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oh-sturg-art · 2 months

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Day 22 of Fishuary! My favourite

Prompt: Favourite Fish

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Okay. Okay okay

It’s no secret I love sturgeon. For a lot of reasons. This is gonna be a long one

My first introduction to sturgeon came from Animal Crossing: New Horizons. No I’m not even kidding. I thought they looked like tiny dragons, and thus my new favourite animal was born. Sturgeon are the reason I got into marine biology in the first place! I don’t regret it at all

Sturgeon are ancient, older than dinosaurs. They’re the apex of their evolution, much like sharks are, having gone through hundreds of millions of years to perfect their niche in the ecosystem. They grow to massive sizes, even the smallest species growing to 3 feet! Not to mention how muscly they are, being armoured with boney scutes. Their skeleton is almost entirely cartilage, with the exception of their skull! They can live decades, some even getting to a century or more. That’s a crazy lifespan! Additionally, many species can tolerate varying salinity levels at different stages of their life.

My specific favourite species are white sturgeon! Acipenser transmontanus are native to North American waterways, mostly on the western side. I find them beautiful and colourful, even if their tones are muted compared to some other more colourful species. I swear we have some at my workplace but I have no way to check other than visual ID!! Ugh

Unfortunately, almost every sturgeon species (there’s 27 total species worldwide) are some degree of endangered. Almost all are critically endangered, which is the stage right before being extinct in the wild. 2 species are unaccounted for, 1 having gone missing with no hints of where it might be and 1 leaving biological traces, but still having not been sighted in a long while. A huge contributor to their status involves unsustainable fishing practices, habitat destruction, global warming, and caviar harvesting. Please protect these beautiful creatures, they’re really something else!

#artists on tumblr #art #my art #digital art #animals #fish #fishuary2024 #sturgeon #favourite fish #white sturgeon

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doddsmountain · 10 months

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hi Dodd I'm in the mood to learn some fish things what are your top 5 favorite fish?

OMG!!!!!!!!

SO! Number 1 is OBVIOUSLY Oncorhynchus mykiss... AKA the rainbow trout

These guys are amazing. They are the most farmed fish in the world by weight (not numbers). And they're not a trout! They are a true pacific salmon, like chinooks, cohos, sockeye, etc etc.

These dudes are different than the other pacific salmon though as they can spawn multiple times! That's why they don't undergo quite such extreme transformations during spawning season.

Rainbows are typically landlocked. Steelhead trout (which are Oncorhynchus mykiss mykiss) are the rainbows you see out at sea.

NUMBER 2: Acipenser transmontanus.... WHITE STURGEON!

This photo is a poor image I took of the baby white sturgeon I got to take care of for a year during my fisheries and aquaculture tech program.

White sturgeon are the largest sturgeon species. The largest ever recorded was 20 feet long and roughly 120 years old. The oldest sturgeon I worked with, Tyra, was about 9 feet long and was only 65. They reside along the pacific coast of North America and they are pure muscle. A two year old is about a foot long and the scutes (modified scales) are sharp as hell. You can't wear gloves when you handle them either so your hands get cut up real bad. I loved taking care of them. They're like giant, muscly, slimy dogs.

Females will lay roughly 3 million eggs per spawn and the eggs will hatch after about 6 days. A newly hatched white sturgeon is a few millimeters long. Crazy to think about.

This is my jar of dead babies.

NUMBER 3: Frog fish!

Wish I could remember who took this photo!

Frog fish have specially adapted pectoral fins that they use almost like legs! They're bottom dwellers and "walk" along the sea floor.

I don't know much about them I'm afraid. My brain was almost entirely consumed by rainbow trout and white sturgeon.

These guys look so grumpy! (I like to say my 'fursona' is just a regular ol' frog fish lol)

NUMBER 4: A fish my family had for about 15 years... A bloodred parrot cichlid named Sir Rupert Finklebottom III, Esq. (We learned she was female when she was about 9 years old)

These fish are man made abominations and I do not recommend owning them. They have horrible health issues and they have nasty personalities. We had two of them. Rupert and Regina. Because they're crossbreeds they're essentially infertile. Rupert and Regina both laid thousands of unfertilized eggs when they were roughly 9 years old. They only did this once. They ate all of their eggs within a week.

People say they're good community tank fish. They are not. They're aggressive little assholes. Ours had to live in their own tank and they'd try to bite you if you put your fingers in their tank (it didn't hurt because they can't close their mouths and have no teeth.)

They have malformed swim bladders and are just generally awful fish. But boy do I miss my Rupert and Regina.

And finally

NUMBER 5: All manner of eels. For the purposes of this I'm going to say Rock Gunnels.

These slippery little dudes are sharp as hell. When I did a practicum at an oyster farm these dudes kept getting pulled up in the oyster beds and I ran around scooping them up and tossing them back into the sea. They come in a variety of vibrant colours too!

BONUS FISH:

This abomination. It's a lamprey of some sort. And if I gotta look at this thing so does everyone else.

#ask #Sydmarch #fish #rainbow trout #white sturgeon #frog fish #parrot cichlids #eels #rock gunnels #lamprey #fucking ugly ass ballsack lamprey #long post #all photos are mine except the frog fish and the fucking ugly lamprey and the rock gunnel

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mysticdoodles · 2 years

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Please please PLEASE show us the giant sturgeon who wants to be pet :(((

HERE HE IS!! DAT BOI!!! He doesn't have a name, but he's a fully-grown White Sturgeon, and he's older than I am.

And here is the adorable old man pictured next to one of the other divers, just after getting caught sneaking in a snuggle while they're cleaning and doing maintenance xD

He loves the texture of neoprene gloves lmao. It's difficult to get a good scale for just how big this fellow is, because he moves so much when he's not sleeping out of sight, but he breaks 6ft in length! His favorite pastimes include sitting on the horned sharks for prime real estate in front of the inflows and attempting to shove his face into your scuba mask when he wants attention.

#marine biology #marine life #sturgeon #white sturgeon #scuba

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galaxicalsart · 3 months

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This is Serge, he’s a blind mer based on / inspired by a white sturgeon my family saw at SeaWorld :3

Featured character: Sergei (he/him)

(Please don’t repost, but do reblog!)

@emmettverse

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blackswaneuroparedux · 1 year

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imperium cupientibus nihil medium inter summa aut praecipitia

- Tacitus

Among those seeking power there is no middle ground except either triumph or complete failure.

Farewell Nicola Sturgeon, the Jimmy Krankie of Scottish politics.

Nicola Sturgeon will go down as one of the most formidable election winners in Scottish history. Her legacy is rooted in success at the ballot box and can be seen in the many defeats inflicted on her opponents. As she said during her resignation press conference, she fought eight elections as First Minister and won them all. Nobody has done this before.

But winning elections is always a means to an end. And the question has to be asked: what did Sturgeon do with the power at her disposal? The main goal of Sturgeon’s time in power had been the secession of Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom, and in this she has decidedly failed. Taking office as head of the SNP in 2014 after a decisive independence referendum loss, Sturgeon failed to move the ball forward no matter what she tried. Although the party was keen to dub local, regional, and national elections as “de facto referendums,” no second vote was ever called. A recent bid to force the issue ended with defeat in the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, which found that a new referendum run only under Scotland’s devolved powers would be unconstitutional.

Sturgeon was a supreme communicator, and her public relations team - run out of the first minister’s official residence, Bute House - effectively outmuscled all Scottish opposition. SNP spinners outnumbered the journalists sent by the national broadcaster, the BBC, to cover Scottish politics; and Sturgeon cannily used press conferences during times of crisis, including the COVID-19 pandemic, to undermine the U.K. government’s claims of national unanimity. She would either preempt British announcements, sometimes only an hour or so earlier, or publicly disagree with them - all in an always successful bid to capture headlines. Sturgeon’s opponents grumbled at these efforts - they called them stunts. But they always worked, and she never lost an election as SNP leader.

But Sturgeon’s tenure exposed many of the shortcomings of nationalist and populist politicians after they’ve taken power. They campaign largely on the basis of a single slogan and policy. And when they return again and again to office - especially if they cannot enact their chosen policy or slogan - they begin to struggle and suffer. Sturgeon wished dearly to be Scotland’s first leader after the country seceded from the United Kingdom. Scotland would much rather she focused on the immediate challenges of dealing with the growing NHS crisis, the education gap, and the cost of living crisis. In all this she failed.

Sturgeon tried to style herself as a social democrat, obviously a nationalist and a feminist – but not the type to lecture you about the heteronormative capitalist patriarchy. Her audience was down-to-earth folk who would have laughed if she had started talking about women having penises. Yet she ended up promoting a policy of allowing trans people to change their legal sex by self-declaration alone – a policy that, when rolled out in the prison’s service, led to a double rapist being placed in a women’s prison.

How could this happen? You almost begin to believe in Elon Musk’s ‘woke mind virus’. How could a lifelong feminist promote a policy that was not only based on the absurdity of ‘women’ having male genitals, but that also endangered the safety of female prisoners – many of them only inside for trivial offences like non-payment of fines. Only she knows and now she’s walked off the anvil of politics because she wants to spend more time with her family - one of the least believable lines in British politics. Yet the truth is that the walls were closing in on Nicola Sturgeon: she leapt before she was pushed.

Much will be made of her bizarre gender ideology, which led Scottish institutions to the conclusion that it was perfectly acceptable to send a male rapist to a women’s jail, on the grounds that his decision to declare himself a woman after he had committed his offences must be unquestioningly respected. Sturgeon later, after a great deal of public outrage, opposed the move, but the scandal underlined the foolish and naive thinking behind her gender recognition bill. Yes, it turned out, sex offenders really will take advantage of a system which allows them to change their gender at whim, just as many women’s groups had warned.

Some of Nicola Sturgeon’s fans on social media have claimed that she didn’t know about what was happening in Scotland’s prisons. But she could scarcely have failed to notice that her favourite government-funded charity, the Scottish Trans Alliance, had been advising the Scottish Prison Service on self-ID since 2014. If she didn’t know, it would be astonishing negligence, and Nicola Sturgeon is famous for being meticulously well-briefed. She is no fly-by-night blusterer like Boris Johnson. No, the first minister accepted self-ID in prisons because of her adherence to the Stonewall dogma that ‘transwomen are women’. No buts, no qualifications. As her Green Party coalition partners put it, denying that transwomen are women is the ‘definition of transphobia’. So when the Scottish Prison Service was instructed to follow this dogma it started to house offenders according to the ‘social identity’ they presented.

There were of course many other reasons for Nicola Sturgeon’s departure from office, not least her failure to shift the dial on Scottish independence, but self-ID was a very large part of it. The popular press in Scotland had started running increasingly lurid tales of sex offenders being placed in the women’s estate – not just double rapist Bryson. A 6ft 5in male-bodied paedophile, Katie Dolatowski, had also been housed in Cornton Vale women’s prison. Another self-declared transwoman, Sophie Eastwood (formerly Daniel), who strangled his cell mate with his shoelaces, is currently being held at HMP Cornton Vale, too. Eastwood currently self-identifies as a baby and is given nappies and baby food by prison officers.

The Scottish Prison Service had been piloting self-ID for years prior to Sturgeon’s plan to extend it Scotland-wide. Most of the Scottish media have, like the BBC, been observing informal self-censorship on the trans issue. There was little comment on these cases, which were well known to Scottish feminists. It was and still is seen as rather indecent in the middle-class media to mention prisons and the risks of allowing men to become legally female just by putting on a dress and calling themselves a woman. Last September, Nicola Sturgeon insisted such concerns were ‘not valid’.

But Sturgeon’s failures don’t end there. Her zero-Covid policy, which briefly made her so popular in the summer of 2020 as infection rates in Scotland fell below those in England, was undermined by longer term data: Scotland did not handle the pandemic much better than England. Moreover, the implosion of China’s own zero-Covid policy after the masses began to rebel against being regularly locked in their homes showed what a blind alley it was. Then there is the shame of Scotland’s drug deaths, which numbered 1,300 in 2020 alone, three and a half times the rate of England and more than three times the rate of the second-worse European country, Sweden. It is all the worse because of Sturgeon’s boasting about leading a “progressive” drugs policy - even down to trying to ban the use of use of such words as “addict�� on the grounds that they are stigmatising.

Education, in particular the narrowing of the attainment gap between children of different socio-economic backgrounds, was supposed to be one of Sturgeon’s great legacies. She even set up a new system of measuring education attainment in order to demonstrate progress in this area – but the data failed miserably to show much. Scotland’s NHS, too, failed on her watch – in spite of Scotland receiving particularly high funds thanks to the Barnett Formula.

But what finally did for Sturgeon was surely the realisation that her dream of Scottish independence was going nowhere. Briefly, at the end of last year, at the height of the Conservative government’s trouble, it seemed as if the polls might finally have shifted in favour of Scottish independence. Come the new year, and normality was restored: a poll this week showed Scots to be against independence by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent - almost exactly the same result as the 2014 referendum, the SNP’s failure to win which brought Sturgeon to power in the first place.

All that politicking, all that trying to drive a wedge between Holyrood and Westminster, all the games with the Supreme Court over her second referendum, all the efforts to use Brexit to try to drive the case for a breakaway Scotland: all came to nothing. She was back where she began, leading an SNP which is deeply-frustrated with the voting public.

Critics allege that she had very few plans to govern Scotland as a devolved leader, had little interest in doing so, and felt that she was an international figure deserving of a global platform accorded to a head of state or government. Now she may well get her chance as she seeks a bigger stage as part of some UN body as an ambassador. She has every chance of continuing to fail upwards.

Farewell Wee Nippy!

#tacitus #latin #classical #quote #politics #success #failure #power #white sturgeon #nicola sturgeon #scotland #holyrood #scottish indepedendence #resignation

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