cleavagearbiter

rural trans woman | envirosci+geology nerd/government rock jockey | caver | sapphic muser | 19

[cleavagearbiter]

saw 38 of these little guys the other day. cavefish are so so so cool to me for so many reasons, some of my favorites

Hoosier Cavefish

Amblyopsis hoosieri

[cleavagearbiter]

[anziesnewfoundtankfantasy]

[elguen]

Got to watch them blow some rock out the other day. Some rich dude is getting a lake put in and they needed to overexcavate to make sure the dam wouldn’t leak through the bedrock.

[cleavagearbiter]

updated draft map for a central Alabama cave @cerussa

this is made in inkscape! so all the assets you see are, albeit poorly, hand drawn on the computer and are being transcribed from hand drawn sketches.

Here you can see portions of the sketch. Not all the sketching was done by me so interpreting them can be interesting at times!

I'm trying to balance artistry with navigabilty here, not that this cave is hard to navigate, and I think it's decent to far.

For anyone interested in a more detailed explanation/guide of the process this site has detailed guides on everything from data management to final products. https://share.google/QAea0ivReHD7CXMP7

[cleavagearbiter]

cartography shenanigans time

[cleavagearbiter]

David Littachwager and Susan Middleton, 1993

Madison cave isopods (Antrolana lira) showcase/public outreach for cave week. We set up an aquarium for visitors to a popular cave and did a little spheel. MCI are a federally endangered species that live in karst aquifers in Virginia and West Virginia. They're a really cool species that we know fairly little about. The most notable fact is that they have marine ancestors so unlike most cave isopods which have freshwater ancestors, these guys came from the sea!! They're also a really old species. Probably older than the cave that we were showing these guys off in. Rather aggressive hunters that, like most cave obligate species, will devour almost anything put in front of them, including their own kind! They have one short and one long antennae and a few different theories for cave colonization that I'm happy to get into if someone is curious. What's really interesting to me is that there are 3 leading theories and each of the theories cover one of the 3 types of cave colonization (accidental, adaptive shift, climate relict). Makes it really cool to explain a bit about how cave colonization occurs to tour groups. The strange thing in the stocking is a shrimp, which is the bait for the trap and the stocking ensures they don't each it all, because they will, because they're ravenous and once ate a whole deer in a single week.

Additional fun facts, they're considered federally endangered because they were originally only known to two locales in the same area but the range has since expanded across VA and WV, not because they are reuthlesslt colonizing new territory, though I wouldn't put it past them, but because significant effort has gone into finding them when possible. They're also probably in mant other locales but because we don't always have aquifer windows it can be hard to say. They're also an indicator species for good water quality, which doesn't necessarily mean I'd drink straight from a spring of this aquifer, but is a good sign that their federally endangered status has allowed this aquifer some breathing room, if only a bit.

Anyway this is my job now. going into caves, looking for caves on the surface, doing biosurveys, dye traces, bat counts, cave surveys, public outreach, etc. I like it a lot!

David Littachwager and Susan Middleton

[cleavagearbiter]

i received a package today from one of my alabama lovers, a lesbian that i met in February and whose company I quite enjoyed. It contained 2 items. One, a mug (i love tea, as did she) that she made, modeled after a piece of shale i gave to her that came from a fold in Virginia, where i am now moving

And it also contained a letter, the contents of which have had me crying for hours. A small excerpt, "I would be lying if I said I never thought about what things could've been if the circumstances were different...I think I will always have a special place and kind of love for you. You were a wonderful experience, S, and I will treasure every moment spent together."

She ended the letter with,

"In another life,

A"

Ugh. I love people.

[cleavagearbiter]

bitched at someone for taking handfuls of rocks from a national park today and tbh i was more mad that the rocks they were choosing were CHERT and like yeah for chert it was pretty nice chert (white chert at arches) but if you're gonna take from a sacred place like a national park at least take some rare shit idk, make the felony worth it?

obligatory if you take rocks from national parks ur a useless nerd you can find better stuff basically anywhere else without stealing from a national treasure, for example, that white chert can be found across basically the entire county on trails off the national park

[cleavagearbiter]

additional addendum that edward abbey was right

[cleavagearbiter]

bitched at someone for taking handfuls of rocks from a national park today and tbh i was more mad that the rocks they were choosing were CHERT and like yeah for chert it was pretty nice chert (white chert at arches) but if you're gonna take from a sacred place like a national park at least take some rare shit idk, make the felony worth it?

obligatory if you take rocks from national parks ur a useless nerd you can find better stuff basically anywhere else without stealing from a national treasure, for example, that white chert can be found across basically the entire county on trails off the national park

[cleavagearbiter]

backlog! for u cavers out there if you happen to recognize me by my helmet at some point please say hi!

[nettlewildfairy]

Such a cool visual I had to draw it

[cleavagearbiter]

THIS IS SO SICK WOAHG

[mumblesplash]

it’s so magical and beautiful that there are sprawling interconnected cave systems carved deep into the earth by various geological forces and you don’t have to go in them. there are miles and miles of stone passageways in total darkness that require you to exhale all the air out of your lungs to squeeze through parts of them and you don’t have to be there. some of these squeezes are underwater and require cave divers to take off their oxygen tanks and push them through ahead of them and me i am above ground looking at the sky as we speak. there are untold subterranean wonders no human has ever seen and i will not be the one to discover them #grateful #blessed

[mumblesplash]

so true there could be any number of undiscovered species down there all of which are none of my business and never will be. peace and love on (the surface of) planet earth 💕

[cleavagearbiter]

i am glad in a way that so many people find caving to be this terrifying thing because there are absolutely so many treasures that you will only find in caves that would be destroyed if caving was as mainstream as like climbing and certainly as hiking.

there are wonders in caves that are only talked about in hushed tones around a camp fire because they are so sacred even within our own, quite secretive community.

i am and will continue to be one of the people finding places that no human has ever been before, finding new wonders that will remain largely untouched in a way that very few of the world's remaining wonders have had a privilege to be all because of the fear that so many people have surrounding caves and that remoteness and sense of undisturbed nature is nearly impossible to find anywhere else nowadays, so it's really special to me

i like that my hobby, and now my work, is mine, and a few thousand other friends'. this is not to say that i don't welcome new people, i very much do, but maybe not like a few tens of thousands of people.

[cleavagearbiter]

Hesperochernes mirabilis (Cave obligate pseudoscorpion) with babies.

Credit to Katarina Kosic Ficco for the foto

[cleavagearbiter]

i graduated (4 year) college! off in June to work for the gov in cave and karst. kinda crazy to be 19 and off in the world now, but also rather nice!

cheeky little rappel. should've c-rigged

[cleavagearbiter]

Perimyotis subflavus (Tricolor Bat)

Eurycea lucifuga (Cave Salamander)

Something interesting, neither of these organisms are troglobionts. That is, neither are adapted to solely live their life cycle in caves. This is obvious for the Tricolor, but even cave salamanders are suited to life outside of caves just as well as in caves and lack many of the significant troglomorphic specific characters that you'd see in troglobionts. Though cave salamanders certainly have many preadaptations. Because cave salamanders can live outside of caves, we call them troglophiles. Bats as a whole are trogloxenes, they visit caves and use them as refugia, but they need to leave often and can certainly go an entire life without using caves, especially with modern cities.

Additional cave salamander facts, they are of the family plethodontidae (lungless salamanders) and represent one of the 7 transitions this family has had into caves

[cleavagearbiter]

potentially my number one pet peeve as a caver is people calling caving "cave diving," but on the other hand that meme probably turned off people from caving that wouldn't have been good at it which means more for me so like, it is what it is. but also i don't want to be compared to cave divers, those rich, gear addicted fucks.

and never call it spelunking, if you ever call a caver a spelunker you're basically calling them a slur in our community.

[cleavagearbiter]

backlog! for u cavers out there if you happen to recognize me by my helmet at some point please say hi!