True story time.

The National Zoo is weird. It doesn’t so much have hours of business so much the animals have hours for which they work. Since the zoo is, in some ways, a National Park, it is functionally open really early to really late. It’s just that if you get there early, the buildings are closed, but the grounds are open. Basically, all the animals are still having their morning coffee and reading the comics, so you don’t get to see much.

However, the sea lions don’t really go “home” for the night, so they’re out (in as much as sea lions get an “out”). They’re also extremely bored. Now, I’m not crazy enough to throw anything into the pool for them (seriously, don’t do that). However, what I did do was set my hat down on the ground up near the glass and this little guy had all sorts of fun trying to bite it or bubble it away. In the process, I got a decent little portrait here, but feel free to click through and see the other “playing with my hat” photos.

Scorpions begin to ripen from the stinger end.

The invention of the cotton gin not only increased production of cotton, but it saved lives by reducing the number of people required to harvest cotton from the mouthes of these snakes.

This salamander is offended at your photos, political posts, games invites, friends’ comments or sheer quantity of posts. There is a reason that salamanders did not invent the Internet.

Back when these creatures were discovered, someone looked at them and thought “slipper!”.

Exploratory biologists got rather homesick at times.

Invisible pig.

Tonight on the Nightly New(t)s, this emperor newt explores an economic environment in which television networks make their money by selling shows about poor people to other poor people, making the first group of poor people ever richer the poorer they can get them to act.

Fortunately he concludes his analysis with the observation that, though such a system would make the network quite rich, it is too transparent and cruel of a ploy for anyone to really fall for.

When making a shrimp, you pretty much just poke a bunch of little sticks into the body until it doesn’t look like a shrimp anymore. Then you take that last one out and call it done.

Some frogs will move their young from pond to pond or up trees to small pools of water in bromeliads. They do this by sticking them on their back and carrying them one-by-one to where they need to go.

This process can take a long time, so these frogs don’t see many movies until their brood has grown up.

Once they become successful with using two sticks in two hands, they progress with two in one. Then, they practice with smaller and smaller sticks. Eventually, when the sticks become sufficiently small, pandas may begin to to eat rice, greatly expanding their possible range.