This is a titmel. It's been first described in 2007. Other than camels, it lives in the mangroves only. When the flood comes, it sticks its long trunk inside a tight and wet hole. The thickening at the tip of the trunk serves as an anchor. At the back it has two huge humps which always float on the surface. They feel very nice. Because the titmel can't breathe underwater, there's a nose on each hump. It can't flee in water, so it follows a very interesting defense strategy. If an enemy appears (mostly sea cucumbers), it sprays milk out of its noses. That's very confusing for the enemy, because milk signals offspring. Every predator knows not to fight a feeding mother. When living at land, this weird animal behaves almost like a common rabbit. Always hopping around, looking for huge carrots and fresh holes. Scientists still try to figure out the reproductive system of that species. There's no evidence for sexual reproduction yet. It seems as if they just appear out of random holes in the swamp. Scientists definitely need to dig much deeper, harder and faster!

Last night, I summoned the Krampus.👹 I wish you all a nice St. Nicholas Day!🎅 In truth, Nicholas came yesterday to my dear serpent.🐍🐁❤ He brought frozen mice and I even got about a spoonful of dry ice. (Yippie!😆) I didn't want to waste any time and quickly picked up a few things from the room that I thought would work well with the fog.🤔 A mirror, three crystal glasses, three candles and a small figure from Peru (condor, cougar, snake). Of course you can't recognise the figure correctly.🙃 It could also be the Krampus, half goat, half demon. He doesn't go around here in Hesse, but in Bavaria.


🎅🍻👹

Who say he's not a Hesse?😜
In a hurry I didn't align it perfectly, but no matter. The result looked pretty good.✌ I don't have much video editing experience yet, so I learned something new again: This time I've dealt with the track mask keying. You take a grayscale picture, which you put over the video. It's like a transparency mask. Where the picture is black, the video is completely transparent. The brighter, the more opaque the video is. If you put another video underneath, it will be visible in the transparent areas. That's basically how I made this experiment yesterday. The second video was done professionally with Snapchat.

🏨🐜 News from the insect hotel:


That's my bud, the stink bug! I thought of it as a different species, but thanks to a friendly hint I know that it's the introduced species Halyomorpha halys. Since 2011, this species has been detected in Germany and comes originally from East Asia.

It sat on my finger for about 8 minutes.☝ Then my patience was over. It has nothing to do with the little gift that made it to me.💩😂 I was hoping it would fly away, for recording.😐 It's very affectionate.😅😘 This stink bug has been with me for at least a month now. Sometimes it lands on my desk and struggles to get back up.😂 Stupid sweet little bug!❤ I'm very happy about this roommate, but I've just read that they don't survive the room temperatures in winter. Next time I see it, I free it! 🤗

Frankfurt on a beautiful Sunday morning.🌇🎶🐦


🎼Music: "Sunday Morning" by texasradiofish (2015 - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)

This morning on the way to Frankfurt together with @_.goala_ 🐨✌🚈🌅🌄🌇

Just a simple sloth in the body of the weirdest animal on earth. 🙃

Cleopatra 💖☄☄

Maybe you feel a little stuck, but that's ok. Be-leaf in you and tree't yourself with the love and respect you deserve!🤗🍁🌟🌞

Look at all the other leaves that were in hurry and now turn into worm feces. 💩

Crane fly,
Tipula sp.❤
(05/2003 in Oberursel, Germany)

Isn't it beautiful?😍 Crane flies are completely harmless.😁 Many believe they are huge mosquitoes.😆 Their mandibles are only suitable for absorbing water and nectar and can't penetrate through the skin.☝ What can end fatally, however, is to get the giggles from people panicking around the whole apartment.😂🙈🙉🙊




Do you see behind the wings these small stems with the thickening at the end? In evolutionary terms, these are reduced wings and serve as orientation. They are called halteres and are a fascinating development of Mother Nature. Many other flying insects have that too. Simply said, the halteres swing through the wing movements, and as the animal changes direction, the vibration also changes.💡

This is supposed to show a sleeping ground sloth. It's fallen totally exhausted into a dream-filled sleep. It's already clear to me that a ground sloth hardly slept in such a position. This is called artistic freedom! I often sleep in similar position!😜


With their huge claws, these extinct representatives of the South American megafauna were able to dig impressive burrows. A particularly large burrow can be found, for example, in the Brazilian state of Rondonia. It consists of several tunnels with a total of 2,000 feet in length (around 600 meters) and was probably extended over several generations.

In the past, sloths were a very diverse group. There was even a semi-aquatic species in Peru that showed similarities to otters and beavers.

Some cryptozoologists think there may still be live ground sloths, somewhere in the Amazon. Basis for this assumption is a myth of the Carios, according to which a monster (the mapinguari) living in a cave on their tribal territory in the Brazilian rainforest. One may doubt and still dream. I suspect that only well-preserved remains were found in a cave (in fact, ancient fur remains have been discovered) and the rest was done with imagination.