Not only do I run into people who think insects and other arthropods don’t qualify as animals, I run into people who know that they’re “technically” animals but they’re of the “opinion” they shouldn’t be.
What are people actually judging by here, though? Intelligence? Because there are definitely vertebrates like us with barely more brainpower than a cockroach, and then there are invertebrates like octopuses, as genetically distant from us as a cockroach but intelligent enough to learn people’s faces and solve puzzles. Are they going by anatomy? That an arthropod is supposedly just “too different” physically to be lumped with us as animals?
Let me show those folks something:
Here’s the animal kingdom. The giant pale blue is all the arthropods, the insects and spiders and crabs and things.
The pale green sliver is the chordata, which contains just three groups. One of those three groups is the vertebrata, literally every single animal with a skeleton: humans, horses, eels, owls, snakes, frogs, all the things people apparently think are “real” animals.
One of the other three types of chordata, your closest possible cousins, are these things, the lancelets:
Just like you, they have a notochord, which during embryonic development becomes your spinal column.
The third kind of chordate, and actually even closer to you genetically than a lancelet, is a tunicate, and here’s an example of one kind of tunicate:
This is a colony of several thousand little bags with mouths and anuses and virtually no other organs. As larvae, they resemble tadpoles and also have a notochord like you once did in the womb, but then they absorb it as they mature. These are our nearest cousins on the planet.
Now unlike the mature tunicate, an insect is a creature with a clearly defined head, jaws, legs, feet, eyes, a complete brain, practically anthropomorphic compared to those bags of filter-feeding jelly, yet it’s the bags of filter feeding jelly that share an immediate ancestor with you. If “bugs” are too weird to be animals then what the hell are we?
Basically if you’re going to say an insect shouldn’t be considered an animal, you may as well say a cactus shouldn’t be considered a plant because it looks funny.
If you guys didn’t see some white girl posted a montage of her colonizer experience in Hawai'i and has been getting dragged for days now lmao I’m not gonna link it cause it’s just her and some other haole girls she met her literally dancing on graves and sacred places and showing off her dirty hair.
But I did a little thread on why these romanticized ads of our home harms us (not super in depth but touches on some important points). And I was a lot nicer about it cause I actually do care if you come to visit and I’d actually prefer that everyone leave us alone forever but colonizers gonna colonize and settlers gonna settle 🤷🏽♀️
[Images: a tweet from user @WatkinsLondon that says: “This year I packed up my life into a tiny suitcase and moved to a little rock in the middle of the ocean. I fell in love with Hawaii, I fell in love with these people. But above all, I fell in love with being alive”.
This tweet is followed by a tweet thread from user @angelcurlsss that says:
“That stupid video of that haole girl who moved here for 4 months is just showing how fucking ignorant the general population is about Hawai'i and what has happened/is happening to Native Hawaiians.
1. HAWAI'I IS AN ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED SOVEREIGN NATION.
2. Native Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) used to make up 100% of the population. It’s estimated we make up about 20% of the state’s population now.
3. Hawai'i was once the most literate nation in the WORLD, about 91-95% of the kingdom by 1834.
4. ‘Olelo Hawai'i (native Hawaiian language) was illegal to teach in schools until 1978, but didn’t get taught again in schools until 1987. People don’t understand how recently they had their colonial policies forced on us. 1978… my mom was born in 1973. She could’ve been beat just for speaking her native tongue on her native land.
5. Despite making up less than a quarter of the state’s population, native Hawaiians make up about 60% of the prison population (mostly nonviolent crimes).
6. Native Hawaiians also make up most of the homeless population. Hawai'i has the largest population of homeless people per capita in the U.S.
7. As of 2018, the average price for a single family home in Hawai'i is $795K. There are no regulations for foreigners owning land.
Including (but not limited to) these facts and statistics, native Hawaiians are one of the most disenfranchised communities in Hawai'i. Our own ‘āina. When people treat our home as a playground for their own selfish needs, they change everything here except the price of living. Native Hawaiians and locals are leaving Hawai'i by the dozens. They recently estimated it to be 11 locals leaving PER DAY.
I don’t care if you want to come visit. Our home is beautiful and I don’t blame people for wanting to see it. But I do care when you poison our land, romanticize our lifestyle, fetishize our people, and cheapen our culture. Unless you’re coming to pour money into our communities and work for our betterment and sovereignty (I know you’re not) you bring nothing of value to Hawaiians. Please come and enjoy, but don’t forget when it’s time to leave.”
Timestamp of last tweet: December 26, 2018. 12:09 p.m.]
today my professor shortened the term “significant others” to “signifs” reblog to make signif the new gender neutral term for the person you’re dating
I support it, but also my chemistry-tutor brain will read it as sig figs, and there’s nothing I can do about it, your bf/gf/nbf/spouse is now a significant figure and nothing can change that
