I Feel Like This Could Be A Studio Ghibli Aesthetic.

I had injured my hand last week and I am just starting to get back into the swing of drawing again. Have some animal studies. Pygmy, shrew, Australian, honey, possum, and golden mole.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of those movies that I feel any aspiring artist should see. The struggle of Kiki in this movie is one that ANYONE who wants to further themselves goes through, that transition from taking what you love to do to something that you make a living off of.

As artists we have all been in the place where Kiki is. That place where we can’t draw anything right, can’t paint anything right, can’t sculpt anything right, that place where everything comes out wrong over and over and we begin to question if we’re actually good enough for the talents and skills that used to come to us like second nature when we were just using them for fun. That place where we want to give up because we suddenly can’t ‘fly’ like we want to, because everything seems too difficult to do that. 

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, just because it isn’t working right then and there when you want it to be. If you can always fly, then it wouldn’t make those times when you did as special. It isn’t necessarily easy to grow up, nor is it necessarily easy to live with the artistic struggle of losing inspiration. But you can’t just throw up your hands and say ‘No, I can’t do it anymore’ because you’ll NEVER fly if you do that. 

You gotta wobble before you stand. 

what if it GETS her though 😥

I love Harvest Mice. They are so small, and one of the only rodents to have a prehensile tail. Very cool to watch climb around.

Tiny friends

Photographed by Miles Herbert

shitposts from like last week

Can’t wait! This is going to be amazing!

The Kickstarter for 'Other Worlds', my first ever book, is GO!

Filled with art from Subnautica: Below Zero, the Birrin Saga, and decades of my illustration and concept art.

I took no half-measures creating this book.

The Kickstarter link is here!

Toothless for How To Train Your Dragon live action.

Pretty

桜

I promised you some lions! Let's talk about manes, males, and management.

This is Tandie, the current male lion at the Woodland Park Zoo.

Notice anything odd about him? He's got one of those hilarious awkward teenager manes. Except... this cat is nine years old.

I was, of course, immediately curious.

Manes serve a lot of purposes for male lions, including being an indicator of health and fitness - it's actually a sexually selected trait and a social signal. Mane texture / hair quality / length is dependent on nutrition and the body having energy to grow (and carry around!) that much hair! The color is also a signal: males with darker manes have been found to have higher testosterone levels.

In one research report, wild males were much more likely to avoid a lion decoy when it had a longer or darker mane - but the girls really loved a dark mane. It's thought this is because a long, dark mane is an indicator of mate quality. Males with longer, darker manes have higher testosterone and were pretty healthy: meaning they had more energy for fighting, had a better chance of recovering if they got injured, and generally had a higher rate of offspring survival. Manes matter!

So, back to Tandie. He was actually born at the Woodland Park Zoo in 2014 alongside two brothers, to dad Xerxes and mother Adia.

This was Xerxes (rip).

Obviously, a very large, dark, lush mane on Xerxes here. So where did these blond muttonchops come from on his son?

I asked the zoo docents and got an answer that didn't make a lot of sense. They told me that after the three cubs grew into adolescents, they were moved to the Oakland Zoo together. But living together suppressed his testosterone, and he never grew a mane.

Hmmmm.

Here's a photo from 2016, when the brothers debuted at Oakland. They're a year and a half old in this photo.

(Photo Credit: Oakland Zoo)

And here's from an announcement for their third birthday.

(Photo credit: Oakland Zoo)

Okay, so these dudes obviously all were growing manes as of 2017. I think Tandie is the one on the left in the first photo, and laying down in the middle on the second. What happened?

I was just in the Bay Area for a zoo road trip, of course I went to Oakland and tracked down a docent to ask some questions.

It turns out that shortly after the brothers turned three, they started acting like adult male lions: they started scuffling regularly. It's a normal social thing for male lions to live in groups, called coalitions, but according to my lion experts there's generally a baseline level of some social jostling within them. It wasn't quite clear from what the docent said if they couldn't manage the boys together, or if they just wanted to avoid the scratches and small wounds that result from normal lion behavior. Regardless, they put all three of the boys on testosterone blockers in order to be able to keep them together as a social group.

Now, I don't know a lot about the use of hormone alteration as a form of captive animal management, except in the case of birth control. I don't think it's something that's unethical - there was just a webinar on it that I saw go by - but I don't think it's commonly done with big cats. Lions have kind of complicated reproductive cycles, and for instance, we've been learning that female lions can take much longer to come into estrus again than expected after coming off hormonal birth control.

In males, testosterone blockers (or being neutered) means they lose their manes. This is why a lot of rescues will do a vasectomy on their males instead of a neuter - it allows them to keep their mane and the social signals that accompany it.

Tandie returned home to Woodland Park Zoo after Xerxes passed in early 2022, and the docent told me all of the lions had been off their blockers "for while." I'd guess those things happened around the same time, since bringing the trio down to a duo at Oakland would reduce some of the social tensions.

Hormones are such interesting things, though. One of Tandie's brothers has a full mane again, and the other is still totally mane-less.

As for Tandie, his mane is growing back in, and it looks like he might rival his dad for length and coloration.

He started here, in February:

Yesterday:

What a difference four months (and maybe proximity to a girl) makes!

This tree looks strait out of Narnia

by roksolyana_hilevych