And I’ll bet you didn’t even let the shark have some “finger foods” for his trouble.
Tsk, tsk. You really are a terrible host. 
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@nickcarlson we shall dub thee ‘sharkbait’
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I didn’t know sharks were parasitic…
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Isistius brasiliensis are
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I like how they’re called ‘cookiecutters’, I don’t know why, it just makes them seem almost less harmful
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Welcome Brother Sharkbait
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wa-he wa-he, wa-who ho-ho, wa-he wa-he, wa-who ho-ho…
Nick Sharkbait moo hah-hah!
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One that I remember fondly, me and my mother had gone on a day trip to the San Juan Islands, our return boat was scheduled for about 5:30PM (the 2nd to last departing ferry), however the 5:30 ferry was suddenly canceled and we raced to the ferry lanes to get on the last boat of the day which wouldn’t be departing until 11:00PM (if you know the Washington ferry systems this happens more than often). Since this was the last ferry of the day it made all the stops on the way out and we didn’t end up getting off the boat until almost 1AM.
On the drive home through the farmlands and estuaries, I am watching out the window when this ghostly white flying figure is headed our way from the moonglow, I look up through the sunroof just as it is passing directly over us to see the glowing white underside of a barn owl silently glide over the sunroof, with the stars glowing in the night sky above it and everything, my mind took a perfect mental image of that very moment.
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Beautiful. The way the second paragraph is written is reminiscent of the Mothman story, a white creature flying over a moving vehicle. This “creature” is speculated to have really been a Barn Owl.
Interesting parallel.
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Could you sketch it? You could make an observation:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/nature-drawing-and-journaling
Yes, one picture of the adult bear further away is on Inaturalist. I didn’t bother uploading all of my 43 pictures though, lol! Here is the one on Inaturalist if you were interested.
You can kind of see one cub. The other one was further behind.
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Just today, I saw something that reminded me of your post @jhbratton.
It was walking up my driveway when I spot a Brown-lipped Snail on the ground. I went in for a closer look and realized that it was eating the poop of a Eastern Cottontail. I got photos and I’m planning to upload them soon.
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Yeah, surely because cookiecutters are so harmless a two year-old kid could play with them…
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Oh, nice shot! That was definitely an exciting encounter.
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I had returned to the Dominican Republic after several years away, only to find that my structure’s thatch roof had deteriorated and a lot of the things inside were a loss. As I began the task of clearing out the debris, I found that a Hispaniolan Boa had moved in. To this day, that is the only one I have ever seen alive – every other encounter I have had with the species have been individuals slain by the locals.
I replaced the thatch roof with sheet metal.
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I really wish that I’d had my sweep net yesterday afternoon during track practice, there were hundreds of ground beetles flying around and crawling on the ground! Ranging from Amara to little black Stenolophus-like carabids! And I neary got into trouble at home after storing a few dozen carabids in my sweatpants’ zipper pockets until I got home… #nocollectingvials@school!
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The people in charge of slug PR don’t make enough of the slug and snail role in cleaning up after incontinent vertebrates.
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For sure!
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indeed! Decomposers in general have image problems.
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