Salt water and fresh water fish are different animals. Obviously, I guess. They have different names. So what would happen if you were to put a salt water fish in fresh water and vice versa? Well, if it happened too quickly, either a salt water fish placed in fresh water or the fresh water fish in salt water would die. Why, you ask? I asked the same thing, thinking that fish live in water and, well, what’s a little salt between fish right? Apparently the way a salt water fish lives in salt water is by sucking in salt water and excreting the salt. This happens through osmosis, where the sea water that the fish sucks in is able to diffuse out of the fish into the ocean, leaving the needed fresh water behind. When a salt water fish is placed in fresh water the lower saline content does not allow for the osmosis process to occur so the fish ends up absorbing water and not displacing it, basically drowning the fish, which may sound stupid, but that is what science tells us. The fresh water fish not being able to survive in salt water is a similar story. The fresh water fish is not able to osmoregulate the salt content of the salt water. This means that they are able to process a minute amount of slat in the water they process, just not the amount that is found is most salt water bodies since the content difference is so drastic. Fish need water to live, not only to breath, but also to drink and hydrate. The salt content of water throws off how fish process the water they are able to absorb, which is why fresh and salt water fish are independent animals.

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There used to be a real nice older couple who used to live next door. They were probably in their late 70s or so. They were the only ones on our block that I knew, not well, but I knew their names and we would say hi to each other. One day they left for a trip and before they left they told me that if their son came by to call the police. They didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask, you know bygones be bygones and so on. Anyway, one day about a month ater they left in their RV the son shows up in his beat up ass old RV and parks it in front of the house next door. I didn’t know it was the son and didn’t think much of it except for the weird ugly green RV on the street. One day I was out front working on my bike and like 20 cop cars show up (not much action for cops here so for anything above a parking ticket and they call the cavalry). I hear someone jump out a window yelling and he runs out the back of the house down this dirt hill in the back of the houses as the cops swarm the house with guns drawn. It was like an episode of Cops, the ghetto bird (helicopter) and all. This was about 7 years ago and since then I have never seen Marv (the older guy) or his wife, but the son (Scott) is around all the time and has had about 3 or 4 such raids on the house since he has lived there. It is a really weird situation, the old couple just disappeared. I have no idea what the whole story is but it is all very peculiar. I came to find out a couple years ago that the nasty green RV was a mobile meth lab and Scott is a pretty good sized drug dealer (physiacally an also in terms of drug sales). The house next door has been the subject of all sorts of weird goings on but the reason Im giving you the background is because the neighborhood smells like cat pee. Why, you ask? Well, because not only is the house next door a drug house but they had a few animals. They had two dogs and 2 cats. Luckily the dogs were spayed and neutered, but the cats spawned like 25 other cats and they just roam the freakin neighborhood. I love animals a whole lot, I really do, but stray cats that pee everywhere an make the neighborhood smell like the Carlsbad Caverns are not why I love animals. They are all really cute and when I see one that looks malnourished I always put some food out or water. There are seriously like 20 cats though, its like freakin Bangladesh or something around here. The dogs roam around the neighborhood too, humpin other dogs and crappin on lawns. The dogs are nice when I play with them or pet them. They are neighborhood dogs I guess. No one else likes them and the drug dealers take shitty care of them so I give them love when I can. Luckily they dont hit the dogs or anything, they just dont pay attention to them.

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I never used to be squeamish around spiders until I got bitten by a brown recluse. Brown recluse spiders, otherwise known as fiddle backs (because of the distinct markings on the dorsal abdomen), are native to the United States from the Midwest all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Brown recluses generally live in dark secluded areas including woodpiles, sheds, closets, and unused bedding. While brown recluses don’t typically come into contact with humans, they are still a spider to be leery of. The actual bite itself is painless and generally goes unnoticed for a few hours. Mine was a textbook brown recluse bite. I was bitten at night and woke up to an itchy, irritated spot on the back of my thigh. I chalked it up to a chigger or other insignificant insect, but throughout the day, the legion became more and more swollen and painful. By the next day, the bite had become swollen, red and bruised. By the end of the second day, I decided to go to the doctor the next morning. The doctor told me it looked like an insect bit and to treat it with a hot compress. I went home and gave it a shot, but by the end of the day, it looked like a duck egg under my skin and hurt to move. I went back to the doctor the next morning and she quickly decided it was a recluse bite and needed to be lanced, drained, scraped, cleaned and packed with antiseptic gauze. It was an incredibly painful procedure that had to be repeated everyday for the next two and a half weeks to stop the necrosis that is a typical affect of brown recluse venom. I still have a dent scarred into the back of my leg from the fiasco and feel like it’s now my duty to warn others about this kind of spider. Consider yourself warned.

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Something like 35-40 percent (depending on the study you read) of pets (dogs and cats) in the U.S. is overweight or obese. Fat cats and chihuahuas may seem cute a cuddly, but just like humans, overweight pets are more prone to health problems. Fat dogs and cats are at higher risk for heart disease, breathing problems and osteoarthritis. Usually pet owners are to blame for their pet’s excess weight, but just to be on the safe side, it’s always s good idea to have an overweight pet examined for heart or thyroid problems. It’s also important to consult a veterinarian before putting a pet on a diet to make sure the animal still gets the proper amounts of nutrients. People need to remember that their pets do not need to eat like people do. Regardless of what Purina commercials tell you, animals do not need to eat every day in order to be healthy and happy. While an animal might scarf down all the food you throw in front of it, it does not mean the animal is starving or needs the food. Some pets will over eat because they like the taste of the food, or just because they instinctively eat when they can, to stockpile fat for lean times. Good news is that your there to make sure your pet doesn’t go through long periods without food, so they don’t need to be stockpiling. Overfeeding and lack of exercise are the leading causes of pet obesity. Both of these factors can be corrected by the pet’s owners. As tempting as it is to give your furry friend human food, try to refrain. According to Fox News, one extra pound on a chihuahua is like 38 pounds on the average woman and a ounce of cheese for a small dog is the equivalent of a human eating almost two hamburgers

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Recently I had to give away my sweet sweet shitzu due to the fact he became strongly aggressive towards me after becoming pregnant. We could not figure out why he was being so aggressive towards me he was perfect with my husband and my daughter. However it broke my heart more than anything to have to put him on the local ad for rehoming. I felt like I had let him down but I couldn’t even let him out when he needed to potty because he would bite my hand as he come out the door of his kennel. My poor two year old would let him out of his kennel and luckily for me she knew how to work the lead to put it on him and then opened the door for him. My husband became leery and I was getting mass emails on my poor baby dog. I finally however decided on a loving family with three wonderful children. It was in fact the oldest child’s request of me that had me in tears. She was a high school student that worked a couple of hours after school and had convinced her mom and dad that if she paid for her own animal could she have one and they said yes. She was the one that gave my beautiful baby an new home after living with me for three years. I had an update on my baby earlier this week and he is absolutely happy in the home he is at. Continuing to play with the children and their three year old everyday tires him out for the evening. He will always be missed and always have that special place in my heart.

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My family are a bunch of cat people. All of us. We have four cats that currently live in the house with us, and I am never surprised when there are more added because my mom feels bad for them. The most recent addition, and by recent I mean many years ago, was Little Boy. Or, Scooter Brown, as he’s known on his birth certificate. And, he’s also the strangest cat ever. He is really pretty, an American Bob Tail, so he’s white and has a darker stripe along his back. He’s got beautiful blue eyes and he’s really big and muscular. But, he has no tail. Which is fine with us, but he’s a little sensitive about it. When you try to touch his “nub”, he gets pretty pissed off. And, when he gets mad, those beautiful blue eyes turn a scary shade of red. Since they are so pale, when he gets excited you can see the blood vessels in his eyes get fuller and his eyes change colors. Which is pretty creepy. Most of the time, he’s strolling around like he owns the place. He’s the biggest and strongest of the cats, but he’s also the most clumsy of them. If I had to describe his demeanor, I would never say he acted like a cat. He acts like he’s a dog, like following you around and just wanting to play all the time. He’s definitely the most fun cat we have ever had, but the strangest at the same time. I love him, and for anyone out there that doesn’t like cats, he’d be the perfect one to start you out on!

His eyes aren’t red, which mean he isn’t about to violently attack you. Kidding. Maybe.

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Camels are quite interesting animals. For how much they resemble David Letterman, they are actually highly evolved and magnificently adapted to life in the desert. The most common misconception about camels is that they store water in their humps. It’s just not true. Camels store fat in their humps. This was kind of a disappointment when I first learned about camels, but the more I learned, the less disappointment I felt. Camels don’t require as much water as other animals, this is true, but it’s not because they hoard it on their backs. Camels have several evolutionary mechanisms that help them survive in arid environments. For one, they have oval shaped blood cell. This helps the camel’s blood to continue flowing through shrunken, dehydrated blood vessels when other rounder blood cells would get stuck and kill their carrier. In a nutshell, camels can withstand a higher percentage of sweating due to dehydration than other animals before suffering in circulatory failure. Camels are the only mammal known to posses this adaptation. Another interesting feature camel’s come equipped with is a large, cavernous nose that absorbs a good amount of the water vapor that it would otherwise lose through respiration. Camels’ urine is also think and syrupy and their feces are dry enough to start fires with. The deal with their humps is that they store most of the camel’s body fat. This helps the camel to not retain as much heat radiating up from the sand. Camels do not sweat until temperatures reach over 106 degrees F. This comes in handy when your trying to retain water. Having all of your fat piled up in a central location helps to keep the heat off the rest of you.

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Diving with Great White Sharks is one of the most incredible things a person can do. Being so close to one of the Earth’s longest-running most deadly predators is just awe inspiring. The feeling is intensified by being submerged underwater in an iron cage. The whole experience is nerve racking. When I was underwater watching a White Shark charge the cage I was hanging out in I felt very much alive. Alive and very possibly about to die at the same time. It is one of the few experiences that visually lives up to everything you see in the movies. The teeth are enormous and those black eyes are intimidating. While the sharks can quite easily bite your body in half in a single chomp, they are still very misunderstood. They don’t attack because they hate your little human face, they bite because you are in their territory and they think you are food. You can’t just go divin’ off into the ocean where ever you please. You have to respect the inhabitants that have lived there long before your species came to be. If you don’t want to be eaten by a shark, don’t go diving into shark infested waters. It’s as simple as that….Unless you are well informed and in an iron cage. Just being near the shear magnitude of a Great White is an impossible feeling to describe and it has inspired me to write this blog and try to spread love for the Great Whites. We eat way more fish than fish eat humans anyways. So give ‘em a break. At least they don’t make us swallow hooks and then rip our guys out with them. One chomp and it’s all over. Much more humane than ourselves.

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I think small dogs are precious. I haven’t always had this outlook on the critters. There was a time when I thought small dogs were just sorry, yappy, little excuses for the real thing. The “real thing” being Great Danes, Labradors, Mastiffs, Heelers….Those types of guys. Then I met Monster. Monster is my little Boston Chihuahua mixture. I adopted him from the pound a few years ago. At the time, I still wanted, but couldn’t afford a big dog. I didn’t wanna pay for the pet rent or for thirty-pound bag of dog food every week. Still though, I wanted a new friend so I searched the pound a couple times a week for months until I found a little guy that could pass all the tests. He had to be able to jump high enough to get out of the window which was the doggie door. He had to like water since we went to the lake every weekend. He had to get along with other dogs (who were much, much bigger than him), and he had to be smart. After getting Monster and realizing that small dogs can do all the things big dons can do and then some, I’m not sure I will ever be able to go back. Obviously if a giant stray shows up at my door I’m not going to be able to turn it away, but as far as picking out my ideal doggy, I’d go for another ankle biter. It’s so much easier to transport and bathe small dogs. They shed less and don’t take up as much space or food as their bigger brethren.

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A blue whale can choke on an object the size if a grape fruit. A grapefruit has about the same diameter as a blue whale’s belly button. That I already knew, but my boyfriend told me last night that is possible for a human to walk through the veins of a blue whale. I was skeptical, but I didn’t want to be a bubble burster so I just decided to marvel at his knack for useless factoids and look it up when I got to work the next day. Sure enough he was right. Looks like a blue whale’s veins are large enough in diameter for a human baby to cruise through. I would like to see that plastified like they do for the Body World exhibit. Horses, humans and other animals have been plastified to exhibit their muscular, skeletal, vascular and nervous systems. Body World is actually an amazing exhibit. If you haven’t seen it, I would definitely recommend it. Anatomy is really a pretty amazing subject. For the most part, insides look like you would expect, but from what I know of the anatomy of a blue whale, it’s just backwards from what I know about most mammals. How can something so huge choke on a grapefruit? That’s like golden retriever choking on a peanut. It makes sense though if you consider that blue whales eat plankton. Why would a whale even need to swallow something the size of a strawberry when they subside on micro animals? Okay, I’ve talked myself out of being awestruck. Just goes to show that all animals are in fact pretty well adapted to do what they do.

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