Sophie W

I wasn't actually flirting I just wanted the sticker

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-

a young boy sits at a desk in front of a computer screen Alt: A young boy who looks very 90s sits at a desk in front of a computer screen, giving a thumbs up while nodding.

What I assume people's reactions are when I pop in to get them from "Animalia" to the maybe equally unhelpful "Octocorallia"

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

A strip of grass next to a sidewalk and parking lot. There are fallen leaves and many batches of brown mushrooms pushing up out under the grass.

A close up on the brown mushrooms forcing the grass up into a relatively large trench of exposed dirt.

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'm not great at reading things the year they come out, but on the off chance some 2024 books slipped through your net last year, I loved The DallerGut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee (published in 2020 but the English translation was mid-2024), and The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

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

The whole team is here for the off-season I guess

A blue jay sitting on a telephone wire in the distance

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

A view down at legs standing in a pile of colourful fall leaves

Oh yeah. That's the good stuff

we just all have a lot of interests in common, you know

Me 🤝 fallen leaves
bugs

Me 🤝 bugs
Piles of
fallen leaves

philangoustines

It was the same fact both times, apparently telling people that my lobster costume should have one bigger claw and one smaller claw and the bigger one should be my right claw because lobsters have handedness and I'm right-handed is enough to make people abandon all conversational propriety and leave

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 thought at first this was a sigh of relief and I was like what urgent information did cole need from the cuneiforme tablets THIS time

A boardwalk through the woods, there is a clear break with a small jump in the boardwalk ahead.

A side view of the jump built into the boardwalk. It looks pretty intense.

How do I know it was a mountain biking route? Well, I was walking blithely along a boardwalk and then it became very obvious

A photo of a tree next to a boardwalk with forest behind. A plank of wood is nailed to the tree with writing on it.

A Macbeth quote is written on the plank of wood, it is quite long but it is the section that begins "out out brief candle, life is but a walking shadow."

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 (?????)

A red car side mirror showing a spiderweb with a spider in the middle.

A close up on the spider showing its underside. The web around it looks disheveled.

That'll be $65 in taxi fees pal

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

A photo of the edge of a path with a metal photo bolted to the lower trunk of a tree.

A closer image of the metal photo bolted to a tree trunk, it is a picture of a great white shark.

Not to brag or anything but I also saw A SHARK

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

omg!!!!

circleweaver

A view down a gravel path through the woods, there are evergreens and some autumn coloured leaves in the distance. Very small on one of the right-hand trees is a square something bolted to the tree.

A closer view of the bolted metal square on the tree, it clearly has a picture of a spider on it.

Now the metal picture is clear, it is a photo of an orbweaver.

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