Seeing Spots
DEAR READER
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
tumblr dot com

roma★

ellievsbear
Keni
No title available
Cosmic Funnies
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

No title available
cherry valley forever
trying on a metaphor
NASA

No title available
YOU ARE THE REASON
Peter Solarz

Love Begins

JBB: An Artblog!
h
Show & Tell
seen from Türkiye

seen from Canada
seen from Austria

seen from Brazil

seen from United States

seen from India

seen from United States

seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Jordan
seen from Guatemala
seen from Jordan
seen from United States

seen from Jordan
seen from Brazil

seen from Iraq
seen from Jordan
@agentredsquirrel
Seeing Spots
Early Birds
note: I know this is so delayed! But I’m committing to finishing these posts even if you’ve all moved on to prompt-er pastures, just as part of my own record of the trip. Expect random updates as I find the time and motivation! If you’re not a morning person, the timing of safaris could feel kind of punishing — every morning at 5:30 am we were clambering into the jeep, swallowing our last…
View On WordPress
Get Out the Big Lens
We embarked from Cape Town early March 5th, hopping a flight up to Hoedspruit. From there it was less than an hour’s drive to Milima Safari Lodge. As we bounced down the road toward the lodge, we passed a giraffe (not sure who looked more surprised, the giraffe or the pile of us). And as we checked in and signed waivers by the pool, we watched as a family of elephants finished up their afternoon…
View On WordPress
Art Tour!
Mostly pictures, this one. We met up with X (Xolani, a fashion designer who moonlights as a tour guide) for a rainy hop around an up-and-coming neighborhood in Cape Town to check out the vibrant street art scene. We talked politics, street trees, the desperate need for student housing (apparently this is a truly universal problem) and upcycled denim fashion. Every piece X showed us had some kind…
View On WordPress
Cape Tour and the Golden Oldies
*Editor’s note: I’ve gotten out of order! I guess I got too excited to write about Mzansi and skipped a day and a half of Cape Town. This post should follow our day in Bo-Kaap, before the art tour and Mzansi Restaurant.* We knew ahead of time that March 3rd would be a long day. On the group agenda: a full tour of the cape, from the top of Table Mountain to Cape Point, with a visit to the…
View On WordPress
Mzansi Restaurant
March 4th was a two-post kind of day — while we spent the morning snapping photos in Bo-Kaap, we were thrilled that a combination of luck and Dana’s persistence rewarded us with a fantastic and fascinating dinner at Mzansi Restaurant in Langa Township. Mzansi (which is a colloquial name for South Africa, derived from a Xhosa word) is almost a home visit/cultural experience/restaurant all at…
View On WordPress
Colorful Bo-Kaap
The day before yesterday we gave ourselves a little walking tour of the Bo-Kaap neighborhood in Cape Town. Once a neighborhood of former slaves, it became a multicultural community of majority Muslim Cape Malay people, and then a strictly Cape Malay zone under the “Group Areas Act” as part of Apartheid. Bo-Kaap today is a hip-and-happening attraction perfect for Insta-interested locals and…
View On WordPress
The Train Leaving the Station
I’m a few days behind posting, but still aiming to do a post about each day as a sort of travel journal! So my fourth full day in South Africa had us meeting up with the women in whose company we’ll spend the rest of the trip photographing and exploring. For a nice easy start, we hopped an Uber to the wine tram in the Stellenbosch area — poshness, gorgeousness, and deliciousness abounded. Think…
View On WordPress
happy pride from me and all these flowers i saw today ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
The Philly Squid Quiz has launched
The Squid Quiz has hit the streets of Philadelphia this morning!
Over the next couple days about 10 of these squid will be posted around the Fishtown/Northern Liberties area. 5 went up this morning!
Each squid is paired with an "exam" (each one slightly different wording) which states the challenge. For example:
--
Many squid I have explained
But how much have you retained?
Prove yourself with my squid test
I'll reward you for this quest
Limitless number of tries
Ace the quiz, you’ll get a prize
Text "Squiz" to 1-833-SCI-TEXT to begin
--
When participants succeed, they are given the location and code to a lock box, which I have SNEAKILY placed in my own "front yard".
Inside the box, I have prepared prizes for those who reach the end of my 13-question, not-very-easy quiz.
I couldn't land on a wording I liked, so I put a bunch in there and people can take whichever one they like.
Each little squid came individually and I punched a hole into their mantle to add them to a keychain. This was the crafting equivalent of sinking your teeth into a starburst, and I have to recommend the experience.
So now all we can do is wait and see if people like it! Let's cross our fingers for a good reaction!
Do you LIKE projects like this? Do you want to see more of them in the world?
Welllllllllllllll I have good news and great news. Good news, I do this for a job (in addition to connecting people with science in many other ways)! Great news, if you want stuff like this to keep existing, you can support us so we continue existing! Support us on Patreon or donate directly to the nonprofit that makes this stuff happen, Skype a Scientist.
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.
I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation.
I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.
It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post.
And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.
If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.
I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.
A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic.
They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.
If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried.
Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.
You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.
It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.
i really love safety quizzes that are like.. "When handling hazardous chemicals, what should you do? a) Run around and skip and pour it on pedestrians b) Drink it all immediately c) Use the correct handling procedure d) All of the above"
Source
something i've noticed. people seem to think the most nature-y nature is forests. so forests are always prioritized for conservation, and planting trees is synonymous with ecological activism. my state was largely prairies and wetlands before colonization. those ecosystems are important too. trees aren't the end-all be-all of environmentalism. plant native grasses. protect your wetlands.
deserts also!!! it sucks so bad that people think of desert as 'wasteland' just because it's not suited for western european style ag development, they're beautiful and delicate and valuable ecosystems and, i think it's good to point out that humans have been living willingly in them for thousands of years
i live in a shrub steppe desert. it has been like this SINCE THE ICE AGE. mentioned it to a friend and their immediate response was "i could totally fix that and restore that into a forest like it used to be." LIKE IT USED TO B- it's been like that since the ICE AGE! you can't "fix" a biome into a forest just to save trees and nature. you need shrubbery, you need grasses, flowers, WEEDS, vines, bramble, water plants. NATURE! ISN'T! JUST! TREES!
Also! When we say ‘used to be’, to what state are we referring to? Homeostasis is a state of change. Yes, we should encourage nature and more undeveloped spaces, but to what standard are you holding it to? 50 years ago? 100? 1,000? 10,000? Do we even have data on what it exactly looked like then?
It’s never going to be exactly what it once was. We can just allow the process of succession and change to continue at its own pace (or hardly at all for some specific ecosystems), and simply try not to bulldoze over whatever nature is trying to do.
Also @headspace-hotel this thread seems like your vibe
It is! Thanks for tagging me :)
Now, we need to keep a few things in mind:
There is no "original" state of an ecosystem. The word people are looking for is usually the pre-colonial and pre-industrial states of ecosystems. However, there is not a single unchanging pre-colonial state of an ecosystem either. This is why it's important to focus less on what the land "used to be" and more on what it is trying to restore itself to right now.
There are a lot more subdivisions of ecosystem than "forest" vs. "grassland" vs. "wetland" and so on, and there can be tons of variation in small geographical areas.
The classic closed canopy "forest" is not the only place trees are found. Many non-forest environments contain trees as a vital component.
As much as it is a mistake to presume that forests are universal, it is also a mistake to (for example) take the open, treeless tallgrass prairie to be the "original state" of all of the American Midwest.
There is a wide spectrum of intermediates between closed-canopy forest and grassland, and opener wooded land with grasses and small plants etc. on the ground is often called woodland (good explanation here)
In particular, a lot of the United States Midwest used to be (and still could be!) not prairie, not forest, but a secret third thing: oak savanna!
Maps disagree on the exact extent of the oak savanna. North-Central Kentucky, known as the Bluegrass now, was once a very rare open woodland type environment similar to the oak savanna.
Basically, oak savannas are grasslands full of large, open-grown oak trees, which are resistant to the periodic fires that maintain the prairie. Oaks, unlike many other trees, do very well growing to large sizes in the open.
But ecosystems get much more specialized, and it requires a holistic approach to pin down the exact nature of the place you live in. This is frustrating, but it also lets you discover the rare and unique characteristics of your area's ecosystems.
I'm going to go into just how wild this gets for a bit, so buckle up.
For example, I'll talk about the state I live in—why? because I live there and I know lots about it. Kentucky is divided into 27 ecoregions. In a single day, I could visit a dozen ecosystems unique to this area and to nowhere else in the world. The seeds to this uniqueness were planted hundreds of millions of years ago. Look at the linked map, and see how closely it matches this one:
The north-central-east area in pink is the Bluegrass, collared by the Knobs, a weird ring of Devonian and Silurian sandstone and conglomerates that forms little eroded plateaus and mountainous outcroppings. The lavender and dark blue is the limestone-karst plateau that holds the longest cave system on planet Earth. The east, in pale blue, is Lower and Middle Pennsylvanian (aka Carboniferous) deposits, making up the Appalachian Mountains.
The ancient Appalachians were once as tall as the Himalayas, but they are simply so old that they are eroded down into rounded, soft, wavy ridges that slowly fade into steep rolling hills, making it a subject of debate where they actually end.
Let's focus on the limestone and carbonate rock-dominant regions that cover much of the state though. This is what's known as a limestone karst region.
Limestone and dolomite are carbonate minerals. Instead of normal stuff like silicate minerals, they are made of the dissolved skeletons of billions of ancient aquatic animals, like brachiopods and bryozoans, which can be found fossilized throughout the state. Limestone is made of CaCO3, calcium carbonate—which, unlike other rocks, dissolves in acid.
This has two immediate consequences:
the ground dissolves over time, which means the whole area is riddled with sinkholes and huge caves with subterranean rivers and lakes
the soil is usually super alkaline, meaning plants that like acidic soil are basically nonexistent
As you can see, a unique ecosystem that existed over 450 million years ago can directly create unique ecosystems that exist now!
Kentucky's limestone karst regions, especially near the mountains, have another quirky characteristic: the limestone bedrock is exposed or nearly exposed in many places, with little soil on top of it. I don't know exactly why this is, but instead of several feet of soil on top of the bedrock, we often get just a few inches. Almost any construction that involves earth-moving requires dynamite. Hillsides used as pasture for cattle erode into slopes of broken rock.
This creates another form of unique ecosystem: limestone glades. Places with only a few inches of topsoil don't develop into closed-canopy forests, but rather limestone glade meadows, where the dominant trees are these guys:
the majestic Eastern Red Cedar (which is actually a juniper), a pioneer species that, unusually for pioneer species, can live a long time...over 900 years.
Red Cedars might outlive every single other tree in a forest, but they don't thrive in there. They hate the shade and want to be alone in a meadow. Why, then, do they live so long? I have a hunch the answer might be that they're not exactly pioneer species at all, but rather specialized for mountain ridges, rocky outcrops, and limestone glades where other trees cannot grow. They provide food and great nesting sites for birds.
But limestone glade meadows aren't as important to Kentucky as the ecosystem that used to be so distinctive, it's been hidden in the state's name the whole time: the canebrake, a stream-side forest of the United State's native bamboo, giant cane.
Kentucky, (at least according to the book i'm reading by Donald Edward Davis titled Where There are Mountains), was once Kaintuck, or CANE-tuck. Giant cane, like the oaks of oak savannas, is fire resistant, meaning it thrives in areas managed by frequent fires.
In my state, the canebrakes used to stretch for miles, dense bamboo forests that could grow up to 25 feet tall. But they were all destroyed, meaning this ecosystem is practically extinct. The giant cane still lives, but only in small patches.
Canebrakes are considered extinct (although they could be restored), and oak savannas are one of the most endangered ecosystems on the continent. I suspect that the reason is that people are stuck with the old, simplified categories of ecosystem that they learned in school, and ecosystems that don't fit into those categories are hard to imagine.
Everything in biology is much, much more complex than high school teaches you, and ecosystems are no exception. There is probably a super rare, unique ecosystem close to you that doesn't get enough recognition.
To protect them, people have to care, and to care, people have to know they exist...so everything starts with being curious. Learn! Tell others! It will save the world.
Also important to note that pre-industrial or pre-colonial landscapes were often altered or stewarded or maintained by indigenous people. We shouldn’t imagine even those as “untouched” or even solely shaped by non-human forces.
80% of the ocean is unexplored by YOU GUYS. i've seen the whole thing
I'm a squid biologist on a mission. To teach everyone about squid.
Even you.
Especially you.
Want squid facts? I have you covered. I have a squid facts hotline, 1-833-SCI-TEXT. Text SQUID to that number (1-833-724-8398), and it'll send you squid facts aplenty.
I have even created an advent calendar for you to learn squid facts throughout December. It's an 11 by 14 inch scratchy lottery, but instead of taking a chance at winning money, you are guaranteed to learn about squid.
I have a street art campaign to bring squid facts to the people. You might see wheatpastes (like the squid below) if you live in Philly, Boston, Austin, or New York, or stickers if you live in hundreds of other cities and towns across North America.
When you buy a calendar, you're supporting my undying mission to bring squid to everyone. Did you know that squid have donut shaped brains? That their class, cephalopods, have been on earth for longer than TREES? That scientists estimate that there are literally millions of giant squid living in the deep sea?
People deserve to know about squid. Help me spread the word.