LOL. (They have some VERY esoteric categories and still no.) UNTIL NOW! THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST is still $1.99 at ebook retailers apparently! :)

“pivot to video” no thanks I’m gonna pivot to the woods

exCUSE ME

I love visiting my hometown and getting to eat poutine 😌

Every year I say I'm going to do better at creature-finding for December Invertefest and yet every year I decide to spend Dec 27-30 in the Outaouais where it is currently *checks notes* -24°C with the wind chill

I was trying to get a sluggish dragonfly to crawl onto my hand so I could move it out of the middle of the road, but the wind kept blowing it off. Someone stopped to block the wind, and after I'd successfully moved it, I looked up and it was one of the most preeminent scientists in my field

Now this is an #InverteFest boxing week sale I can get behind

Bryozoa mention

There's a snowstorm in the part(s) of Ontario that I have been spending the holidays in so to celebrate #InverteFest on day 2 of it, here are some invert-adjacent ephemera I have seen

Have yourself a merry little Carboniferous. #Art #SciArt #PaleoArt #Inverts

Pack your bags, charge your batteries, #InverteFest begins at midnight your time. If you're going out to spot critters, join our community science project here: www.inaturalist.org/projects/inv...

Diplomoceras (the clippy) and Pseudocenoceras

I'd like to thank the people who put St. John's in a natural harbour because it meant my house was slightly sheltered from the record-breaking 137km/hr winds last night

I love when the spam predatory journal emails are desperate

I bought this shirt on the first run and it is truly so comfy, and when people polite-small-talk ask me about it I can spring my trap and talk to them about white-throated sparrows' four sexes or giant grouper protogyny. would recommend 10/10

I bid on and won these 30-year-old trail signs in a charity auction for the East Coast Trail Association (all of their signage was just updated and replaced) and I haven't figured out what I'm doing with them or where I'm putting them but I love them so much

Lemme just say - and I cannot emphasize this enough - 𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗸𝘀

Me, pointing: So those bigger ones are from blue jays, and the smaller ones are juncos Them: Whoa, that's so cool, how can you tell? Me: I saw blue jays and juncos running around making them this morning

My cat, Totoro, had a follow-up vet appt today where they had to bring her to the back, but they put me in an exam room where I could hear the staff talking through the closed door. One person was just quietly singing the My Neighbour Totoro theme to her for the entire procedure and it was the best

A friend gave me their AppleTV login so I'm catching up on Prehistoric Planet and I gotta say I think this is my favourite episode so far

I'm old. If you're not, listen to this. Get a guitar or some drums, or a trumpet. Pick up a brush, a pencil, some clay or a welder. Just make shit. It doesn't have to be good (eventually it will be) just make music, art or write or whatever. It's literally never been more important.

I was going to be a vertebrate palaeontologist but I spent one (1) summer in the badlands of Alberta while it was 45°C and then I became a coldwater marine biologist

This has now become my most popular post on here, I can't believe that for a second time it is once again an eel post that I will be known for

It's axiomatic! You have to hold them by the head! In pre-modern England, the expression, "Holding an eel by the tail" meant that you were doing something the wrong way. Like...did you just buy a cyber truck so that you could look cool and pick up women? You, sir, are holding an eel by the tail.

Pro tip if you ever need to carry a lamprey

If you ever wonder why people say "slippery as an eel" I can confirm that one time we had to hold an eel for a vet to do a blood draw and that eel ended up on the floor 47 times out of 48 attempts

I'm at an archaeology talk tonight about the history of a specific fishing settlement and there is an entire gaggle of archeologists associated with the speaker here and they are all wearing matching shirts that say "𝗡𝗼, 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗼𝘀𝗮𝘂𝗿𝘀"

There is a deep-sea red tree coral (Primnoa resedaeformis) in the North Atlantic that is an ecological engineer and a keystone species creating habitats for all sorts of other animals and it smells like watermelon cucumber

Earlier today, I was notified that someone was at my door. This is who it was:

Me, leaning flirtatiously on the wall at the gym: is that a sandpiper sticker on your water bottle? because I also like sandpipers and- *misses wall, falls over* -underappreciated by the general population and deserve more promotional material and if you could tell me where you got that sticker-

Sometimes I like to go into iNaturalist at the Kingdom level to try and help people who are truly baffled, and I like that the most baffling items are just fungus, fungus, fungus, fungus, ctenophore, fungus, fungus, jellyfish, fungus, fungus, fungus,,,

parents freed a hummingbird from a skylight with a coleus flower attached to a pole

I love fall, when the leaves change colour and *checks notes* dozens of fungal fruiting bodies burst the earth apart to disperse spores into the air

sponsored post #critterposting

as far as I know, the species isn't even named. there are literal glowing shrimp just chilling in puddles in rural Argentina and somehow they're not even printed on their money yet

I have a shared folder full of R code for a publication I'm working on with my very offline previous manager and I am mortally tempted to spend way too much time to find-and-replace every dplyr verb with these just to see what they say

Bold of you to show your face around here bud, everybody's pretty disappointed in you tbh

Me 🤝 bugs Piles of fallen leaves

I was at a Halloween party last night wearing a lobster onesie and I am not exaggerating even slightly when I say that TWO different people just walked away from me while I was literally mid-sentence telling them a lobster fact

I took a wrong turn during a hike last week and ended up on the mountain biking route, on which I found this plank of wood with a handwritten Macbeth quote nailed to a tree (?????)

Them: Ready to go! Should we take your car or mine? Me: Can we take yours? Mine has a spider on it. Them: Ha ha ha, for sure, I get it Me, thinking about how I drove the entire way home at 20km/hr that morning with my hand cupped over the spiderweb and spider on my side mirror: I'm not sure you do

I accidentally stayed up until 3am reading and I'm now beefing with the entire local starling population because apparently every single individual inhabiting Newfoundland AND Labrador was posted outside MY window this morning boopling and burbling and SCREAMING

was randomly browsing r/megalophobia earlier only to see an image of stygiomedusa with a snorkeler at the surface, which is bonkers since it's a deep sea jelly. 🦑🧪 after a little digging, it came from this paper: doi.org/10.1590/S198... about this observation: www.instagram.com/p/BzlnDMxht0y

Not to brag or anything but I saw a pretty cool spider on a walk yesterday

The autumn colours here have been SPECTACULAR (in between the near-constant RDF), so please enjoy this view of Quidi Vidi and Signal Hill with me

Heard about the Louvre jewel heist and my first thought was “finally, some good old fashioned normal crime”

It's the last day of my contract today and I'm debating if anyone will notice if I pack up my things and also the decorative fish earbones and seal skull that were already in my cubicle when I arrived

Two paths diverged in a wood, and I– I took the one more traveled by; Because the wood is still a full ecosystem and leaving the maintained path can damage it, Also I don't want ticks or wet socks

Two paths diverged in a wood, and I– I took the one more traveled by; Because the wood is still a full ecosystem and leaving the maintained path can damage it, Also I don't want ticks or wet socks