by Grania
We’ve all seen the photo of the shark jumping at the helicopter, which is as fake as a fish on a bicycle; but here are two fascinating pictures that are completely real.
From the Puffle Ho, David Canales snapped this amazing shot while kyaking in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Check out this epic battle! A Bald Eagle vs seagulls at Prince William Sound by David Canales #Alaska #nature pic.twitter.com/WfYZIwzoJp
— US Department of the Interior (@Interior) July 14, 2015
The sad, but inevitable news: the eagle won.
And from the Daily Mewl, a foal in North Yorkshire has been born with a marking that looks like a horse. There are more photos at the link. His owners have called him Da Vinci, or Vinnie for short.
Thanks and a Hat-tip: John Williamson
We have a thread Vinnie!
Pretty incredible images! Birds on birds and horse on horse (or at least a horse with random patterning on his fur that just happens to look very much like the front part of a horse)
At least no one thought it looked like Jesus
It’s obviously one of the many horse gods, perhaps Boreas who pulls the chariot of Zeus. Clearly not jebus – silly you 🙂
It’s clearly the Invisible Pink Unicorn (bbhhh)
Am I just seeing things, or does the gull in the eagle’s talons appear to be the same size as the eagle?
It’s not a small gull, but its wings are close to the plane of the picture while the eagle’s (and the other gull’s) are foreshortened. Looks like Glaucous-winged, which has wingspan up to 1.5 m if I read the wiki correctly (it needs some edits).
Why is the outcome of the Eagle v. Gull interaction sad? Eagles gotta eat, too, yo!
So it’s a no-win situation. Either outcome is bad for somebody.
That’s the whole point of the argument from natural evil: why would a benevolent, omnipotent god create a world in which such situations are routine?
Not just routine, but essential.
It’d be barely plausible for an all-loving overmind to design a world in which conscious actors would have the opportunity to cause harm to others and leave it up to them whether or not to act on the opportunity. Well, no, it isn’t plausible, but I’ll pretend that I’m squinting at it hard enough to make it so.
But that’s not the situation in the real world. In the real world, the lion must kill and eat the lamb, else there will be no more lions…and, worse, if there aren’t any lions, the lambs overpopulate and die out from disease and starvation anyway.
More than one hard SF author has envisioned a future world in which spaceborne factories use solar energy to directly convert raw supplies of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphate, sulfur, and the various trace elements directly into tasty food, so both humans and lions can enjoy yummy lamb chops without causing any pain or untimely death to the lambs. The physics and chemistry are practically trivial, but the engineering and, especially, economics are far beyond our current abilities. As such, it may well be the case that, in some distant future, the lion really will lie down with the lamb…but as a result of human ingenuity, not any sort of apocalyptic divine intervention.
So, if we can figure out how to reverse-engineer the system and fix stuff that’s this horrifically broken, what’s the designer’s excuse for fucking it up in such a profoundly evil way in the first place?
b&
“economics are far beyond our current abilities.”
So, how about we all go vegetarian. Extra protean could be harvested from seaweed or genetically engineered bacteria. That would be well within the grasp of current technology.
We can. Lions probably couldn’t.
I’d be all in favour of reducing the number of methane-farting atmosphere-destroying climate-wrecking herbivores anyway. Wouldn’t need that many to feed all the lions and tigers left in the world.
cr
We can’t, actually. Humans are obligate carnivores; just not to the extent that cats are. We need more protein than is typically available from plants, and plants high in protein come with too much carbohydrates and less-than-optimal protein balances. Some of the best alternatives come with other side-effects…soy is high in estrogen mimics, for example, and not a good idea for a sole (or perhaps even primary) protein source. Most Americans eat much more meat than is nutritionally necessary and typically more than is optimally healthy…but a strict vegetarian diet, especially a vegan diet, goes too far in the other direction.
b&
So the problem is too many humans, then. But we knew that 😉
Yeah, I know. I still basically respond to any animal-on-animal violence like this:
https://twitter.com/DrinkingQuest/status/609051995748577280/photo/1
~Grania
I sometimes watch gulls hunting pigeons at the railway station where I catch my daily train home. I have never seen a successful outcome (for the gull) but I have seen small pieces of ex pigeon lying around. For this reason I have always thought of gulls as nasty evil creatures, especially with those malevolent eyes.
That is, I thought that until one day recently when I realised I was anthropomorphising them and they were really just doing what they needed to avoid starving to death.
Da Vinci looks more like a Kandinsky to me.
My son and I were fishing in our canoe on Powhatan Creek in Virginia and saw an osprey carrying a pickerel being chased by a bald eagle. They passed maybe 15 feet above the surface of the water and so close, I could see the eye of the poor fish. I wish I had a camera along.
Oddly enough, the chances of getting pictures of raptors carrying prey are somewhat good. The raptor in question is usually closer to the ground, slowed down, and preoccupied.
RE the horse–the impression is greatly enhanced by the fact that that section of the real horse’s mane is also white. I wonder how much of the white blotch carries on to the other side of the neck?
The horse strike me as a model for this panel from Lascaux : http://popular-archaeology.com/upload/2697/horses2.jpg