I hate it when man or animals are way too sure of themselves. This Wombat knows he is way too cute …

You know that watching cute and cuddly animals is good for your psyche. It gives you that warm and fuzzy delight the evil world denies you constantly …

Click images for bigger snouts.

I often wonder if animals have a perception of time and personal history – or if they live totally ZEN-like here and now without worrying about the past and future …

Click image for a larger version.

Click image for a larger version.

The great Australian Dust Storm – some more great pictures here at the Boston Big Picture and Wired. 

I always find it amazing that many mammals spend so much energy and time caring for their younglings.

Some do not only do they carry the baby in the womb, but also after birth. This is very unusual in nature: most reptilians, insects and fish simply leave their young behind.

Click image for more fire.

This is an amazing shot – and a sad story. Wildfires are natural, but global climate change seems to make them worse … thanks humanity!

Click image for more cuteness. 

We should watch nature more instead of eating everything we see.

Click image for bigger clouds.

Noctilucent Clouds are fascinating and beautiful things. Click here for more images.

Click image to learn about the full horror of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

I heard many times that our oceans are badly polluted – but this THING really is as impressive as it is a HUGE shame for us humans.

Compared to garbage on land it’s much harder to get rid off. But most of all: nobody feels responsible, because every small piece of land belongs to a country. But the Oceans belong to everybody and nobody – so we give a shit about it’s decline and pollution …

Click image for a bigger critter.

Nature adapts slowly to change – it is not working on the same speed level as human technology races ahead and changes the environment.

Whole ecosystems are killed by small natural and unnatural changes. That is why fast climate change or the intrusion of foreign species (by human infrastructure and colonization) are so deadly.

And we human often think complex enough to see what consequences our "better lifestyles" have for nature.

We certainly can’t live without nature and a healthy ecosystem – in the long run we can only loose. Nature will recover, even when it takes millions of years.

Nature works in long time spans, we don’t.

Click the moth for a bigger image.

I am constantly amazed by the colours of insects and the Leopard Moth is simply a cool bugger. Looking at my pink skin I feel pretty boring and monochrome right now.

I guess you can bridge almost any differences if you grow up together and really get to know each other.

Nature – in it’s ruthless efficiency – has created so much beauty without compromise. Beauty based on practicality is the best kind. Japanese design combines this often to great effect.

Click for a close-up.

Wild Wonders of Europe is one brilliant website and offers many great galleries (like this one featuring Austria including that lovely bugger from above).

Bring some time to explore all the featured photographers and countries. There is a lot of great eye candy to be discovered!

Click image to see a larger version of the magnificent photo by Sarah-Fiona Helme – Summer stripes.

Garden Photography sounds pretty lame, but this competition is full of great snaps. Take some time to visit all the galleries like Plant Portraits, Trees and Wildlife in the Garden.

Website: International Garden Photographer of the Year competition

Click image for a bigger bird.

The most depressing think about winter – apart from the cold and xmas – is the lack of colors. You only get get the grey shades ranging white to black.

Spring´brings the colors back – and most of the colorful birds!

How many colors do we have: white, brown, red and so called yellow (has anyone ever seen a yellow Asian person?). And we are only uni-color: no patterns, no stripes, no dots, no gradients … boooooring!

Click image for a larger view.

What an amazing image – I never get tired looking at our planet. Snapped by Apollo 11.

*thanks to edosan for sending this one*

Click image for more water.

It must be amazing to "fly" under water like this fellow here. Gee, I love watching the creatures of the oceans. They are amazing.

I will never ever again hug a tree!

Click image for more green.

We humans have to use paint or clothes to be so colorful. Most other creatures are less boring.

Click image for a even cooler chameleon.

Aren’t these creatures amazing? They can climb trees, change color at will and look at different directions at the same time.

Wow!

Colors have also a natural functions – like indicating that certain creatures are poisonous or that a fruit is ripe and has reached the right ‘color’ to be eaten.

So some color combinations are more appealing or ’safer’ for us. So beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, but also in our instincts what is ‘good’ and ’safe’ for us.

But the same color can have totally different meanings: you would eat a deep green Granny Smith apple, but you wouldn’t bite a green snake – would you?

Space is the final frontier. No more. No less.

Click Blob for more color.

Some deep sea creature defy our usual concept how an animal should look like. This odd blob is just brilliant.

Animals should invade our habitat and eat away our resources – just like what we do to them.

I think that would raise a lot of awareness.

Bears occasionally do that by accident – and then we humans panic a lot. Apes are notorious food thieves in Africa and India – we should let them loose in the US and Europe. Especially fat westerners will appreciate less food on their table and the extra exercise fighting off large crowds of Baboons.

Click image for a bigger Saturn. Warning: it’s really a big picture.

This is an amazing photo of Saturn. I am just … wow!

They seem to have either a good sense of humor or doing some excellent comedy shows in the deep sea?

Click image for a bigger frog.

Once again: Mother Nature’s colors are amazing. This frog (at least I think it’s a frog) is radiating in a mad orange tone. Brilliant.

Does anyone know the species and why it’s so bloody orange? I guess it must be poisonous – otherwise it wouldn’t give up it’s camouflage?

Photographer: unknown – can anyone help?

Click image for a bigger version.

Isn’t nature and it’s amazing variety of shapes and colors amazing? I never can get enough of bright flowers, crazy shaped insects and deep water fish. They are beautiful too me.

National Geographic offers a brilliant image gallery with many amazing shots. You can even download those images as wallpapers.

Highly recommended.

They will survive us all!

New Scientist: Jesus-era seed is the oldest to germinate

Forget cryopreservation – hot and dry conditions might be all you need to awake far into the future. A date palm seed some 2000 years old – preserved by nothing more than storage in hot and dry conditions – has germinated, making it the oldest seed in the world to do so.

The ancient seed was found along with several others in the 1960s in the Masada fortress on the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel. Recently, three were planted in soil and one germinated.

Wow! Nature is pretty inventive and tough. This shows us that we humans might be able to kill ourselves and damage nature. But in the long run nature will survive and regenerate itself.

We humans have always loved to associate ourselves with animals: strong as a bear, cunning as a fox and being a chicken.

Now a stallion and the white horse are in particular interesting: strength, grace, white (as in innocent), potency, speed, freedom, independence, power (as leader of his herd) and war (because horses were only for rich people and knights need a horse).

So … no surprise "chicks" love riding horses.

BBC News: Sharks swim closer to extinction

Sharks are not breeding like cattle – which means we eat them faster than they can breed.

Excellent – so we now longer need to worry about being eaten by sharks since we simply ate them.

But I am also pretty sure we will figure out that shark are an essential part of OUR mutual ecosystem – because they are one of the oldest species around (from Wikipedia):

Evidence for the existence of sharks extends back over 450–420 million years, into the Ordovician period, before land vertebrates existed and before many plants had colonised the continents. All that has been recovered from the first sharks are some scales. The oldest shark teeth are from 400 million years ago. The first sharks looked very different from modern sharks. The majority of the modern sharks can be traced back to around 100 million years ago.

Similar to bees or ants  – sharks serve a very important function as hunter and "cleaner" in our oceans.

BBC News: Vast cracks appear in Arctic ice

It’s melting and melting and melting. I wonder when we start to RALLY do something about climate change? When New Orleans is an underwater museum or Venice a diver’s Disney Land?

Some scientific theories state that without our moon our days would have been too short to evolve life. Overall it seems our lifes are deeply connected to our lunar companion …

*Thanks to Edosan for sending me this great image*

Many nations have one important water life line. India has the Ganges and China has the Yangtze.

Thanks to overpopulation and rampant industrialization the Yangtze is heavily polluted and has the lowest water level in about a 100 years. The building of the Three Gorges Damn didn’t help either.

Many different species of fish have disappeared and the beloved River Dolphins are also almost gone.

But the Chinese Government has hardly done anything to reverse the effect – but the people have started to protest in recent years. In many areas there were public demonstrations against new factories that would pollute the river and the surrounding areas.

But it will take many decades to repair the damage – if it can be repaired at all.

Interesting video – didn’t know that Sir Attenborough also did porn voice overs. Overall I am happy that my penis isn’t located behind my head – although sometimes it feels like my head is located in my penis. And another note: you can show almost any animal fucking on national TV – except homo sapiens … why is that?

*Thanks to Olivia for that scientific video*

I think dirt can make you very happy. Pigs and Kids enjoy playing in water and dirt – and why not? Nature is dirty.

Modern society is too obsessed with hygiene and “clean” fun.

Life is dirty.

We humans are so often amazed by natures inventions – but we often fail to see that many creatures and plants are just transitions from one “model” to the next.

Only a few of natures experiments have been around for a long time and proven themselves worthy to continuing: the shark is one of the oldest “models”, so are the bees and crocodiles.

We humans are pretty new and I am not sure if we make it for several million years like the sharks have …