DUXXX update

[summer_jackel]

2 am duck sex prevention updates:

Nights 1,2---locked up the boys, Josephine and Petey. No quacking.
Last night---locked up the girls, Vera and Vivienne. Loud 2 am quacking! D: The morning found both hens still in the coop, and a mystery: 2, eggs, one of which was a chicken egg! (we know this because it's blue. Only a certain breed of chicken, of which I have 3, lays blue eggs).

WTF? One of the CHICKENS squeezed into the coop, a feat just barely possible, laid an egg in the dirt next to the ducks, caused quacking, and left again??? (She was not in the coop this morning).

I have interspecies lesbian fowl love going on, on top of everything else, apparently. The coop gets kinkier and kinkier.

The drakes are locked up tonight. I'm not sure I want to know.

And some stats on me! I am less slutty than my fowl, I'm afraid.

Your LJ Slut Stats!
Out of your 141 friends, percentages you have:
met		53.9%
hugged		45.39%
dated		7.09%
kissed		8.51%
seen shirtless		9.92%
seen naked		7.09%
had net sex		7.8%
made out with		5.67%
had oral sex		3.54%
fucked		4.96%
Get your LJ Slut Stats!

Comments

Gotta See 'Em

[darkwoofe.livejournal.com]

Now I'm really wanting to see these ducks and chickens! Do you have any pics or better yet a video of them that you wouldn't mind uploading to YouTube and linking?

This has me really curious at this point and I can't wait to hear what you find about these animals...

Re: Gotta See 'Em

[joreth]

funny, I was just telling a friend that I have a friend with the kinkiest fowl yard ever and he asked for video too!

Re: Gotta See 'Em

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

hahahaha! I will try and get photos. I don't have a video camera, unfortunately. :)

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

Not to burst the bubble, but...can't the quacking simply have been due to an intruder in their area? And one that was nervy enough to lay an egg right in the middle of it, to boot!

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm being silly. I'm sure the girls just raised hue and cry because they were startled by the chicken sneaking in. The weird thing, though, is that it was the same series of quacks as the mating quacks, and they kept going for awhile. 0_o The 'predator in the coop' noises are different.

I think that Vera is just a very noisy duck, and she's keyed up about this on top of it. The really weird thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that the chicken was not only putting a lot of effort into laying an egg in the ducks' coop, she was doing it *that early*...chickens tend to be very, very diurnal. Go fig.

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

Heh. I know someone who grew up on a small livestock farm; he compared chickens to unpeeled potatoes, and he LIKES animals in general. Critters that are all ROM and no RAM can develop some very odd quirks. :>

[kayos-drion.livejournal.com]

is it possible for interspecies mating? think of all the new creatures on the galapocus islands.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Mating, yes ( and frequently); offspring, no. Ducks and chickens are very different biologically and could no more produce offspring than could a dog and a cat.

The Galopagos speciation is a result of one species ending up on an island and quickly (on biological timescales) evolving into new ones to occupy habitats that were not being otherwise exploited. Speciation works faster when there's a bunch of surplus resources. :)

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

It can happen, but it only occurs with two animals very genetically similar (such as donkeys and horses) and usually the hybrid (such as a mule) is sterile. It's one of the oldest hallmarks of speciation whether or not two animals can breed, AND their offspring breeds true.

As Summer said, too, a small population of a single species, arriving in a rich and unexploited habitat, can 'branch out' into several new species over many thousands of years -- it takes a LONG time for their genes to drift enough that they can no longer breed with one another.

[kayos-drion.livejournal.com]

but i did see somewhere where a mare and a male zebra had been kept in the same pen for a while, the foul was a light brown but had the distinctive black markings of the zebra

guess that proves zebras are white with black stripes :)

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Yes, zebras, horses and donkeys can all create sterile hybrid offspring. Zebra/horse is a zorse, zebra/donkey is a zonkey or zedonk. Horse mare/donkey stud is the familiar mule; a stallion to donkey jennet, which is done very rarely because it produces a small animal really useful mostly as a pet, is a hinny.

Some of the donkey crosses are quite lovely. Have some zorses:
http://kakaos.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/zorse.jpg
http://zonkey.info/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/zorse2.jpg
http://marmitte.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/zorse.jpg

zonkeys:
http://www.lafilmforum.org/past/spring2005/5_08/zonkey.jpg
http://www.kolaj.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/zonkey.jpg

hinny:
http://www.lovelongears.com/silver_dapple_mini_hinny_winter.jpg
http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/1017/50242931.JPG

None of these animals can have offspring.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

/nods/ yep, everything you said. Hybridization rarely happens in nature unless something in the environment changes, like red wolves breeding with coyotes because there are so few wolves left. Captive animals kept together will often hybridize, however (eg the hybrid macaws).

On canids, though, I'm always fascinated by how easily they interbreed. Wolves, dogs, coyotes and jackals can all produce fully fertile offspring (as evidenced by my 3 wolfdogs, heh), yet they are very distinct species (with the exception of the dog, which is genetically still so close to wolf that, were it a wild animal, it would be considred a subspecies at best no matter how many visual mutations we've bred into them). I've often wondered if the dhole or painted dog are close enough to hybridize.

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

The fun part is how much 'species' has been redefined in the age of genetics. As you've said, visual differences are completely meaningless; genetic compatibility is everything. All the interbreeding canids really are one superspecies, but cladistics and genetics do occasional war with one another. Biologists just can't quite let go of the idea that most canids aren't quite evolved enough to be genetically incompatible. ;>

Just be glad you don't work with plants. Plants not only can hybridize each other like crazy, but sometimes their diploid genomes suddenly duplicate themselves. Hybrid diploid genomes also sometimes COMBINE and exist side by side. (This is what's known as polyploidy, common in plants and lethal in animals). Hybrid, polyploid breeding forms the basis of almost all our modern agriculture, and quite a few garden flowers are the way they are because they have 4, 6, 8 copies of certain genes.

Omnidirectional duck quacks

[cphoenix.livejournal.com]

There's apparently a belief that duck quacks have no echo. So researchers analyzed the quacks, and found that the sound dies away exponentially--just like echoes do. Perhaps that makes it harder for the ear to distinguish the original quack?

I might suggest that your neighbors haven't complained because they don't know where the sound is coming from. :-) But I won't. :-)

Chris

Re: Omnidirectional duck quacks

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

hahahahaha
oh, they know. We're the only ones on the block with Dux.
I buy them off with fresh eggs sometimes. ;)

QUAAAAAAACK qucack quack quack
(maybe the redwoods muffle the echo...)

[humpingtails.livejournal.com]

Does "seen naked" mean in person or include in pictures? Hehe.

[kayos-drion.livejournal.com]

when i did the lj slut posting i assumed it was both, because thanks to SYS seen alot more "chests"

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

likewise. I'm counting SYS as seen naked. The meme did not specify in person.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Snerk. I counted you as 'seen naked', from pictures. murrr, foxeh.

[humpingtails.livejournal.com]

He he. Thanks, I think. ;-)

If the meme included "been seen naked by", then filling it would certainly expose the degree of my sluttiness!