This is a rare photo of a mother vise-grip feeding her baby wrenches. Nature really is amazing.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1301461/this-is-a-rare-photo-of-a-mother-vise-grip-feeding-her-baby-wrenches-nature-really-is-am
This is fucked up and should be tagged NSFW or just plain deleted. That isn’t a mother vise-grip. It’s a male. And it’s about to put it’s nut in that poor innocent little wrench.
ElJefe@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
You can tell by the markings on their sides that these specimens belong to the great northern metric wrench. Quite rare to see.
69420@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Nature truly is amazing. As we all know, vise grips are born sterile and can never have offspring of their own. But the females still have the instinct to nurture young, often adopting those of different species. That’s why she spends much of her day foraging for nuts, knowing her adopted spanners each have very specific nutritional needs: the brothers are unable to consume the same fare.
Here the mother vise grip must have a delicate touch when feeding the juveniles, as one wrong move could round over the nut, rendering it inedible.
wjrii@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Interestingly, despite morphological differences, they’re rather closely related to the silver-necked metric socket, of which the 10mm subspecies is sadly presumed to be extinct.