rhamphotheca:

Cockatoo Squid

This transparent cranchiid, or cockatoo squid (Leachia sp.), retains ammonia solutions inside its body—giving it a balloon-like shape and helping it float. It has large eyes and pigment-filled cells (chromatophores) that look like polka dots and serve as camouflage—all adaptations to life in the deep ocean.

(via: Smithsonian Ocean Portal)

(image: Marsh Youngbluth/MAR-ECO, Census of Marine Life)

brazilwonders:

The Indigenous peoples in Brazil comprise a large number of distinct ethnic groups who inhabited the country prior to the European invasion around 1500. Unlike Cristóvão Colombo, who thought he had reached the East Indies, the Portuguese, most notably Vasco da Gama, had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route when they reached Brazil.

Nevertheless the word índios (“Indians”) was by then established to designate the people of the New World and stuck being used today in the Portuguese language to designate these peoples, while the people of India, Asia are called indianos in order to distinguish the two people.

At the time of European discovery, some of the indigenous peoples were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. Many of the estimated 2,000 nations and tribes which existed in the 16th century died out as a consequence of the European settlement, and many were assimilated into the Brazilian population.

Brazilian Indigenous people have made substantial and pervasive contributions to the world’s medicine with knowledge used today by pharmaceutical corporations, material and cultural development—such as the domestication of cassava and other natural foods.

(Source: fyowls, via )

(Source: h3llo-sunshine)

(Source: moonbutterfly)

marilynadorno:

#justspme #green #weed #onmyyard #lol #butitlookspretty (Taken with Instagram at Lomas Verdes)

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(Source: missford2)

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process. 

Turritopsis is believed to have originated in the Caribbean but has spread all over the world, and has speciated into several populations that are difficult to distinguish morphologically, but whose species distinctions have recently been verified by a study and comparison of mitochondrial ribosomal gene sequences.

fairy-wren:

red-legged honeycreepers

photo by peggy collins

herbspice:

fiddlehead

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heyletsbang:

I had to lol.

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