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Hareguizer — Loper
Published: 2007-09-10 20:25:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 8719; Favourites: 68; Downloads: 57
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Description
Newly invented critter!Lopers are leopard-sized predators that prey on burrowing herbivores like mumbrats. They have sensory pits in their chins that allow them to detect a mumbrat in its tunnel. A hunting loper then leaps into the air and lands hard to collapse the tunnel on the mumbrat, stunning it, whereupon it plunges its large head into the dirt and digs out the mumbrat, swallowing it in one or two bites.
Lopers can also change the colour and patterning of their skins to blend in with their surroundings. Their main predators are teratorns, so the ability to become invisible from the air is a huge advantage.
Their whiplike tails are armed with a venomous spine for defence, and they communicate in haunting, whistling howls that travel for miles.
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Comments: 67
Thank you! 
Now if only I could figure out what they are!
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You're welcome! lol. Indeed!
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Loper(s) means walker(s) (aka walking person(s)) in Dutch
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In English it means one who runs with a long stride. Our languages have a common root.
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Strandloper should be translated as beach walker.
Ha indeed, European languages are all related. Especially Dutch, German, Danish and Norwegian are veeery much alike oO
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Strand still means beach in English too.
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Oh I didn't know that. It does makes sense though, since you also use it as a verb, right? Or were you talking about the verb?
(Started to learn English around 12 years ago and I still learn XD yay for DA)
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We use it as a verb and two separate nouns! 'Strand' as in a thread or fibril, 'strand' as in a beach, and 'to strand' as in 'to run aground' or 'to beach'.
English is a crazy language. I admire anyone who can learn it as a second language because the rules make no sense!
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Ok I knew about the fibril and about the verb
English is not that bad to learn. If I take a look at Hungarian or Finnish.. oO ha or any Asian language XD
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Well, Japanese seems logical enough, but the Chinese languages just seem varying degrees of insane!
I've never tried Hungarian or Finnish... Polish looked fairly challenging though.
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Eh Polish is indeed very weird. It looks like a cross breed between Hungarian and Russian XD
English is actually quite hard because everyone assumes that, since it is a world language, almost everyone learns it and can speak it properly. That's not really the case XDD But I have to admit, practice makes perfect (being on DA is good practice 
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Indeed, a lot of people who know no other language still can't use English properly
Your English seems perfect to me, though.
Ah, Russian. I had a childhood crush on that language!
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Sorry for the late reply!
Ha most Dutch people can't speak Dutch well either.. Especially Dutch grammar seems to be hard
Can you speak Russian? Or was it just a very temporal crush XD? To me it seems a very difficult language to learn properly when you're young.
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I think you're right, it is a difficult language to learn. I spent two years carrying a Russian pocket dictionary round in my pocket, learned basic grammar and pronunciation from some old BBC cassettes and language book and could read Cyrillic decently well by the end of it, then University happened and it all went by the way. But I couldn't have learned much because after three terms of evening classes I had a better grasp of Japanese than I did Russian. Mind you, I had a very good teacher and Japanese is easier to pronounce!
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You really were motivated to learn Russian then
Japanese is less articulated then Russian I guess. Were you struggling with the Russian rolling r's?
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Luckily I'm just Welsh enough to be able to roll my r's, though nowhere near as well as my old head-teacher could (he could roll them out the door and back in again, he could purr like a cat!) But the 'shch' sound defeated me utterly! I could not get it right.
I have a friend who learned Danish during a year staying over there. Evidently she still remembers a lot of it because she met some Danish tourists while she was in Paris a few weeks ago and was able to converse with them.
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Haa you're Welsh? I love English dialects, such as Scottish and Irish. Or err how do you call it.. Cockney? That extremely British accent.
Haha is that an English expression, 'roll it out the door and back in again'?
You'd probably find it difficult to pronounce the Dutch hard g's then. It is the same as the shch you mentioned, but without the sh. In the Southern part of the Netherlands (Brabant, where I live) the r's and g's are pronounced only very softly.
Someone from the UK in Paris, speaking Danish. XD I don't think Danish is difficult to learn, the grammar is not that hard either. It's just confusing to learn words that are almost the same in Dutch, but with an other pronunciation!
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Oh, she's actually from Canada, so bilingual to begin with, but now working in the USA and travelling all over the place. She certainly seemed to pick Danish up very quickly (apart from the trouble finding out what a sink plunger was called). She was in Russia not long ago. I should ask her what her Russian is like.
I do love the Scots Western Highland accent, that has to be my favourite UK accent. There's an insular North Welsh accent that sounds utterly alien, every consonant hard - it's like Norwegian mixed with Punjabi. That's hard to understand, let alone pronounce!
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Quite multicultural then
That North Welsh accent is unlike other English accents then! Sounds it a bit like the old Irish language Gaelic??
Hah ok that's a funny habit
I'm always having troubles finding (real XD) English expressions. And it doesn't work at all to literally translate Dutch expressions XDD
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Yes, her work sends her to all these exotic cities, the lucky thing!
Welsh is part of the same family of languages as Gaelic but it sounds very different. It is more closely related to Breton.
Yeah, it can be hard finding reliable language info on the Internet! I can recommend a few books, being such a language nerd XD There is the Wordsworth Dictionary of Idioms, the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying and Quotation which are pretty comprehensive.
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Ha no wonder that we are still talking about languages 
Actually I'm not that good at all with languages and I don't know much about the origin(s). It might be a good idea for me to learn more about the English language, since my education is international (university, biology). At the moment I'm interested in Danish because next year I'm going to Denmark for my 6 month during internship! Yesterday I heard something about a free course on the Internet, still have to visit that site...
And I must admit: my English is improved since I'm on DeviantArt!
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If you're studying biology then you will probably have a headful of inadvertent Latin and Greek already, which is very useful in English etymology too. That's where most of mine came from. Knowing the meanings of the names of trees and dinosaurs!
And the origins and roots of words has always fascinated me. It is useful to know some Latin and Greek to help when I come across unfamiliar words. Except these days people invent new words without understanding what the component parts mean, so they end up with a word that means something other than what they say it means.
One I came across recently - 'prosumer' coined to mean professional consumers. But 'pro' means 'in favour of' and 'sumer' means 'to take'.
Language is tricky like that.
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So languages is not your study? All your knowledge about it is self-taught?
Ha we never learned to use Latin or Greek, we only need to know the taxonomy names of the species we are using for our experiment. I knew the "most common trees in Europe" by Latin name, but never learned the meaning of it. Although I must admit that since I study biology, I understand much more from the veterinary terms, such as names from body parts and systems and all kinds of diseases.
We have a Dutch weekly newspaper called BioNieuws (BioNews, translated, obviously XD) and every week there is a column which explains unknown, special species, including where their Latin name comes from. Very interesting 
Hahah so the real definition of prosumer is actually the contradiction of what it should mean?
Language indeed is very tricky, especially when you want to apply Greek and Latin to languages such as Hungarian or Finnish. It's completely different! I think English is one of the languages that still has a lot in common with Latin and Greek?
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Yes, by training I am a biologist, I just have a fascination with language!
And whenever I look up a word I look at it's etymology. Breaking down strange or foreign words often reveals their meaning and even familiar words have interesting histories behind them.
The advantage of this approach with English is that because it's a mishmash of half a dozen languages, if you learn the roots of words you're learning half a dozen languages (minus the syntax and grammar, but it's a start!)
That column sounds great. What kinds of species do you work with? Most domestic animals have quite dull latin names but there are some curious gems out there!
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Yay biologists united! Whenever the etymology is mentioned, I'm interested in that too
This weeks column was about Lithobates catesbeianus. The genus name is easy to translate, but the species name is derived from a British nature scientist Catesby, as is mostly the case (or the genus name is derived from a surname). The column mostly tells something about 'hot topics' in research, such as at the beginning of this summer vacation, all the problems around Escherichia coli at vacations was the topic
Ha I store my BioNieuws when there are interesting articles in it, so I can search for more names if you like
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I wish I knew what old Linnaeus was smoking when he came up with some of these names. Condylura cristata is another example. Come to think of it he called a few things 'cristata' that it's hard to think of as crested.
That reminds me, I saw an interesting contest asking for a latin name for an alien species: [link] I haven't come up with anything suitable yet but it got me thinking.
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I don't have any knowledge about dinosaurs but I believe that it is hard to give a correct name derived from scattered bone fragments XD. An entire skeleton at least tells something about the ecology of the animal.
Ha I had the same thing with the bird Troglodytes troglodytes. It makes no sense at all!
In the column it is said that cristata comes from the Latin word crista, which means ridge or crest. It refers to the shape of the nose. So to make it even harder, Latin (or Greek) names can be interpreted in different ways too!
I see that you came up with a name in the Latin alien name contest. Maybe I'll enter the mini-contest too, when I have the time to analyze the species and think about a fitting name ^^
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It would be great if you entered, then I wouldn't have the only entry in the contest!
Naming dinosaurs can backfire horribly. Like Oviraptor which turned out to be defending the nest it's fossil was found in, not eating the eggs at all. Or Bambiraptor which everyone thinks is a really cute name until you point out it means 'baby-snatcher'!
Or 'Dinotopia', which everyone reads as a utopia for dinosaurs, but really it means 'terrible place'
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Haha don't be that shy! Besides, if you're the only one, you sure are the winner!
Pfft it is a difficult animal XDD
You know a lot about dinosaur names? Is that also just a hobby?
Bambiraptor sounds like a dinosaur that feeds on Bambi, the deer from the Walt Disney classics.
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Just a passing interest. I like dinosaurs, but with two cats we can't really have any as pets.
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Uh maybe it is late in the evening and my brains stopped working, but what do you mean with having a dinosaur as pet? I suppose you don't want a T-rex or something
That furaffinity looks like a specific form of deviantart!
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I meant maniraptorans, the last surviving dinosaur clade - birds! Specifically chickens. But they would scare the cats.
Furaffinity looks like it might be an art site specifically for the Furry community, who are great purchasers of art. It has a smaller membership because of it, but the members seem to find it more valuable. I admit there are times dA looks more like a dumping-ground than an art site.
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Haa you're talking to a bird-addict XD! Birds are great to have, especially budgies are quite easy
I really am against holding macaws, unless the owner can take really good care of it. (e.g. opportunity to express their natural behaviour, including social behaviour and flying)
Furaffinity looks indeed a bit more serious than dA. Sometimes I see a profile of a child oO that's not really art, unless they are really good for their age XDD. But I shouldn't be ranting about that, because my deviations are not very artistic either.
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I haven't explored Furaffinity much so I haven't noticed that. I know it's horribly ageist of me but I sometimes wish for a site that's fun like dA but without the lined-paper scribbles, Naruto tracings or the photos people took of themselves in the shower.
Growing up the only pets we had were budgies. We adopted my Grandmother's when she went into hospital.
Macaws are magnificent birds. I saw a pair flying over Kirkby Stephen in Lancashire once. There was still snow on the hills and we were just driving home through the village, first time I'd ever been there, and I couldn't quite believe my eyes. They were quite definitely scarlet macaws, and flying leisurely not like they'd just escaped. When I got home I did some searching and found there's a colony of semi-captive parrots there. They are looked after by their owner but they come and go as they please and nest on rooftops in summer.
[link]
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Anime is indeed quite overwhelming on dA. It's like dA is a kind of resort for nudity 
Budgies are funny companions
Wow the founder of that foundation keeps them for conservation purposes, but the macaws are still free to go? And the macaws have settled there
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I sort of understand his stance on macaws. They're so intelligent it seems wrong to confine them against their will. I think he rescues them and lets them live their lives the way they want, and if that means nesting on someone's chimney, so be it!
There's a whole lot of nudity on dA that's neither porn nor art, it's simple exhibitionism.
Seriously though, these are issues that crop up with any image sharing site. A while back there was a cry to make Flickr more photographer-friendly in the hopes that causal snappers had Facebook to post their phone-photos to, but it's still full of shots of drunk people. It would take a brave person to stand up and say, "Dude, a blurry shot of your goolies in the shower is not art!"
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You're right about the sharing sites. Most people do not take it seriously, or.. maybe they think their productions ARE art. Maybe that blurry shot is considered as a very defined technique
But like I said before, I should not be venting too hard, because I submit simple photo's and drawings as well
The only thing that is bothering me about the macaws, is that those macaws are exotic (if I remember well, can't find the site anymore 
Interesting field, maybe I'm going to do an internship or write my thesis about conservation projects
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I wondered about that too, as we have so many problems with invasive alien species in our country. But the winters get very cold where they are, I doubt the macaws could survive without help, and there are no native species locally that they compete with (well, maybe jackdaws for nest sites).
I think part of the issue is that these internet sites promote sharing, and some people embrace the sharing thing without considering whether anyone wants to see what they're sharing - especially before breakfast! (you can tell I've been traumatized, can't you?
Both parrots and corvids are so fascinating socially! They would make excellent subjects for a thesis.
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Jackdaws indeed, and maybe other species. In Holland we have this problem with ringnecked parakeets. That might be a good thesis subject as well
Ha today I saw a stamp about nude photos: [link] XD
Is it so bad that you've been traumatized?!
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There are a number of parakeet species naturalized in the UK too, including ring necks. They cause problems with noise and some damage but because they're pretty and unusual people still quite like them. But then we are a nation of pigeon-feeders!
I like that stamp, but the photos that traumatised me were neither porn nor art. They were taken on compact camera or maybe phone, something low rez, in a bathroom mirror, of some fat middle aged dude's dangly bits, the colour was washed out, the focus was indifferent, and the framing was wonky and poor. It was like the photographic equivalent of a dick doodle in the margin of a schoolbook. I was traumatised on a creative level by the badness of it!
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They are pretty indeed, and maybe smart too, but since they compete with local species, they should be considered as threatening for the local environment.
Pigeons, there's so many of them!! Their cooing annoys me more than the screeches of corvids and parrots! XD they sound so.. stupid.
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I have developed a certain appreciation of pigeons, living as I do in a place where only a small proportion of the population has learned what a litter bin is for. They provide a valuable service cleaning up the many tonnes of food dumped on our streets. I feel a lot less sympathetic to the litterbugs who then complain about pigeons and call them 'rats with wings' like it's an insult. There wouldn't be so many if it weren't for people like them, yet they can't see the connection.
Unlike their detractors, I see the pigeons as useful.
Female pigeons, anyway. I admit the constant philandering of the males, with all their cooing and walking in circles, is rather irritating!
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Ha yeah their population size is more or less influenced by the human population size 
Courting males are actually funny to look at! It is just the cooing that irritates me XD
Rat with wings? They are opportunistic indeed, but to insult them in that way.. Even though I don't like the species, I will never seriously insult animals (apart from humans
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I like it! The psittacosaurus-type mouth is interesting, and it looks graceful. ^_^
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Thank you! I'm curiously fond of these big lanky rodent-eaters. And I never saw the connection to psittacosaurus before but you're right, I see what you mean. Thanks!
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oo wow that's very good nice shading and great texture, 
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