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@afrogonline​

Who else really wants to know why that turned into a fight

pretty sure they’re both males trying to sing to attract a lady frog. they got mad bc they’re right on top of each other and fight to get one to leave the territory

Ahhhh that makes sense. Thanks!

But why did it take that long to notice each other then? They seemed to be chill with each other at first?

Hey I'm writing my thesis on Behavioural Ecology and have an answer for you! Tbh I work w bugs but I'm a big fan of amphibians so I dabble ;)

Before fighting, these frogs tried to resolve their differences peacefully with shouting. Usually, you can tell from the sound of the call which frog is bigger (and thus presumably stronger). Bigger frogs generally have deeper, louder calls, and if the other frog is significantly smaller, they'll often just give up and leave without a fight on the basis of a rival's call alone. It's kind of hilarious, actually: if you take 2 fairly even frogs, and modulate one of their calls to make them sound bigger, the other one will often just dip. Like "no, that guy sounds like he could kick my ass, I'm not touching that!"

So the first bit, they're calling close to each other, simultaneously to attract a female and to size each other up, but after a while they realise that they're pretty evenly matched. If a lady shows up, she might pick either one! Can't have that. Plus, maybe this is a great spot! The acoustics are EXCELLENT, and the call reflecting off this concrete wall makes me sound even BIGGER and STRONGER, but this other dude is RUINING it. Only solution is to declare this territory as my own and kick out the other guy!

Basically, there comes a point where yelling isn't enough and the frogs need to fight it out to determine who's the strongest. Even then, it tends to be a strength test more than a trying-to-hurt-you fight (think arm wrestle vs fist fight in humans). The stronger one pushes the weaker one, the weaker one realises he's outmatched, and he leaves with no one sporting any significant injuries other than on their frog-pride (which may or may not exist, idk if frogs feel thinks like "pride" or "envy." P sure they experience "avarice" tho).

You see similar things in lots of animal species. It's called "Ritualised Aggression" if you want to google it more! Honestly there are some EXCELLENT examples out there.

Hey, wow, that’s super cool! Thanks for answering my question! 💜

Neil Hilborn, “For Henry, Who Has Just Died”, The Future

[image descriptions: text that reads:

“For Henry, Who Has Just Gone

Henry was my pet rat, and he died
last night in my hands. He was three
years old, which is way longer than

an albino rat is supposed to live. To be
honest, he wasn’t a very smart animal,
but he was so sweet that now I wonder

if intelligence has anything to do
with leading a good life. He had been sick
for a few months, and every twelve hours

I had to apply antiseptic and lotion
to both his back feet. By the end
they didn’t really work anymore,

so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way
so cute and sad that I started calling him my little
sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,

a surprise: you would think that when your rat
is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months
you’d be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel

and mixed the solution, I picked him
up and noticed his breathing
was s slow. I lay down with him

on the towel, the towel where we’d spent
the last few months, where I think we
finally, really, completely loved each other,

not like humans do: humans always want
something from you and he and I
would rather just be together than apart,

and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way
that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain,
his head fell forward, and there was so much less

light in the room. The lamp was so far away,
like the light of a house to which there is no
road. I know, he was just a rat. So many

just like him, all white, red eyes,
die every day and only one or two people
in white coats are even there to see it.

He was all in white, he was always there
to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare,
so many nightmares, I would turn on the light

and there he was, holding on, a constant companion
to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment,
the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying

in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside
my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat
once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big

Mouse. Named proof that something could need me
and still love me. Named please
can I have some of your apple? Or I know

you’re sad but I’m hungry. Don’t go; if you go
I won’t survive: a child reaches for her father;
a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;

a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly,
sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together.
Some day I’m going to have a child. She’s going to have

eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like
she’ll need me alive then, she needs me alive
now; I can’t say goodbye before I’ve had a chance

to say hello. I don’t stare off bridges anymore.
I don’t count out little blue exit signs and even today,
with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away

it feels like someone else buried him using my body,
today I came home and only wanted to sleep
for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed

me once, and I know something will need me
again. One day I’m going to have a daughter.
She’s going to sleep through the night

sometimes. She is a light on a rock
at the edge of a lonely see. You see that light
out there? That’s where I’m headed. That’s home.”

/end id]

the userbase when tumblr attempts literally any contemporary method to profit from us that has been highly effective on every other website:

the userbase when tumblr implements the most deranged and masochistic series of features imaginable immediately after covering our dashes in thousands of crabs:

Lesbian moving service that

Sorry I got so horny thinking about strong women I passed out for a sec

REAL

that late 90s-early 2000s trend of loosely adapting literary classics into teen romcoms was the BACKBONE of our culture and society and we need to make it a thing again

#i mean yes because they were AMAZING #but also the true essence of the au is this #taking the bones of something and lifting them out so that they’re still recognizably themselves #but adding new elements around it #to recontextualize it into something the same yet new #is a real and very difficult skill #and i think we should culturally cultivate it more #everything today goes very fast and because of that it needs to be simplified #and there’s something to be said for peeling back the layers #you know? (via swashbucklery)