yeah lemme give you an example. you know anglerfish? those fuckers with the lightbulb hanging out of their heads on a stalk. and they're called anglerfish because when you see this thing (the "esca") you're like, oh, it's a lure, for catching prey. but that's actually just a guess. nobody's ever seen an anglerfish catch prey with its lure. or at all. or seen them eating, or mating, or anything really. probably there's like a few hours of footage of living anglerfish, if that. so maybe it does something else entirely and we just fucked up naming it.
"well," you say, "obviously that's because anglerfish are really far down, where it's hard for us to see." but actually it's pretty unusual to be able to see large parts of an animal's lifespan. that's why we tag whales and shit, because we can hardly just follow them around with a film crew. With a leopard or whatever, we can follow it around a bit all attenborough like, but how do you do that with a fish, or a small bug?
and usually an animal's behavior in captivity is pretty abnormal, assuming you can even keep it in captivity in the first place.
so what people do is they find dead ones and guess. like if you want to learn their diets you open their stomachs. if you want to know how they grow you catch a whole lot and hope that you can guess their ages. if you want to know how they mate good fucking luck
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" we don't know fuck about x's life history" goes for like 96% of nonmammals, also
"well," you say, "obviously that's because anglerfish are really far down, where it's hard for us to see." but actually it's pretty unusual to be able to see large parts of an animal's lifespan. that's why we tag whales and shit, because we can hardly just follow them around with a film crew. With a leopard or whatever, we can follow it around a bit all attenborough like, but how do you do that with a fish, or a small bug?
and usually an animal's behavior in captivity is pretty abnormal, assuming you can even keep it in captivity in the first place.
so what people do is they find dead ones and guess. like if you want to learn their diets you open their stomachs. if you want to know how they grow you catch a whole lot and hope that you can guess their ages. if you want to know how they mate good fucking luck