Niche and useless trivia! The more ridiculous the better!

[vvinrg]

The title is pretty self-explanatory, what sort of random, completely pointless trivia do y'all know? The more absurd and obscure the better.

I'll start with a few:

• In Ducktales(2017), Weezer is canonically called Geezer.
• The protocol used by many internet radio stations, now called Shoutcast, was originally called ICY, short for "I Can Yell!".

[Bede]

Oh heck yes, I'm GREAT at this. ('This' being 'having obscure knowledge'.)

• In the Japanese (original) version of Splatoon 2, it is canon that Marina has romantic feelings for Pearl
• In Japanese, the Pokemon type Dark is called the Evil-type
• Alterhumanity / otherkinity dates back to at least the 1970s or 80s.
• Those involved in The Lion King were advised by wildlife experts to NOT portray hyenas as stupid, but they chose to continue with the direction they chose. This led to the association with stupidity and incompetency that hyenas now have today
• 'Bisexual' originally was a word coined to mean 'intersex'
• Black cats get a 'rusted' orange coloring if they hang out in the sun a lot
• The domestic cat has evolved to meow the way it does specifically to communicate with humans, and it is rarely used when communicating with other cats

I could keep going, but I'll stop there.

[hellodreamymiku]

I really don't know if these are niche or considered to be common knowledge but here goes,

• HP lovecraft was an easily scared person, he was also known to be scared of air conditioners
• There's a musical instrument that is usually unknown by many, but it is my favorite instrument so I'd like to share it. It's called an upright bass, double bass or a contrabass, this instrument is the biggest of all in the violin family! It's bigger than a cello so the players usually stand up to play it, it's also a very common instrument in jazz trios and takes part in classical music, although it doesn't get recognition because it kind of can't be played as a solo instrument, it's an amazing instrument that you should check out! Bonus points if you read the one man show of a person going insane because they feel left behind in the orchestra for playing the double bass!! the story is called double bass  and its by patrick suskind.
• very random ballet fact you never need to learn: in ballet there are dances called "pas de deux" and "pas de trois" which means dance for two and three respectively, and it is exactly as the name suggests. my favorite is the one in nutcracker, it's called sugar plum fairy. You've probably heard it before

[/list]

[Rosaria Delacroix]

Purple bettas don't exist.

This is baffling, because there are bettas that look quite purple! But from a genetics standpoint, it's impossible for a purple betta to exist. Why? Well, blue bettas don't exist.

This seems even more absurd, because blue is quite a common variant to see in stores- (red-blue bicolor is especially popularly sold as like, fourth of July fishies, but bettas come in a beautiful, wide range of colours and patterning- such as the much adored koi and beautiful marbled babies) so what gives?

It's because betta fish colours are kind of weird, not unlike how cat colours are a bit strange. For betta fish, you can think of it sort of like washes of watercolor. There's four layers that can be present or absent (as in, turned off): black, red, yellow, and iridescent- and various combinations therein will yield different perceived colors. Iridescence is also in of itself, weird, because 'iridescent' isn't really a colour the way that we might think of black, red, and yellow as being colours. The regular colours are caused by chromatophores, and the special sparkly ones are called iridocytes.

But you might notice- there's no such thing as a blue layer! So how the heck do you get bettas that look blue? They're black fish, that have the iridescent layer active. The iridescence in their scales are shaped and coloured in such a way that the iridescence sheens back as blue. If you have a black base to your fish, the iridescence will sheen blue. But on the other bases, you wind up with a coppery, metallic finish. A super thick layer of iridescence can even make your fish look wholly silver! A fish with all four layers switched 'off' is pure white. Pattern and coloration can be particularly unstable with some color morphs- marbleds and koi are notorious for it, and I have an especial soft spot for blue/white marbleds. The instability is also a big driving force behind heavily masked and very metallic morphs like dragonscales (who have that super thick layer of iridescence) going blind, as their eyes can be prone to scaling over.

There are some, in my opinion, very unethical morphs that I don't purchase or support- like the mentioned dragonscales and rosetails, who have extremely overbred finnage and often results in the miserable little guys gnawing off their own fins to cut them down to size: bettas truly are metal as fuck, and they are stubbornly tenacious fish with huge, spirited personalities. They're survivors, and so feisty. They're among my favourite fish to keep, and certainly punch massively above their weight class for intellect and personality: watching them patrol around their environment and curiously sniff around at new additions like marimo moss balls for a soft place to cuddle up and nap on is freaking adorable. Every single one I've kept has had a radically different attitude, and learning their quirks: their favourite snacks, sleeping spots, toys to play with, interest in following their humans about from within their tanks, curiosity in changes to your attire (especially if you wear bright clothing, haha) and so on has been so rewarding.

Circling back to the fishie colors- basically, there is no true blue pigment in bettas- only black base scales with iridescent sheen overtop, that results in reflected light that is blue to our eyes: but because it isn't genetically blue, you can't crossbreed a red betta and a blue betta to spawn a purple betta. This is also why there is no such thing as a true green betta- because you don't have the blue to mix. Some 'alien' morphs can look super greenish, but that's just a result of the iridescence flashing light back. Alien bettas are hybrids that draw from similar related sub-species that are much closer to their wild/natural appearance, which causes some absolutely fantastical looking iridescence and black color markings, almost like stained glass and solder. They're not like, actually green, though.

The very purple-y looking betta fish you might see swimming around are actually red-blue bi-colors, which means they express both red and blue coloration: but with extremely fine tuned breeding and some luck of the draw, it's just very densely packed together red and blue, which blends in our eyesight as purple. But if you were to zoom in, it's still distinctly red and blue, not a mixed purple tone. So you can have a purple looking fish, but it's not really purple.

[haumeaGeth]

Purple bettas don't exist.

I was not expecting to learn so much about betta fish today, thank you for sharing this-

Alright, useless trivia, let's see...

• There's a type of surgery called tooth-in-eye surgery to cure some forms of blindness. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. A mollar is yanked out of the patient, a lamina is cut from it, a hole is drilled into the lamina and fitted with a lens, and is then inserted into the patient's cheek for some months to grow. After that, it is removed, and inserted into the eye socket. Boom, new eyeball.
• Hippo milk is pink.
• Humans have gills! Well okay not really. Embryos of all kinds of species develop a structure called pharyngeal arches. These weird ridges go on to form parts of the skull and facial structure in humans and other mammals, but become the base structure for gills in fish! It seems that lots of embryos start off with similar building blocks that end up getting used for different things. (I only know about this because my cousin had branchial cleft cysts that got infected, which happens when one of the gaps between these arches doesn't fill in correctly during fetal development.)

[drmollytov]

Related to "bettas aren't purple":

Ferns still don't have a settled classification, and taxonomically, deer don't even exist.

Also, some folks have made an exhaustive hobby out of categorizing bread tabs: https://www.horg.com

[dust]

Ferns still don't have a settled classification, and taxonomically, deer don't even exist.

speaking of ferns, they reproduce through spores, and are one of the oldest forms of plantlife.
flowering plants are the dominant form of plant life of earth today and also the newest type!

i did not know that about deer! i know that male deer during rut season, will form harems. rut season (late fall to early winter) is also the time when male deer's antlers begin to shed, at their peak growth, and eventually fall off! it is completely painless for them (though maybe itchy, as they compulsively rub their velvet off on tree bark)

[haumeaGeth]

taxonomically, deer don't even exist.

They what

Could you explain more about this? I tried to look it up but nothing related to this statement came up, and I found a lot of pages mentioning the classifications of different types of deer. Google's AI even tried to aggressively correct me that deer do in fact exist (yes, Google, I know, thank you for your input). But I know taxonomy is a bit of a kooky part of biology and I don't think I'll be able to sleep without knowing what this means--