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Phil: are you seriously farming potatoes Techno?

Techno: Yes

Nikki: Awww! Is there- is there another potato war going on?

Techno: It- It makes me calm 🥺👉👈

The Camouflaged Looper: these caterpillars fashion their own camouflage by collecting flower petals/vegetation and using silk to "glue" the pieces onto their bodies

Though they're often referred to as "camouflaged loopers," these caterpillars are the larvae of the wavy-lined emerald moth (Synchlora aerata).

Camouflaged loopers deploy a unique form of self-defense -- they snip off tiny pieces of the flowers upon which they feed, then use bits of silk to attach the vegetation to their backs. This provides them with a kind of camouflage, enabling them to blend in with the plants that they eat.

Some of them create little tufts that run along their backs, while others fashion a thicker camouflage that covers their backs completely. In some cases, the camouflaged loopers will even build much larger bundles that surround their entire bodies.

Their range includes most of North America (from southern Canada down through Texas) and they can feed upon an enormous variety of plants -- so the disguises that these caterpillars build can come in countless colors, shapes, and sizes, incorporating many different flowers and other bits of vegetation.

And this is what the fully-developed moth looks like:

Sources & More Info:

Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy: Wavy-Lined Emerald, Master of Disguise

Maryland Biodiversity Project: Wavy-Lined Emerald Moth (Synchlora aerata)

The Caterpillar Lab: Camouflaged Looper

University of Alberta Museums: Synchlora aerata

Missouri Department of Conservation: Wavy-Lined Emerald

Nebraskaland Magazine: The Amazing Camouflaged Looper

Lake County Forest Preserves: Camouflage Revealed

Carmin in a Angel of Death au! She takes the place of Zack here

This is a free coupon/excuse for you to infodump on the current topic you’re obsessed with. Take some time away from internet discourse and share with us something you find interesting.

Today I read about Precambrian animals!

The above one is Thectardis, which is an animal so weird we have almost no inclination of how to categorize it. We know it was alive and it was cone shaped. That’s it.

The thing about fossil life from 500+ million years ago is that there often aren’t really any living analogs for it? Many of the animals from that time were sessile, many filter feeders, without much in common with what comes to mind when we think “Animal”—something that moves around and has a brain and thinks. The strata that preserve these animals are very rarely accessible, and these glimpses we have are hard to interpret.

Many of these creatures are known from a single fossil. Many are too weird to interpret or classify even tentatively.

Here’s another organism from that time, Eoandromeda:

Look at this thing. I can’t explain why, but Eoandromeda makes me feel some kind of deep dread. Like...we don’t know what this thing was. We don’t even know if it was an animal. I look at that shape and I want someone to tell me what that thing is. But we don’t know. We don’t have the words for What That Thing Is.

Imagine something so alien, so divergent from the paths life took to the present day, that we can’t look at it and say “That’s a worm” or “That’s a sponge” or “that’s a jellyfish” or...anything. The words for it literally don’t exist, because nothing like it now exists, and we know nothing about it. We’re not looking at different versions of the same categories of creature we have now. We’re looking at something that is too obscure to have a category. We can guess what it might have looked like. But it is so utterly unlike anything that exists now that we know nothing—except that undeniably, it existed.

Namacalathus. Be honest, doesn’t this make you scream inside? Or is it just me? This was a real animal that existed. It doesn’t know or give a fuck what a “snail” or “bird” is.

Learning about dinosaurs is DIFFERENT. We know what bones are. We have them! When we say that sauropod dinosaurs ate plants, we can imagine those plants. We can describe dinosaurs as having a “neck” and “claws” and “legs.” And I think that’s comforting because whatever I feel when I look at Namacalathus is not that.

This one invented muscles! Muscles are okay! I have muscles! That should make me feel better, right!

...Not really! Put it back!

For millions of years these things existed, living their unknowable lives. There was an entire world of these organisms. This was EARTH, our world.

People mostly haven’t heard of these. I think people care less about these strange early creatures because they seem less charismatic, not having brains or doing anything, but I think there is a lot of charisma to the Unknowable Cone Animal, the Dread Spiral, and all the other unsettling animals of the Precambrian.

Part 3: Dsmp members as low-quality screenshots + iconic tumblr posts

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4 |

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"that lil animation loop is the most annoying fucking thing" suck on a lemon? Why would you say this. If you can't say anything nice jump out of a window.

Sam: this is why no one likes you you're so insensitive.

Wes:

Danny: REESES PUFFS REESES PUFFS

credit to songwriters alex quackity and george notfound

Shout out to when Pokecord was still a thing and Technoblade had the bot installed to Technocord and he made everyone who played it pull up their pokemon list and if you had any Beldums and didn’t immediately trade them to him you got kicked from the discord. And then if a Beldum ever spawned and you dared claim it before him you also got kicked. It was the funniest shit