Biden – Harris 2020

Yay!!

The Fly and Man

This was a story I wrote, chatting with my auntie, she made it funky!!

Go and get your belly full! Subscribe to her funktastick stories.

Salmon Swimming!

Adventures in Juneau salmon hatchery!

Part 2

Beautiful Alaska

Star Fish!

On the causeway from Douglas Island to Shaman Island in Alaska

Today I saw a seal!

Kinda Animal of the day – 2/1/2020 – Papillae (not an animal)

Yup. Cray.

I saw this picture floating around the internet, and had to dig into it. So, those aren’t teeth, those are papillae, and they are more like rubbery teeth. They are there as reverse water filters for turtles. So! The turtle eats fish, but gets a bunch of water along with it. So, they vomit out their stomachs to get rid of the water, and the papillae stop anything that’s not water from escaping! I think that’s rather cool.

Papillae are by far not limited to turtles!

Say what!?

Camels have them too! Camels use them to help them deal with eating cactuses (cacti?)!! Whatevs, lots of animals have them!

They tend to just be more pronounced and over time modified to suit certain purposes for different animals.

Oh…you have papillae too.

Those marvelous bumps on your tongue? yup, pretty much the same stuff as what’s in a turtles mouth. And while turtles use theirs to keep food in their tummies, and camels use them to deflect cactus thorns, you use your papillae every day to help masticate and move food around in your mouth.

Go Papillae!

Ugh, And as much as I hate penguins, they have em too and have to show this picture of one flashing theirs. (Like turtles, they use theirs to keep their food in their belly)

Ugh. I hate penguins

Birthday fun in Juneau 1/7/2020

38 years is a long time.

On my birthday, I try to go to a zoo or an aquarium or something where I get to learn about something new and fun. this year I learned about Alaska!

Juneau has no zoo yo, and the aquarium is the Pacific ocean. So I went to the Alaskan Museum of History instead.

Why are there no monkeys in North America?

I was wondering why out of all the primates, homo sapiens are the only ones to live in North America and Canada. No native monkeys at all!

Turns out, it’s a lot geographic, and a lot of timeline of how monkeys evolved, survived and spread. Dive in with me.

Monkeys originated in Africa, spread to Asia (Those monkeys are referred to as Old World monkeys).  The Old world monkeys managed to migrate to the new world via rafts (what!?), but keep in mind this was 55 million years ago and the continents looked much different then. And it wasn’t like they were making rafts, it was just a large amount of vegetation that could float. (I guess that’s what a raft is anyway).

These new monkeys settled in South America and tiny parts of Central America as we know it today.

So! North America, Canada and Australia & New Zealand are the only continents without monkeys. (I included New Zealand cuz, I love you guys and think you should be a continent. #PlutoIsAPlanet)

 

BUT my question was still, what stopped those monkeys from populating North America? After all, they would do fine in some of the jungles of Florida, Alabama and the south. And there’s those snow monkeys in Tibet that kick can handle sub zero temps.

Turns out simple answer to that question is: Mexico and Texas.

Those two areas that span some very large deserts completely stopped monkeys from migrating North after the climate change that occured around 34 million years ago warmed up Central and South America and turned them into rain forests.

Not be said that there was never a monkey in North America, there are fossils of an animal similar to tarsiers that were found in current day Mississippi about 50 million years ago, well ahead of the climate change.

Riddle solved!

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