posted by
Fnord666
on Saturday April 09 2022, @11:17AM
from the amazing-(and-gross)-tricks-animals-deploy-to-survive dept.
from the amazing-(and-gross)-tricks-animals-deploy-to-survive dept.
The spider that looks like bird poo:
Animals do all sorts of disgusting things. While these gross behaviours might turn our stomachs, they're often crucial to an animal's survival.
I and my colleague Nic Gill have done the dirty work, and collected a bunch of unexpected facts about how these behaviours help animals live their best lives: making a home, finding mates and food, and surviving predators.
Our new book, titled Poo, Spew and other Gross Things Animals Do, is aimed at kids, but much of it will be news to adults, too.
So what does it take to survive and thrive in the wild? It's not always about being the biggest and fiercest. Many animals have evolved much more entertaining—if not impolite—strategies for evolutionary success.
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The Spider That Looks Like Bird Poo
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday April 09 2022, @01:16PM (3 children)
You should take a closer look at what humans do sometime. Unlike humans, animals as species act strictly out of instinct for survival, and never act out of innate desire for violence, psychopathic tendencies, callousness, perversion or lust for power.
I'll take a gross animal over a polished human anyday.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2022, @02:50PM
So those monkeys in India that are grabbing random dogs, carrying them to the tops of trees and just dropping them are doing it for survival?
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Saturday April 09 2022, @08:21PM
Animals that act weird get eaten, humans that act weird float to the top of the food chain.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday April 09 2022, @10:51PM
I agree that humans are pretty bad for the other disgusting things that they do to each other.
However, The things that we do for mating is just as bad if not worse than what these animals do.
Our bladders are not directly under our faces... but some people include "water sports" as a regular part of sex.
Sounds like an episode of "housewives of {insert location}" from cable tv.
So, I would say that humans are psychopathic, callous, AND just as gross as animals.
We even go farther... Need I mention goatse? or 2 girls 1 cup?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 09 2022, @01:42PM
That's funny. There was a neighborhood fixture in Hyde Park who pursued the same strategy. He grew a long white beard and marched around singing British military hymns. There was another guy on the New York subway who also looked like bird poo, wove feathers into his clothes and hair, and sat on the bench turning his head like a sparrow and chirping.
I never thought to ask them if it helped them catch more worms.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 09 2022, @02:01PM (2 children)
Poop and sex were so taboo that some would suffer in silence related health problems rather than communicate and learn about it. Might not even realize something was abnormal.
I have the impression that the battles over this are slowly being decided in favor of knowledge. For instance, there is a Wikipedia entry on human poop, and I read somewhere that it attracted fights. I'd guess there was a fight over whether the article should even exist. There was a fight over it having a picture.
I remember the extremely elliptic and cryptic commercials of the 1980s for Kaopectate, Doxidan, Metamucil, and similar products, and wonder if advertising for such has shed some of that squeamishness. If you didn't already know what they were driving at, it was easy to misunderstand. Then there's things such as the flatulence scene in Blazing Saddles that was so edgy when it was released but today while still funny isn't particularly shocking. That was, I read, the first time farting was heard in a movie. When replayed on TV, they actually censored that, covering over the fart noises with lots of whinnies.
As for sex, I read recently that porn magazines have given up on trying to use pictures to drive sales, because the Internet now has so much more and better material that they can't compete. Obviously, a print publication can't very well contain video. This is one of the many ways the Internet has changed things for the better. Life is so much harder for censors, pretty well impossible, thanks to digital storage and ubiquitous computer networking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @12:25AM (1 child)
Wikipedia, the bastion of hope for our digital age. I have given up contributing. Utter toxic dump fueled by nuclear warfare. It's a good resource, but gz the community sucks.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 11 2022, @03:47AM
For most technical stuff, Wikipedia is great. The articles on the most prominent and well known technical things are the most vulnerable to idiots who think they know better than top scientists. For instance, the article on Computer Science used to have a horrible definition of just what CS is, something really duh like "the study of computers". "Study of computation" isn't great either, but at least it's better than the "computers" one.
Political, however, yeah, got to watch for agendas. They do try to stick to the facts, with some success, give them that.