How Animals See The World (Video)

How Animals See The World (Video) | Third Monk image 1

How Animals See The World Opening

As a human being that needs glasses to see the accepted norm of 20/20, I’ve always been interested in how our visual perspective of the world varies so greatly. Even among humans there are color discrepancies and a difference in our ability to focus.

Animals extend this question further by being able to see things that are not even perceivable to the human eye. After a new study, scientist have found that  cats, dogs and many other mammals may see in ultraviolet light.

How Animals See The World

I love thinking about how animals see the world and all the things our human eyes aren’t able to perceive. Our ingenuity through science and technology leads to gadgets that give us the ability to comprehend what it looks like to see these wavelengths.

Using that information it is possible to hypothesize the reasons for these unique animal abilities.

Check out this sweet infographic below, peace.

How Animals See The World Infographic

How Animals See The World Infographic

True Facts About The Octopus and CuttleFish – A Big Head With Three Hearts (Video)

True Facts About The Octopus and CuttleFish - A Big Head With Three Hearts (Video) | Third Monk image 2

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After featuring the psychedelic vision of the Mantis Shrimp, the hilarious True Facts About Animals series is back with some love for Cephalopods.

True Facts About The Octopus

It is widely known that the interesting-ness of an animal is proportionate to how difficult it is to figure out where its butthole is. The octopus therefore is very interesting.

 

True Facts About The CuttleFish

Cuttlefish are the kings of camouflage and their mating begins when the male delicately grabs the female by her face and inserts another specialized tentacle into an opening near her mouth, which hopefully is not her nose.

Cephalopods, the class of mollusks which scientists classify octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses, can change color faster than a chameleon. They can also change texture and body shape, and, and if those camouflage techniques don’t work, they can still “disappear” in a cloud of ink, which they use as a smoke-screen or decoy.

Cephalopods are also fascinating because they have three hearts that pump blue blood and are thought to be the most intelligent of invertebrates.  Dr. Wood, Cephalopod Researcher

Giant Ant Hill Colony Impresses Scientists (Video)

Giant Ant Hill Colony Impresses Scientists (Video) | Third Monk image 2

Nature is up to its amazing feats once again. The ant colony featured in this video is so big that it would be the equivalent of building the great wall of china.

Now I can’t speak on the method of excavation, concrete dumped into the colony then excavated, but I do hope that the majority of the colony moved on before the concrete came down to freeze this epic structure in time.

I’ve highlighted ant hills that were made into sculptures using aluminum in the past but this behemoth of a structure is a metropolis in comparison.

This giant ant hill is a testament to the complexity of life on this planet, all living things continue to grow and evolve creating things that we have never seen before, there is tons of excitement left in what we don’t know.

Giant Ant Hill Images

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Sublime Shots of Wildlife – Golden Turtle Photo Contest (Gallery)

Sublime Shots of Wildlife - Golden Turtle Photo Contest (Gallery) | Third Monk image 2

The Golden Turtle includes various creative competitions aimed at identifying the best works and projects demonstrating the beauty and harmony of nature.

The first Golden Turtle wildlife photo contest was held in 2006, and in 2010 officially became an international photo contest.

The 2014 Golden Turtle Contest was attended by photographers from over 80 countries, where a jury selected the best shots from 15,000 submissions.

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Make a Bee Bath and Help Hydrate our Pollinators

Make a Bee Bath and Help Hydrate our Pollinators  | Third Monk image 3

Bee-bath

Imagine how hard just one bee works in a single day.

Bees tend to at least 2,000 flowers daily, with tiny wings beating 10,000 times per minute, carrying pollen, and dramatically assisting our food supply.

Sound exhausting? Bees get thirsty, and they need safe water sources. The problem is water is not always readily available.

Bee-Bath-2Bees need very shallow water to drink from. However, shallow water evaporates quickly. Birdbaths are not the best option as bees tend to drown if the water isn’t shallow enough. As for river and lakes, bees risk their lives trying to get water in the presence of fishes, frogs, and other wildlife, not to mention the risk of being swept away in water currents.

To help hydrate our little pollinators, set up a bee bath by filling a pie pan with marbles and then water. The marbles give the bees a spot to land so that they don’t drown when they come to drink.

Now you have your very own Bee Bath and no more drowned bees!

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> Make a Bee Waterer | Natural Cures Not Medicine

Dogs Hallucinate After Licking Cane Toads (Video)

Dogs Hallucinate After Licking Cane Toads (Video) | Third Monk

Dogs in Australia lick the hallucinogenic sweat off cane toads to get high in this clip from Cane Toads: The Conquest.

Some dogs are so desperate for a fix they deliberately hunt down the frogs to stimulate the excretion of the psychedelic sweat, then lick their prey.

To say a dog or a cat is having an hallucination is impossible, but some do star gaze or track something across the room that isn’t there and others just stare out of the cage while we’re monitoring them – Jonathon Cochrane, University of Queensland’s School of Veterinary Science

Unfortunately, there is only a small amount of the psychoactive chemical Bufotenin secreted compared to the dangerous toxins in the sweat. Most dogs are able to overcome the poison by instinctively limiting the amount they lick.

A psychedelic toad trip has to be more intense than a catnip trip, add dogs to the list of animals that love to get high.

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Bonobo Ape Starts a Fire with Matches to Roast Marshmallows (Video)

Bonobo Ape Starts a Fire with Matches to Roast Marshmallows (Video) | Third Monk image 2

Kanzi the bonobo lives in America and has learned how to build a fire, light it using matches and toast marshmallows on it. The behavior shows how similar we are to our primate family and is another great example of animal intelligence.

In another clip from BBC’s Monkey Planetwe get a glimpse of what monkeys do for fun:

Dive Bombing Macaques

Rhesus macaques in Jaipur, India, dive bomb off a lamp post into a foot of water to have fun, implying that monkeys can be capable of feelings.

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Hilarious Animals in Sweaters (Photo Gallery)

Hilarious Animals in Sweaters (Photo Gallery, Video) | Third Monk image 1

Cute doesn’t begin to describe these animals and their fashionable sweaters.

Purple Horse (via reddit)

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Mushroom Cat (via reddit)

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Straight Chillin’ (via reddit)

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Happy Goats (via fiber farm)

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Snake in Christmas Sweater (via reddit)

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Cold blooded, warm vested

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Fine feathered finery, Chicken Sweater (via craftsy)

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Lisa Frank Parrot says “Sweater vests totally rule!”

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Acrobatic anteaters love a good sweater vest. (via flickr: tamanduagirl)

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The Pug Father (via cuddlepugs)

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Baby Gibbon or Amish E.T.? (via buzzfeed)

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Baby Pig in a Sweater with Socks (via mylifeasmar)

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Parrot, Buttons of All Sizes (via george goes green)

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Bunny Cowl (via flickr)

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One man’s sleeve is another bird’s vest (via flickr)

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Santa Gator (via buzzfeed)

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Irresistably Cute Cat

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Husky Sweater

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For more animal in sweater goodness click here!

8 Animals That Love Getting High More Than We Do

8 Animals That Love Getting High More Than We Do | Third Monk image 8

Everyone loves drugs.

Whether it’s a cigarette break after a high-powered business meeting, a cold beer after a hot day on the job or a half-ounce of shroom juice injected directly into the scrotum to ease the stress of writing, people love their intoxicants.

But it turns out that it’s not strictly a human convention. Experts have found that animals also seek out a quick chemical high from plants, bugs and, well, wherever they can find it.

8 Animals That Love Getting High More Than We Do

Elephants

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Elephants drugs of choice are liquor and opiates.

Throughout history, elephants have been worshiped as gods, lauded for their wisdom and memory, and made into mascots for the Republican Party. Like people, elephants are very complex, social animals. This means they exhibit a lot of humanlike behavior. They nurture their young, mourn their dead and love to get absolutely fucked up. Seriously.

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In October of 2007, six young elephants charged into an Indian village, broke into their beer supply, got drunk, uprooted an electrical pole and died horribly. In 2002, another squadron of alcoholic elephants rampaged through a different village, killing six people.

Drunk Elephant Sex Party

Horses

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Horses prefer to get high on potted locoweed, a type of legume that acts as a mind-altering drug.

Apparently locoweed is to horses what nicotine is to people: an extremely addictive drug that kills them slowly over the course of several years. During the lean winter months, locoweed is the only green plant available in some pastures.

Horses first seek it out for its nutritious goodness, but keep coming back for its psychoactive effects. 

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Long-term users exhibit signs of depression, weight loss and behavioral instability.

Latawnya, The Naughty Horse, Learns To Say “No” To Drugs – A Dramatic Reading

Bighorn Sheep

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Bighorn sheep like to get high on narcotic lichen.

And luckily for them, in the vast wilderness of the Canadian Rockies lives a unique species of yellow-green lichen that will fuck you up.

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The lichen is extremely rare (it can take decades for them to grow over a single rock) and only grow in very inhospitable regions of the Rockies. Despite the fact that it is dangerous to get at and contains no nutritional value, the sheep will risk life and limb to get some. 

Once they reach the lichen, they will rub their teeth down to the gum line to scrape off every last bit of it – in the process getting super high.

Reindeer

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Reindeer apparently love shrooms, their favorite being the amanita muscaria strain.

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Let’s talk about urine for a moment.

The body does not actually metabolize psychedelic mushrooms, so most of the psychoactive compounds get washed out with the user’s pee. If you collect that urine and drink it, you will trip almost as hard as if you’d eaten the mushrooms yourself.

Many native Alaskan tribes stretch out their supply of mushrooms this way. The priests eat the ‘shrooms and the followers drink their urine. How does this tie into reindeer?

Like most wild herbivores, reindeer have a very firm constitution that allows them to eat all manner of nasty plants and fungi without getting sick. Many strains of hallucinogenic mushrooms are toxic to human beings, but not toxic to reindeer.

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Being the practical sort of fellows that primitive shamans were, the priests started collecting reindeer urine and drinking it to get high. But the piss train didn’t stop there. The reindeer discovered that they could get the same high off of human urine. Thus was born…

THE CIRCLE OF PISS:

  1. Reindeer eat mushrooms and pee.
  2. Humans collect the pee and get high.
  3. Humans pee, and reindeer drink their own people-filtered-urine to get high again.
  4. The reindeer pee, and the circle begins anew.

Would you drink this guy’s piss?

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Bees

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Bees get high on Satan’s Bathwater (alcohol). As it turns out, the bee, nature’s communist labor drone, is also another one of nature’s alcoholics. Since they have a similar nervous system to humans, scientists love to provide captive colonies with alcohol to test the effects of intoxication.

Scientists have noted that drunk bees are less likely to fly, less likely to engage in social behavior and prone to random fits of violence.

Some bees get so blitzed that they lose the ability to do anything but lay on their back and kick their fuzzy legs feebly in the air.

Drunk Bees

Jaguars

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Jaguars drug of choice is banisteriopsis caapi, a root found in the jungles of South America.

Jaguars love to get high, and their choice in intoxicants is badass. Wild cats looking for a high will seek out the roots of the caapi plant and gnaw on them until they start to hallucinate. It looks even cuter than it sounds.

Jaguar Gets High

Caapi root contains a variety of powerful MAOIs (chemicals like you find in antidepressants), which allow the animal’s brain to be flooded with DMT, causing them to trip balls.

In fact, some scientists believe that humans first learned to use the root by observing jaguars getting high off of it. 

Capuchin Monkeys and Lemurs

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These two species love to get high on hallucinogenic millipedes.

Yes, both capuchin monkeys in South America and lemurs in Madagascar have learned how to get high off of passing insects. Apparently, several species of millipedes squirt out a poisonous compound when agitated.

By covering themselves with the poison, lemurs and monkeys are able to ward off parasitic insects and get a delightful narcotic buzz.

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Unfortunately, millipede venom is also filled with cyanide, which is deadly to pretty much everything.

Of course the risk of agonizing death has never stopped anyone from getting high, so the capuchins (one of mankind’s closest relatives) gather in huge groups and swap hits of ‘pede.

Drunken Monkeys and Smashed Lemurs

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> 7 Species That Get High | Cracked