I really hope someone is working on a new Tumblr-like website… But not like this new Tumblr… We need to bring it back to the old Tumblr. I didn’t even run a NSFW blog but the lack of overt nudity on my dash is fucking depressing. This was the only website that really spoke to me as a human… I could actually express my self openly and freely and shocking enough, accurately…And they just decide to cut out a solid third of my interests. Fuck that. I doubt I’ll be back here very often. Great job @staff you fucked it up. Pandering to annoying children under 13 is a really dumb move. As if they aren’t opening a new tab to pornhub…. Fucking idiots. Or is it advertisers you are cucking yourself to? Either way… Enjoy the ghost town full of children.
People who are approximately 30 y/o and older are the only people in the history of the world and future of the world whom will know what everyday life was like both before and after cell phones and the internet.
A new species is evolving before scientists’ eyes in the eastern United States.
Wolves faced with a diminishing number of potential mates are lowering their standards and mating with other, similar species, reported The Economist.
The interbreeding began up to 200 years ago, as European settlers
pushed into southern Ontario and cleared the animal’s habitat for
farming and killed a large number of the wolves that lived there.
That also allowed coyotes to spread from the prairies, and the white farmers brought dogs into the region.
Over time, wolves began mating with their new, genetically similar neighbors.
The resulting offspring — which has been called the eastern coyote
or, to some, the “coywolf” — now number in the millions, according to
researchers at North Carolina State University.
Interspecies-bred animals are typically less vigorous than their parents, The Economist reported — if the offspring survive at all.
That’s not the case at all with the wolf-coyote-dog hybrid, which has developed into a sum greater than the whole of its parts.
At about 55 pounds, the hybrid animal is about twice as heavy as a
standard coyote, and her large jaws, faster legs and muscular body allow her to take down small deer and even hunt moose in packs, and the animal
is skilled at hunting in both open terrain and dense woodland.
An analysis of 437 hybrid animals found that coyote DNA dominates her
genetic makeup, with about one-tenth of its DNA from dogs, usually
larger dogs such as Doberman pinschers and German shepherds, and a
quarter from wolves.
The animal’s cry starts out as a deep-pitched wolf howl that morphs into higher-pitched yipping — like a coyote.
Her dog DNA may carry an additional advantage.
Some scientists think the hybrid animal is able to adapt to city life
— which neither coyotes or wolves have managed to do on their own —
because her dog ancestry allows her to tolerate people and noise.
The coywolves have spread into some of the nation’s largest cities —
including New York, Boston and Washington — using railway corridors.
The interbreeding allows the animal to diversify her diet and eat
discarded food, along with rodents and smaller mammals — including cats,
which coywolves eat skull and all — and they have evolved to become
nocturnal to avoid humans.
The animals are also smart enough to learn to look both ways before crossing roads.
Not all researchers agree the animal is a distinct species, arguing
that one species does not interbreed with another — although the
hybrid’s existence raises the question of whether wolves and coyotes are
distinct species in the first place.
But scientists who have studied the animal say the mixing of genes
has been much faster, extensive and transformational than anyone had
noticed until fairly recently.
“(This) amazing contemporary evolution story (is) happening right
underneath our nose,” said Roland Kays, a researcher at North Carolina
State.
THIS SHIT IS SO WILD AND IT’S ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING. If you’d like to watch the entire Nature documentary referenced in that “watch this report” link, you can find the whole thing on Youtube. It’s a terrific documentary and a really interesting look at an animal most people don’t even seem to realize exists. The extent to which coywolves have adapted to urban life and the ways in which they’re very distinct from the species they’ve sprung from is pretty incredible.
Many people thought the world would end in 2012 because an ancient map said so, but nobody heeds the warnings of hundreds of scientists who show empirically that the world WILL end in the next couple centuries unless we stop eating beef and start taking trains.
