Happy New Years Eve Eve Everyone! Thank you to all my followers for enjoying my art! It was one of my big goals this year create and share my art! I hope you have and continue to enjoy my animal doodles and fun fact Mondays in 2020! It's the last Monday of 2019 so let's get into the last fun facts of the year! Why Bamboo?🎍 The question that stuck in my mind while researching these adorably cute black and white bears.🐼 Bamboo is about 99% of a Giant Panda's diet but there are so many reasons why it should not be the main food they eat.
At least they have some specialized features for eating bamboo.
Even with all the reasons why not to eat bamboo seeming to weigh more that the reasons to eat it, the Giant Panda eats bamboo anyway. 🤷♀️The start of the answer for how they survive off this diet is the amazing part!
Researchers and scientists studying this have not fully found the reason for "Why Giant Panda's eat bamboo?" It is definitely a bigger mystery than I thought when I started to make my "Giant Panda". Giant Panda Facts links:
https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/giant-panda https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/giant_panda/panda/what_do_pandas_they_eat/? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bamboo-fake-meat-giant-pandas-180972101/ https://www.chinahighlights.com/giant-panda/giantpanda-diet.htm https://www.pandasinternational.org/newsletter/11-bamboo-facts.html https://www.pandasinternational.org/bamboo-the-giant-diet-of-the-giant-panda/ https://www.britannica.com/animal/giant-panda https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144909/ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/how-pandas-survive-their-bamboo-only-diet https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/111017-pandas-bamboo-bacteria-plants-meat-bears-animals-science/ https://youtu.be/dqT-UlYlg1s https://youtu.be/G2DbShys9ww PBS Eons
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Merry Christmas Eve Eve to all my followers! ☃️
This is the last new doodle Monday in 2019! Today, I bring you an animal known for being adorably funny in videos and memes, the World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) logo animal, and a bamboo lover. Yes, of course the animal this week is the Giant Panda! 🐼 A funny creature whose design came to me quickly but whose research left me with many questions. One question in particular that confused me was: Why do Giant Panda's eat bamboo? 🎍 They have the digestive system of a carnivore and they eat a high fiber, low protein grass? Why? It is a mystery to be solved with some fun facts next Monday. I hope you enjoy my "Giant Panda" and have a wonderful Holiday season! Happy Monday!
Only one close up today because this doodle only has a hidden signature/my logo. So let’s dive into those fun facts! A group of krill are called a swarm and they can be seen from space! I still like my idea of calling them a Krillion. What do you think sounds better a swarm of krill or a krillion of krill? It might be too redundant and cheesy but I still like it! For a creature known for being numerous and getting eaten, you would think it would have a short life span. Maybe a year or two? Nope. Krill can live up to 10 years! The real question is how do they survive that long? They survive by staying in those swarms and by swimming deeper into the ocean during the day and coming to the surface to feed at night. Like I said last week, Krill are a keystone species vital to its marine southern ocean ecosystem. This week I want to illustrate this with two examples.
Like its known predator the blue whale, the Arctic Krill is a filter feeder but, instead of using baleen plates in their mouth, they use the many front arms to filter algae out of the water. Winter can be a hard hunting time even for these filter feeders so Krill have adapted to shrink when there is not enough food. Hope you enjoyed these fun facts! If you would like to learn more here are some websites I used to find these fun facts! Krill https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/group/krill/ https://oceana.org/marine-life/cephalopods-crustaceans-other-shellfish/antarctic-krill https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/animalsoftheice_krill/ http://www.krillfacts.org/1-krill-facts-center.html http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/big-ideas/krill/index.html Keystone Species https://frontier.ac.uk/blog/2017/11/23/the-importance-of-keystone-species Phytoplankton https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/phyto.html One of the millions, no billions, wait maybe trillions?
The Krill, paper clip size crustaceans, known for feeding the biggest creature known on Earth, the blue whale. My doodle is specifically based off of the Antarctic Krill, a keystone species of the Antarctic ocean. A vital species that keeps its ecosystem the way we see it now. Take out the krill and many of its predators lose a valuable source of protein and nutrients in a frozen land where food is scarce. I wanted to try something different this week so no hidden doodles within the doodle, other than my signature. Also the outline and color is created digitally rather than just my usual pen and ink. Hope you enjoy! The Portuguese Man O War looks like our media’s idea of what other worldly beings look like and the scientific words used to describe them sound out of this world. I am no expert on these organisms since I was introduced to them on Blue Planet II but I did have a confusingly fun time learning about them online. Here are some fun facts I found and tried to simplify. Hope you enjoy!
The Portuguese Man O War is a colony of single organisms called zooids. Zooids are so specialized in their jobs that they cannot function alone so they need to cooperate with other zooids to survive. From my understanding, Zooids with similar jobs like all the digestive zooids make up the digestive polyp. These organisms don’t really propel themselves, they just fill a translucent bladder (like a balloon) with gas and float with the waves. In the first close up, you can see this gas filled bladder. A crest on this bladder, it looks like a mohawk on the football shaped balloon, catches the wind and moves them. The tentacles can grow to more than 40 meters, that’s about 131 ft, and some can get longer! A blue whale is around 30 meters, approximately 98 ft, in length. The Portuguese Man O War can get as long as or longer blue whale! Let those words sink in… it's mind blowing! Comparatively, my doodle is probably a young Man O War with such short tentacles. Don't touch these tentacles though. Like I said in last week’s post, these things are venom filled or rather they have cells called nematocysts that are venom coils. Many prey animals they eat such as fish are paralyzed and killed with these neurotoxins. Even dead Portuguese Man O War or severed tentacles from them that wash to the shore can cause welts and allergic reactions in humans because they are still potent. In my second close up, you might see some animals such as the loggerhead sea turtle, violet sea snail with its bubble raft, and the blue sea slug (aka blue dragon) with what look to be long fingers. These are all predators of the Portuguese Man O War. For such potentially deadly creatures, the Portuguese Man O War have very fragile bodies and predators that are mostly immune to those painful tentacles or eat those poisonous nematocysts to use for their own protection have an easy time eating. Want to learn more? Here are some Links: Videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1ps0ooDhU – Blue Planet II- BBC One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTgLTbXJrfM - Portuguese Man-of-War | World's Weirdest Articles https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/p/portuguese-man-of-war/ https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/portuguese-man-o-war.html https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Physalia_physalis/ http://www.siphonophores.org/ https://www.earthhistory.org.uk/corals-and-jellies/siphonophores http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2008/niemi_riss/interactions.htm |
Artist and Blogger
I'm just a doodling artist. My current style started in a lecture class at MCLA where I began doodling in my notebooks. Now I've started a new series focusing on animals. Archives
April 2021
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