EMIL!!

need.

littleguysdaily

quitebashfulexe

Doodle page👾

nadhie

curesarcoma.org/donate

You'll be missed, Techno. Blood for the blood god.

blood-heritage-posts

Blood Heritage Post o7

blood heritage posts you did not have to remind me at 11 pm on a crisp sunday night

ireonic

doing normal stuff while listening to metal is so funny because I'm eating cereal and this guy is screaming at me

egberts

everyone say thanks to the four bears that gave you autism today

Lesbians

clap for lesbians

Made this for my clown collection. Please if anyone else needs it here u go:

And just in case u need these too:

lemon-wedges

Just wanted to update this post

lemon-wedges

Update

lemon-wedges

pleasespellchimerical

Ok but can we talk about non-native and invasive species in a nuanced way?

There’s more to this topic than ‘native = good’ and ‘non-native = invasive and therefore bad’. I also see horrible analogies with human immigration, which…no. Just no.

Let’s sit back and learn about species and how they work inside and outside their native ranges! Presented by: someone who studied ecology.

Broadly speaking, when talking about species in an ecosystem, we can divide them into four categories: native non-invasive, non-native, non-native invasive, and native invasive.

Because ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ are two different things.

Native and non-native refers to the natural range of a species: where it is found without human intervention. Is it there on its own, or did it arrive in a place because of human activity?

Non-invasive and invasive refers to how it interacts with its ecosystem. A non-invasive species slots in nicely. It has its niche, it is able to survive and thrive, and its presence does not threaten the ecosystem as a whole. An invasive species, on the other hand, survives, thrives, and threatens the balance of an ecosystem.

Let’s have some examples! (mostly featuring North America, because that’s the region I’m most familiar with)

Native Non-invasive

Native bees! Bee species (may be social or solitary) that pollinate plants.

And stopping here bc I think we get the point.

Non-native

Common Dandelion: Introduced from Europe. Considered an agricultural weed, but does no harm to the North American ecosystem. Used as a food source by many insects and animals. Is prolific, but does not force other species out.

European Honeybee: Introduced from Eurasia. Massively important insect for agricultural pollination. Can compete with native pollinators but does not usually out compete them.

Non-native Invasive

Emerald Ash Borer: Beetle introduced from Asia. In places where it is non-native, it is incredibly destructive to ash trees (in its native range, predators and resistant trees keep it in check). It threatens North America’s entire ash population.

Hydrilla: An Old World aquatic plant introduced to North America. Aggressively displaces native plant species, and can interfere with fish spawning areas and bird feeding areas.

Native Invasive

White Tailed Deer: Local extinction of the deer’s predators caused a massive population boom. Overgrazing by large deer populations has significantly changed the landscape, preventing forests from maturing and altering the species composition of an area. Regulated hunting keeps deer populations managed.

Sea Urchins: The fur trade nearly wiped out the sea otters that eat them. Without sea otters to keep urchin populations in check, sea urchins overgrazed on kelp forests, leading to the destruction and loss of kelp and habitat. Sea otter conservation has helped control urchin populations, and keeps the kelp forest habitat healthy.

—

There are a few common threads here:

The first is that human activities wind up causing most ecosystem damage. We introduce species. We disrupt food chains. We try to force human moral values onto ecosystems and species. And when we make a mistake, it’s up to us to mitigate or reverse the damage.

The second is that human moral values really cannot be applied to ecosystems. There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ species. Every species has its place. Applying emotional and moral rhetoric to ecology works against our understanding of how our ecosystems work.

Third: the topic of invasive and non-native species is more complex than most of the dialogue surrounding it. Let’s elevate our discussions.

Fourth: If you ever compare immigrants or minorities to invasive species, I will end you.

There are more nuances to this topic than I presented as well! This is not meant to be a deep dive, but a primer.

elodieunderglass

There’s also two different definitions of “invasive” - the ecological one is “a species that quickly outcompetes native species in their own habitat”, but the horticultural one is “a species that propagates and spreads [has invasive behavior]” - so plants like bindweed and mint can behave invasively even in their natural range.

Interestingly, when people who don’t know fuck about bees on Tumblr exhort you to plant native flowers for bees, it’s a great idea, but it’s perfectly fine to plant non-native flowers as well, because they provide food and help to cover the seasonal flowering gaps. in the UK, the Royal Horticultural Society recommends buddleja - or butterfly bush - a non-native species from Asia that behaves VERY invasively on waste ground, but which can be reasonably controlled in a garden, and serves as a very important food source for pollinators. It is highly aromatic and provides a lot of food, especially when other aromatic flowers have gone over, in July/August. It would be a terrible idea to seedbomb buddleja or dig up lawns to grow buddleja or even to let them run uncontrolled in public lands. Because it’s not native to the UK, in the UK it isn’t really a home or food source for things like caterpillars - so it needs to be in balance with plants that will feed caterpillars, etc. But it’s perfectly fine if you have a buddleja in your garden already, or if you think you’d like to have one, and don’t mind pruning a bush that grows a million feet per year. Just because it’s a non-native that behaves invasively, and shouldn’t be allowed to run riot, doesn’t mean that moral value can be ascribed to it. It’s a plant!

turtlesandfrogs

Good discussion, and I’d like to add a few things:

Invasive species seem to thrive most where indigenous peoples have been prevented from taking care of the land, and then the land gets disturbed and/or neglected. Especially in North America, the ecosystems, and the species within those ecosystems, evolved with the native peoples and depend on and benefit from the ways in which native peoples interact with them. I am beginning to think of invasive species more as a symptom of an underlaying problem, rather than eeeeeevil plants that are just set on taking over the world.

The concept of non-native is fuzzier than it seems, because species have been moving and been moved around for a very long time. Different people have different definitions, and draw the line at different points in time. In North America, this unfortunately ties back into colonialism and the idea of a “wild” “empty” land just waiting for colonization. Ecosystems are in flux, and they’re definitely more in flux right now with the impacts of climate change.

Look up the information for your local area, ecology is a very localized subject. What is non-native but not problem in one area is one of the species that is mandatory to remove in another (butteryfly bush is a great example), and what’s invasive and non-native in one area is an important member of the ecosystem in another (Spartina is a fascinating case of this).

One major reason why I encourage people to plant native plants is because not every pollinator species is a generalist- some only use a single species, or a selection of species that’s very narrow. If those species aren’t around, that butterfly or whatever will die out. This is an understudied area, and the information can be hard to hunt down, so often people just encourage native plants broadly. In my area, there’s a couple butterfly species that are dependent entirely on a small number of native violet species, so I do my best to encourage people to plant those- when I’m talking to local people. The other reasons are that native plants are going to be well adapted to the local conditions, so they will be easier to grow and require fewer inputs to thrive.

Honestly, it’s a bit weird to me the pressure put on home gardeners in certain corners to grow only native plants- shouldn’t we be putting pressure on say, the highway system to take care of their vast swaths of scotch broom and Himalayan blackberries? Couldn’t there be a movement to put pressure on government campuses, apartment complexes, churches, college campuses and other owners of big chunks of land to include at least keystone native species?

oldmankenny

@headspace-hotel

Ah yes, I have Opinions.

First off: The horticultural definition of “invasive” is shit from a butt.

I WILL fight anyone about this and I DO bite.

Gardeners with sticks up their asses willy-nilly labeling every plant that has the audacity to not die instantly when they think one negative thought towards it as “Invasive” have wreaked absolute havoc on the ability of the average innocent person to get to know and understand their local plants.

Salvia lyrata? It can live in a lawn, so it must be INVASIVE! Oenothera biennis? It’ll reseed itself and grows vigorously, so we’ll call it INVASIVE. Prunella vulgaris? It can survive in a lawn, so it’s INVASIVE. Conoclinum coelestinum? It’s a nice lawn alternative groundcover, and of course anything better at surviving than your lawn is INVASIVE. Milkweed? INVASIVE. Goldenrod? INVASIVE. Purple passionflower? INVASIVE. Beautiful native species you don’t like for whatever reason? INVASIVE. The “horticultural definition” of “invasive” isn’t even a definition, it’s just a derogatory word for any plant that doesn’t do exactly what you want it to, which is Lawn Brain at its finest.

Even the concept of “native invasives” gives me the ick, because it’s assigning a label to the species implying it is the organism that has a quality that causes it to behave as such, rather than the organism just being relatively too numerous, a condition that can be caused by a specific thing and that can be temporary.

Red maple is too numerous due to fire suppression in North America, but the trees do not dominate and destroy ecosystems, there’s just relatively more of them and things are unbalanced as a result.

The white-tailed deer likewise is behaving exactly as it always has, in the environment it’s always been in, it’s just that somebody else is slacking.

I’m sorry but I’m going to come down on the side that “native invasives” are not really a thing, or at least, non-native invasives are “invasive” in a sense that is fundamentally different.

I agree that very few non-native species become invasive. I’m also with you on the fact that invasiveness is definitely connected to management and the way the ecosystem has been altered or destroyed.

There are maybe 4-5 plant species I consider to be TRULY invasive where I live.

However

I cannot adequately describe how destructive those few species are and how little they can be compared to a native species that isn’t being managed properly (nightmares of wintercreeper flashing behind my eyes)

I’m talking “young and/or fragmented forests in my part of the country basically do not have an understory layer anymore.” The rare species that is highly invasive won’t just alter an ecosystem, it can virtually obliterate it.

Lonicera maackii and Pyrus calleryana growing together on a plot in the early stages of succession will damn near sterilize that land of all other plant species. They are both believed to be allelopathic and they both grow so densely it blocks out all sunlight. “Invasive” doesn’t just mean “this plant alters the ecosystem negatively” it means “this plant can and will kill nearly everything else alive in a plot of land where it gets established.”

I’ve witnessed this, experienced this, been surrounded by this.

It’s bad. It’s real bad. It’s a result of the way the ecosystem has been damaged and exploited, not some evilness within the plants themselves, but it’s still a nightmare, and restoring better management practices might not just make everything fine automatically, and with these invasive species running amok during a fragile time in our planet’s history, untold amounts of genetic diversity and whole species might be lost before better management practices CAN be restored!

So i’m rather defensive of the “invasive” designation, because it gets applied unjustly (dandelions? Invasive? Eat my ass, agricultural website) but there are plants that deserve it and those few plants are SUCH an existential threat to the restoration process of disturbed ecosystems trying to heal

One reason it’s important is, do y'all know how hard it is to get a plant properly designated invasive, how bad things have to get for legal action to be taken to prevent nurseries from selling them?

It’s 2023, the Callery pear is finally being recognized officially as invasive, and honest to god it might not even be worth passing laws anymore, because they first escaped containment thirty years ago and…the legions of Hell are upon us, it’s over, we’re fucked, God have mercy on our souls, Satan’s Bradford Cum Tree Army is storming the gates.

Also However

This is not happening only because of something within these plants’ nature. A niche that was not open before, was opened by the way we have changed the environment.

It comes back to OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LAND, because WE ARE A KEYSTONE SPECIES.

There are management practices that MUST be changed if we have any hope at all of fighting these invasives, because…Lord have you tried to eliminate wintercreeper from anywhere by hand???

There are three things applicable to the southeastern USA: firstly, we created high levels of disturbance; clearcutting and plowing and otherwise destroying ecosystems gave the invasive species the perfect opportunity to get in. Secondly, removing Native Americans from their land meant they weren’t doing controlled burns anymore, which meant a niche that hadn’t been open for thousands of years (extremely dense, shrubby woody plants and creeping vines…you know, the sort that would catch fire like crazy) was suddenly wide open.

Third, and possibly most importantly in this region in particular, a keystone species, Arundinaria gigantea (it’s BAMBOO! WE HAVE NATIVE BAMBOO!) dwindled to almost nothing, to the point that a whole ecosystem (Canebrakes) went extinct or near-extinct, taking Bachman’s warblers, Carolina parakeets and passenger pigeons (which all depended on the canebrakes) with them.

Unfortunately, the ecosystems have been fucked up.

What’s been fucked up…cannot quickly or easily be unfucked up. That’s just a thing we have to cope with now.

BUT…Might the innate nature of these plants play some part in their invasiveness, though?

Almost certainly yes. And not just their “innate” nature per se, but the changes to their nature that they have undergone.

A known fact about invasive species is that they evolve substantially to suit their new environment. In fact, this is thought to be the reason why there is often a period of lag between a species’ introduction and the point when it “escapes containment.”

This…is a big reason why you should avoid non native species whenever possible, and particularly why you maaaaybe shouldn’t listen to the above advice saying it’s Totally Fine to plant buddleja/butterflybush in areas where it’s not native. PLANTS ARE EVOLVING. CONSTANTLY. A plant that appears to be perfectly well-behaved now may be simply accumulating genetic adaptations that allow it to break containment.

I’m not gonna say you have to rip up your butterfly bush right the fuck now, but there are good reasons why people recommend native species over non-natives. One is what I just said. Another is that planting non-natives is pretty much always going to be worse for native insect diversity because *so* many insects are specialists that can only eat a few specific plants they co-evolved with.

Not to mention that non-native plants are just straight up not as good at attracting native insects almost always??? Speaking from experience here. Random non-native plants you get from a big box nursery will, more often than not, be ignored by pollinators.

There are exceptions (bees LOVE my dad’s purple Salvia with the tall flower spikes!) but seriously, pollinator-plant relationships are based on co-evolution over many millennia, and not all plants are equal in their ability to provide good nutrition to insects. American bumblebees will visit dandelions but dandelions alone don’t have enough protein to support them and the queens can end up eating their own eggs. From my point of view, we just don’t know enough about the nutritional specs of each plant. Why mess around with the possibility that your plants could just malnourish your bees, when there’s other perfectly fine options?

Whoops, forgot possibly the best reason to not plant non-native species:

Non-native species can be basically the plant version of Typhoid Mary, incubating diseases that they themselves have resistance to, but that can mutate and infect a wild native species.

This is what happened with the American Chestnut tree. Chinese chestnuts were brought and planted where the American chestnut is native, and it turns out that a fungal infection carried by the Chinese chestnut with little harm is Extremely Deadly to the American chestnut.

4 billion trees, dead. A vital keystone species, basically obliterated. 7 species of moth went extinct and the tree itself almost did.

Same thing with Dutch Elm Disease. Mature American Elm trees are hard to find nowadays. The Emerald Ash Borer has killed basically all mature ash trees in areas of North America where it has spread. I forget what it’s called, but dogwoods have to deal with a disease spread from Asian dogwood species that were planted here.

PLEASE STOP. WE ARE GOING TO RUN OUT OF TREES.

no but i am angry at wintercreeper (for real my family will ask me ‘what’s wrong? you look angry’ and it’s always cuz i was thinking about invasive plants)

wioll

I’ve seen how you tweet.

CALL YOUR BOY LIBRARY BOOKS THE WAY IM CHECKING HIM OUT

CALL YOUR BOY A HARDCOVER THE WAY I’M TAKING OFF HIS JACKET

CALL YOUR BOY A BOOK THE WAY I WANT TO GET BETWEEN HIS COVERS

CALL YOUR BOY A BOOK THE WAY IM RUNNING MY FINGERS ALONG HIS SPINE

CALL HIM AN E-READER THE WAY IM TURNING HIM ON

CALL HIM MORE FUNDING FOR LIBRARIES THE WAY EVERYONE WANTS HIM

CALL HIM A WELL-LOVED BOOK THE WAY HE'S FALLING APART IN MY HANDS

certifiedlibraryposts

Certified Library Post

tbh if someone used pickup lines on me that were formulated like this I'd be on my knees in seconds

prokopetz

There’s discovering that you have a kink as in learning something new about yourself, and there’s discovering that you have a kink as in you always knew you were into it, but you didn’t realise it was a kink because you honestly thought everybody was into it, and of the two, the second one is much, much funnier.

prokopetz

It’s like the boner-based equivalent of folks with undiagnosed food allergies going “I just thought bananas were supposed to be spicy”.

hobbygoblin

Please… you CANNOT HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS

shieldfoss

> #you never see foot fetishists talking about how all men naturally crave toes as part of the human condition

Not only have I seen that, I have seen it in a power point at a conference

catboybrigade

You’ve seen in a what now

shieldfoss

did i stutter

thisishowwedonut

Throwback to that reddit post about the guy who learned exercising doesn’t make everyone incredibly horny and realized he’s come across as an asshole to every partner he’s ever had

thesaltofcarthage

I genuinely love (in a weird way) how horrified and regretful he is at how awful he accidentally sounded. This is a person who is self-aware, not an asshole, and never wanted to make anyone feel bad.

panfriedtoast-deactivated202502

I’m dying over here. This poor guy.

This is good character growth. This is how you act when you realize you’ve been an asshole. Excuse me I need to show this to a few people.